YOU CAN'T GO WRONG PREACHING TO THE CHOIR:

One thing is clear early on in Ms. Arcenas's story: Americans really did read and admire Locke. But his popularity in the New World derived initially, in the early and mid-18th century, from the "Essay Concerning Human Understanding." In that work--a much heftier one than the slim "Two Treatises," running to 500 or 600 pages in modern editions--Locke denied the existence of "innate" ideas; the mind at birth, he held, was a blank slate, and all human knowledge was gained through experience and observation. "At Harvard," Ms. Arcenas finds, "Locke's Essay was read and taught by individual tutors decades before the faculty voted in 1743 to include it as part of the formal curriculum."  [...]

Why the craze for Locke in 18th-century America? Here Ms. Arcenas, a professor of history at the University of Montana, is unhelpful. "America's Philosopher" appears to be a version of the author's doctoral dissertation, and perhaps for that reason she offers complicated interpretations when simple ones would do. On the matter of Americans' reverence for Locke, she begs the question. Locke was treated as an authority because he was recognized as a man of "clear reasoning and honesty" and because he had a reputation as an "educational and childrearing guru." He was treated with reverence because he was revered.

But the reasons for Locke's popularity in Revolutionary America aren't hard to divine. One is that he was Protestant. His religious views may have been heterodox in some respects, but he openly avowed his Protestant faith, and there is no reason to believe--as modern scholars, projecting their own areligious attitudes onto Locke, have often done--that those avowals were insincere. Revolutionary-era Americans would have associated Locke with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the ascendant Protestant king, William of Orange: The philosopher had been exiled by the quasi-Catholic monarch Charles II in 1683, and the preface of the "Two Treatises" claimed that the book vindicated William's legitimacy. All this would have made Locke highly acceptable to the overwhelmingly Protestant reading audience of 18th-century America.

The other reason Americans loved their Locke is even more obvious: His ideas accorded with their own. The "Letter Concerning Toleration" envisions something like the kind of Protestant pluralism Americans would create for themselves in the Constitution. The "Two Treatises" posited a just republic based on consent and conceded the right of the people to overthrow a tyrannical government and form a more just one. And the "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" implied a fundamental equality between farmer and noble, shoemaker and statesman.  

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