In Locke’s time, Protestants and Catholics were constantly in an often violent power struggle in England. Some people felt that the only way to avoid civil unrest was to bring the church and the state together and in that way secure order. Dissent was not to be tolerated as it would both imperil a person’s salvation and undermine civil authority. In Locke’s time, freedom of speech was, in effect, un-Christian because it would lead you to damnation.

Locke argued that using force to enjoin religious conformity would actually in the end undermine both faith and society. He advocated tolerance not only for Protestants, but Catholics, Jews, Muslims or “Mahometans,” Native Americans and pagans.

Locke also realized that what appears to be a religious reason for clamping down free speech is really often just a political ploy for exercising absolute power and observed how religion becomes a political cloak for “covetousness, rapine, and ambition.”

We need to apply the same kind of analysis to the case in Afghanistan. Is this really an issue of the Islamic faith per se, or of the consolidation of political power and the suppression of free speech for political not religious purposes?

Digging a little more deeply into the story, it becomes apparent that the charges were aimed at this young man for the purpose of intimidation of his older brother who had recently published an article implicating an Afghan legislator in a series of killings and kidnappings. I can tell you as someone who lives and works in Chicago, this is a not uncommon story of political abuse of power with or without the cloak of religion.

I join with those who are calling on the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, to intervene in the case. It is an outrage that this journalism student has been sentenced to death. It also sadly shows how much our neglect of Afghanistan in order to pursue the Iraq misadventure has allowed the country to come to the brink of being a failed state.