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can actually benefit government and still be separate from it.

The contradictions and ambiguities weaving in and out of A Letter Concerning Toleration are the same that Americans find themselves facing today in the way that there is no balance between the church and the state, and no answer for Americans who find themselves in between the polarities that run our nation. Locke gives no solution to the problem we find ourselves facing, but he lays the foundation for one. The rest is up to us. If we are to truly keep church and state sufficiently separate but ensure that their relationship complements one another, as Locke advocates, we must reexamine our policies surrounding funding for religious organizations and work towards developing a political position for people who find themselves between the polarities that monopolize our government.

Achieving a Complementary Relationship Between Church and State

If religion and the state apparatus are to truly exist within society in such a way that would appease Locke, they must complement each other. Right now, within American society, it doesn't seem as if the two are successfully coexisting. On one side of the fight, you have the more liberally oriented people and organizations, like the New York Times, who honestly believe that religious organizations benefit from an increasingly accommodating government. On the other side, you have religious groups who believe America's concern with keeping church and state separate has resulted in a nation without any values, who discriminate against religious organizations and nonprofits. While no one will agree on who exactly is right, I believe the more important question is why does it have to be one or the other? According to Locke, the two cannot be completely separate.

If civil government is, as Locke says, charged with the maintenance of a person's earthly life in regards to life, liberty, and property, one must question the government's role in providing things like food and shelter to citizens who can't provide for themselves. There's no question that the government has failed some of Americas poorest communities. The urban poor continue to fall through the cracks, and the government isn't doing much to help them. So while New York Times author Diana B. Henriques argues that religious programs are given unfair advantages over secular organizations in the form of tax breaks and exemptions in her four part series, and goes even further as to claim that religious organizations

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