...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker.
However, despite Locke's apparent influence on Jefferson and Jefferson's admiration for Locke, the two men differed quite dramatically in at least one important respect--their attitudes toward Christianity. Jefferson, despite claiming to be a Christian, rejected "rejected all major theological teachings of Christianity, such as the deity of Christ, original sin, salvation by grace alone, and the substitutionary death of Christ" (Norman L. Geisler, Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, p. 378). Jefferson rather famously created his own version of the Gospels by removing all of the miraculous elements--including the Resurrection--from them. Her claimed that the writers of the Gospels and the Apostle Paul had distorted the original teachings of Jesus.
In contrast to Jefferson, Locke was apparently an orthodox Christian. This point is sometimes obscured by the fact that Locke emphasized the importance of reason and by the fact that he is generally viewed as one of the major influences on the European Enlightenment, which generally sought to reject the authority of tradition, including religious tradition. And yet, as C. Ryan Fields suggests:
[While] Locke is often presented as eminent forerunner to the Enlightenment, a philosopher who hastened Europe's departure from Christian orthodoxy and "turned the tide" toward a modern, secularist orientation...there are reasons to think that such an understanding of Locke has not sufficiently taken into account his Christian faith as it relates to his philosophical project. A more generous reading of Locke requires further grappling with the works which emerged during the final period of his life (1695-1704), works that demonstrate clearly religious interests and provide clarity regarding his proper philosophical legacy. ("A Generous Reading of John Locke: Reevaluating His Philosophical Legacy in Light of His Christian Confession")
One of those works emerging from Locke's last years was On the Reasonableness of Christianity. According to Locke himself, in this work he sought to "convince...men of the mission of Jesus Christ, [and] make them...see the truth, simplicity, and reasonableness of what he himself taught, and required to be believed by his followers" (as quoted by Fields). In On the Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke rejected both what he viewed as extreme sectarian interpretations of Christianity, which he viewed as being unreasonable, "going against 'the plain and direct meaning of the words and phrases' of Scripture" (Fields), and "the extreme that was embodied by the deists, who equated Christianity with natural religion and made Jesus nothing more than its finest guru" (Fields). The latter sounds like a pretty accurate description of Jefferson's religious views.
In short, while Jefferson and Locke may have been very much in agreement with the proposition that "all men are created equal," they certainly did not see eye-to-eye when it came to the truth of the Christian faith. Ironically, Jefferson described Locke one of "the three greatest men that have ever lived [along with Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton], without exception" in a 1789 letter to painter John Trumbull (see here). And yet, Jefferson seems never to have grappled with Locke's claim that Christian belief was "reasonable." And this, I would argue, was a great tragedy for the author of the Declaration of Independence.
Image of John Locke from Wikimedia Commons