What Did Thomas Hobbes Believe About Religion And Government?

I got hooked on Hobbes while re-reading 'Leviathan' on a rainy afternoon, tea getting cold as the arguments pulled me back in. What stuck with me most is how he treats religion as part of the same human-made architecture as government. For Hobbes, humans are basically driven by appetite and fear; left to natural impulses we end up in a violent, insecure state of nature. To escape that, people create a social contract and install a sovereign with broad authority to guarantee peace. Religion, then, must not be an independent power competing with the state, because competing authorities are the exact thing that drags people back toward chaos.

That’s why Hobbes argues the civil sovereign should determine the public function of religion: who interprets scripture, what doctrines are allowed in public worship, and which religious organizations can operate. He doesn’t deny God outright — his worldview is materialist and mechanistic, but he leaves room for a creator — yet he’s deeply suspicious of ecclesiastical claims that undermine civil peace. In the turmoil of 17th-century England, his point was practical: private religious conviction is one thing, but public religious authority must be subordinated to the sovereign to prevent factions and rebellion.

It’s a cold logic in some ways. I find it both fascinating and a little unsettling: Hobbes wants security even if it means tightly controlling religious life. Reading him in the quiet of my living room, I kept thinking about modern debates — how much autonomy should religious institutions have, and what happens when conscience or prophecy clashes with civil law? Hobbes would likely say that order takes priority, and that uncomfortable thought stays with me as I close the book.

I tend to think of Hobbes as the guy who put fear of chaos at the center of politics, and that shapes everything he says about religion. For him, the fundamental problem is violent competition in the state of nature. The solution is a social contract creating a sovereign whose power must be strong enough to prevent return to that condition. Religion, then, is valuable only insofar as it helps maintain peace; if religious groups threaten public order, the sovereign has the authority to regulate or suppress them.

Hobbes argues that public interpretation of scripture and religious practice should be subject to civil law so private belief doesn’t become public disorder. He’s suspicious of clergy who claim independent jurisdiction, and in 'Leviathan' he’s explicit that ecclesiastical power must be compatible with the sovereign’s authority. That doesn’t mean he necessarily wanted to eradicate private faith — personal conscience survives — but public religious authority cannot be a rival. Reading this, I feel both impressed by his drive for stability and wary about how that drive limits spiritual freedom; it’s a trade-off that still gets debated today.

When I first tried to explain Hobbes to a friend over coffee, I boiled it down like this: he thought humans are mostly self-interested and afraid of violent death, so we agree to give up some freedoms to a sovereign who keeps the peace. That social contract is central to his political theory. The role of religion in that framework? It’s subordinate to politics. Hobbes was worried that religious authorities who claim independent power could splinter society, so he insisted the sovereign should control public religion to prevent civil strife.

Digging deeper, Hobbes treats scripture and religious claims as things that must be interpreted in ways that preserve order. He was not necessarily a doctrinaire atheist; he allowed for God and spiritual matters in his mechanistic worldview, but he rejected the idea that priests or popes could hold power that competes with the civil ruler. In practice, that meant the sovereign could regulate worship, doctrine, and church offices. The reasoning is pragmatic: peace and security trump ecclesiastical autonomy. Thinking about it now, especially with recent headlines about church-state tensions, Hobbes’s emphasis on preventing faction feels eerily relevant — even if his prescription for absolute sovereign control makes many of us uneasy.