Spinoza was writing the Theological–Political Treatise at around the same time that Hobbes was composing Behemoth. What the experience of the English Civil War had taught Hobbes was that it was time to put the churches out of business, at least with respect to their political ambitions. But Behemoth, for all the stridency of its anticlericalism, was a rather tame contribution to reflection on the relationship between religion and politics compared with the explosiveness of Spinoza's challenge to biblical religion. Hobbes (and later Locke) completely deferred to Scripture as an absolutely authoritative text, with an authority equal to that of reason. For Spinoza, by contrast, this authority is entirely subject to the superior authority of reason, and it does not stand up well to rational scrutiny.

Spinoza's core insight is that, although Hobbes's determination to subordinate religious authority to the domain of civil authority was a move in the right direction, the theocratic conception of political life had to be challenged much more radically than Hobbes was able to grasp. That is, liberalism, not civil religion, is the appropriate response to theocracy. (Arguably, the doctrine of right = power in the early chapters of the Political Treatise is incompatible with any coherent version of liberalism. Rather than attempt to find a way around this hugely difficult problem in Spinoza's political philosophy, in what follows I will largely ignore this central teaching of the Political Treatise – even though aspects of the problem are present in the Theological–Political Treatise as well.)