The Relationship Between Religion and Sovereign Authority in Hobbes’ View

Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651, during the chaos of the English Civil War, a conflict in which religion and politics were violently tangled together. Competing claims about who spoke for God, the king, the bishops, the Pope in Rome, or radical preachers, were tearing the country apart. Hobbes had a blunt answer to this disorder: in any commonwealth, there can be only one supreme authority, and religion must answer to it. The sovereign, not the church, holds final power over both civil and religious affairs. This idea sits at the heart of his political philosophy and remains one of the most provocative parts of his thought.

Why Hobbes saw religion as a political problem 🔗

For Hobbes, the central goal of politics is peace and collective security. People leave the dangerous “state of nature” and submit to a sovereign precisely so they can escape constant fear and conflict. Political authority is justified by a social contract in which people vest in a sovereign the responsibility for the safety and well-being of all. Anything that threatens this unified authority threatens the peace that makes ordinary life possible.

Religion, in Hobbes’s time, was exactly such a threat. When a subject believes that a priest, a bishop, or a foreign Pope can command obedience independently of the king, the result is divided loyalty. Hobbes called this the problem of serving “two masters.” When people divide their loyalties between the civil sovereign and a separate religious power, both believed to be rulers of the world, the result is confusion that leads to civil strife. A commonwealth split between two centres of authority is, for Hobbes, no real commonwealth at all. It is a recipe for the very war he wanted to end.

This is the practical motive behind his entire treatment of religion. He was not writing abstract theology for its own sake. He was responding to a real political crisis in which rival religious authorities had helped plunge his country into bloodshed.

Religious authority must be subservient to the sovereign 🔗

Hobbes’s solution is uncompromising. The church cannot be an independent power standing alongside the state. Instead, the sovereign must be the head of the church just as he is head of everything else in the commonwealth. For Hobbes the sovereign should determine the proper forms of religious worship, and citizens have no separate duties to a church that could override that authority.

This position is known as Erastianism, the view that the state holds supremacy over the church in ecclesiastical matters. The Hobbesian version is especially strong. His doctrine of sovereignty demands a complete monopoly of power within a territory, covering all institutions of civilian or ecclesiastical authority alike. There is no domain, religious or secular, where some other body can legitimately overrule the sovereign.

The church without coercive power 🔗

A key move in Hobbes’s argument is to strip the church of any power to compel. He insists that genuine faith is a matter of inner conviction, not force. A saving faith must be freely held, so churches cannot use coercion to produce it; they can only persuade. Since faith must be uncoerced, churches must rely on persuasion rather than force.

Once you remove the church’s power to coerce, it can no longer rival the sovereign. The clergy become teachers and persuaders, not rulers. Any genuine power of command over outward behaviour belongs to the sovereign alone. Hobbes even argued that doctrines settled by religious councils or synods only become binding law when the sovereign gives them the force of law. The church proposes; the sovereign disposes.

Public worship versus private belief 🔗

Here Hobbes draws one of his most important and surprising distinctions. He separates public worship from private belief, and he treats the two very differently.

The case for uniform public worship 🔗

Public worship, Hobbes argued, must be uniform and controlled by the sovereign. He held that there is both public and private worship, and that the duty of states to establish uniform public worship stems from reason and nature. Why uniformity? Because public worship is a collective act. When a whole commonwealth worships in different and contradictory ways in public, it sends conflicting signals about what the community honours, and this can breed ridicule, contempt, and conflict between groups.

There is a deeper reason too. For Hobbes, public worship expresses the single will of the commonwealth. Because religious motives are so powerful and can never be fully removed from human nature, the sovereign must also be recognised as the image and representative of God to be accepted as the supreme authority. A unified public religion reinforces the unity of sovereign power itself.

The space left for private conscience 🔗

Inner belief is a different matter entirely. Hobbes recognised that the state simply cannot reach into a person’s private conscience. As he put it in Leviathan, internal faith is by its nature invisible, and therefore lies beyond all human jurisdiction. What is out of sight and beyond control is exempt from human jurisdiction, including the jurisdiction of any church.

This is partly a practical point. No ruler can force a person to genuinely believe something internally. But it is also a point about the limits of law. Law governs outward actions, not the secret movements of the mind. So while the sovereign commands the visible, shared, public face of religion, the private conviction of the believer remains free. A subject might be required to outwardly conform to public worship while privately holding different views.

This distinction has earned Hobbes a complicated reputation. Some scholars read him as a strict opponent of religious freedom, while others detect a limited space for toleration in his system. One influential reading describes him as an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom and defended uniform public worship, yet who still endorsed a form of “Independency” in religious association. The freedom Hobbes allows is real but narrow: it protects the inner conscience, not the public right to dissent or evangelise.

Materialism and the critique of false religion 🔗

Hobbes did not stop at organising religion politically. He also brought his materialist philosophy to bear on religious belief itself, attacking ideas he thought were both false and politically dangerous.

Why “incorporeal spirit” made no sense to Hobbes 🔗

Hobbes is often called the father of modern materialism. He held that the universe is entirely corporeal, possessing the dimensions of length, breadth, and depth, which led him to deny the existence of an incorporeal soul separated from the body yet suffering the torments of hell. In his view, everything that exists is matter in motion. There simply is no category of thing that exists without a physical body.

This had radical consequences for religious language. To Hobbes, talk of “incorporeal substances” or disembodied spirits was close to meaningless. He treated discourse about incorporeal things as “insignificant speech,” arguing that the phrase “incorporeal substance” amounts to a contradiction. He suggested that the word “spirit” should really just mean something thin and airy like breath, but still material.

Superstition, deception, and the Kingdom of Darkness 🔗

In the final part of Leviathan, titled “Of the Kingdom of Darkness,” Hobbes launched a sweeping attack on the corruptions he believed had crept into Christianity. He identified several sources of this “darkness.” These included misinterpreting scripture, introducing false doctrines of demonology, and mixing Christian teaching with the vain philosophy of the Greeks, especially Aristotle.

For Hobbes, beliefs such as exorcism, ghosts, purgatory, and the worship of images were not genuine Christianity at all. He argued that scripture does not teach that spirits are incorporeal, treating such beliefs as relics of “heathen religions” that had infected Christian doctrine. Crucially, he argued these errors persisted because they were useful to someone. Those who claimed to understand or control these mysteries derived great personal benefit from them, which is why he held ecclesiastical authorities responsible for the present Kingdom of Darkness.

This connects directly back to his political argument. False religious doctrines were not just intellectual mistakes. They were tools that allowed priests to claim independent power, frighten ordinary people, and undermine obedience to the sovereign. By exposing these beliefs as superstition or self-serving invention, Hobbes was clearing the ground for a rational religion that supports, rather than rivals, civil authority.

A rational religion in service of the commonwealth 🔗

Pulling these threads together, we can see Hobbes’s overall design. He wanted a religion that was rational, stripped of dangerous superstition, and firmly subordinate to the sovereign. Religious authority should reinforce political order rather than compete with it.

Notably, Hobbes argued that true Christianity, properly understood, was perfectly compatible with his system. He read scripture to show that Christ left lawful civil authority to kings and sovereigns, not to the church. On his reading, Christ came to persuade rather than to coerce, and far from undermining secular powers, he strengthened the subject’s submission to them. The full Kingdom of God, in Hobbes’s account, lies in the future, after the Second Coming. In the present world, therefore, the believer’s duty is to obey the civil sovereign.

Hobbes also understood that he could not simply abolish religion, even if he wanted to. He recognised its enormous power over human conduct. Part of his interest in religion lies in its power to shape human behaviour, and his main concern was its educative power to mould obedient subjects. Rather than fight religion, he wanted to harness it. A religion taught under the sovereign’s direction could become an instrument of peace and stability instead of a cause of war.

This is why Hobbes placed such importance on what is taught in universities and churches. He believed the sovereign must control which doctrines are publicly preached, ensuring that teachings harmful to peace are suppressed while those supporting lawful authority are spread. Education, public worship, and a purified rational religion all serve the same end: a single, unified, stable commonwealth in which no rival authority can claim the loyalty that belongs to the sovereign alone.

The lasting significance of Hobbes’s view 🔗

Hobbes’s treatment of religion and sovereignty was deeply shaped by the religious wars of his own century, yet it raises questions that have never gone away. How should a state handle deep religious diversity without falling into conflict? Where is the line between public order and private freedom of conscience? Can a government regulate the public expression of religion while genuinely leaving belief itself untouched?

Hobbes answered these questions in favour of order and unified authority, even at the cost of public religious freedom. His distinction between the controllable public sphere and the untouchable private conscience anticipates debates about secularism, state neutrality, and freedom of religion that continue in constitutional democracies today. Whether one finds his answer persuasive or alarming, it remains a powerful and challenging account of why political stability and religious authority can be so difficult to hold together.

What do you think? Is Hobbes right that public religious expression must be regulated by the state to preserve peace, or does this concede too much power to the sovereign? And can the law really leave private belief truly free while controlling almost everything religion does in public?

References

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14. https://iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/