Ophelia Benson has just noticed that some time ago, in response to this post of hers, I suggested it was just ahistorical to deny that liberal conceptions of equality have Christian antecedents. Having digested my remarks, she now says this:
I don't deny, in the passage [from Locke's Second Treatise] Jonathan quotes, that the Christian 'view that all have equal worth before God, and the idea of democracy and equality' were around; what I deny is that it's possible to know that that particular source was an inescapable source. Maybe it was. Maybe every single person born after Locke's Second Treatise was steeped in it and had no other source for the idea of equality - but I don't quite see how anyone could be sure of that.
I made a straightforward point: that the concept of equality in one of the key -if not the key- texts of liberal political theory is grounded theologically (and, incidentally, the Second Treatise is not, as Ophelia goes on to say, just "one book by one philosopher", among many others). I did not say that there was "no other source for the idea of equality". That, too, would be implausible - but I didn't argue that.
It is somewhat mysterious to me why Ophelia should want to expend so much energy trying to deny what simply is the case. Moreover, just because the idea of equality has Christian antecedents, that doesn't mean that now there isn't a perfectly satisfactory secular use of it. The same is true of lots of moral and political concepts, which have been thoroughly secularised.