3. Jottings on the History of Tolerance
It doesn't take much trolling on the Internet to uncover some remarkably awful statements from the religious right:
If this is one's only exposure to Christianity, one might easily develop a fair bit of sympathy for those on the left who find Christianity to be intolerant.
If Christian insiders were trying to read these two quotes as char itably as possible, they might point out that there is a species of subChristian scholarship that thinks Christian "love" seeks the other person's good in some sort of resolute fashion, without any necessary emotional component: you can love some nasty pervert, they might say, while emotionally hating their guts. The clause "hate is good" has a certain rationale to it: there is a biblical mandate to hate what is evil. Yet Christians at their best have known how to put together revulsion of godlessness with transparent love for people who are enemies, not least because they follow a Master who cried out in agony as he writhed on a cross, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing" (Luke 23:34). If Christians speak of "conquering" a country by powerful evangelism, that is one thing; if they give the impression that they are going to impose their will on a nation by force of arms, or even by force of numbers, they are forgetting the distinctions the Bible itself makes between Christ and Caesar, between the church and the world, between legitimate expectations of what they think should take place now and what they hope will take place in the future. Worse, they also have an amazingly tin ear about how they are going to be heard outside their own circles.
Yet without justifying for a moment much of this rhetoric, Christians who take these stances do so because they think the issues are of such importance they are worth contending for. Most who respond to them do not engage with the issues the Christians want to raise, but simply outflank them by dismissing their intolerance with equal or greater intolerance.
As far back as 1991, the then-preeminent journalist Lance Morrow opened his essay in Time magazine's cover story "A Nation of Finger Pointers" with the following paragraphs:
The busybody and the crybaby are getting to be the most conspicuous children on the American playground.
The busybody is the bully with the ayatullah shine in his eyes, gauleiter of correctness, who barges around telling the other kids that they cannot smoke, be fat, drink booze, wear furs, eat meat or otherwise nonconform to the new tribal rules now taking shape.
The crybaby, on the other hand, is the abject, manipulative little devil with the lawyer and, so to speak, the actionable diaper rash. He is a mayor of Washington, arrested (and captured on videotape) as he smokes crack in a hotel room with a woman not his wife. He pronounces himself a victim - of the woman, of white injustice, of the universe. Whatever.
What I propose to do in this chapter is canvas some of the evidence from the past decade or so, beginning with a miscellany of examples, and then focusing more pointedly on examples in the domains of education, media, and sexual identity, ending with some observations on how much of this intolerant tolerance is fixated on opposing Christianity.
Miscellaneous Examples
In 2005, the Co-operative Bank, based in Manchester, England, asked a Christian organization, Christian Voice, to close its accounts at the Bank because its views were "incompatible" with the position of the Bank.' The public statement of the Bank reads as follows: "It has come to the bank's attention that Christian Voice is engaged in discriminatory pronouncements based on the grounds of sexual orientation.... This public stance is incompatible with the position of the Co-operative Bank, which publicly supports diversity and dignity in all its forms for our staff, customers and other stakeholders." Thus in the name of supporting diversity, the Bank eliminates one of its diverse customers! Even here it cannot be consistent: the Bank doubtless has Muslim customers who are no less willing than Christian Voice to condemn homosexual practice. After the BBC news report of the story was released, the Bank further stated: "We accept that everyone has the right to freedom of thought on religion; however, we do not believe that this entitles people to actively encourage and practice discrimination." Apparently the Bank thinks private religious thoughts are acceptable provided you do not act on them - which of course instantly trivializes religious belief. Meanwhile the word "discrimination" takes on the rhetorical power of "intolerance," without any rational reflection on the fact that most human beings discriminate a dozen times a day, and the entire culture is awash in discrimination: we do not hire pedophiles as school principals, we do not appoint a functional illiterate to head up NASA, and so forth. Indeed, the Bank itself has of course discriminated against Christian Voice. The issue ought to be whether any particular act of discrimination is good, sensible, and proper, for there are both good and evil forms of discrimination. But instead of engaging with the issue (in this case, homosexuality; Christian Voice had come to the attention of the Bank because it had publicly condemned plans to broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera, describing it as blasphemous), the Co-operative Bank discriminated against Christian Voice on the grounds that Christian Voice discriminates against homosexuals.
In the autumn of 2007, Donald Hindley, a sociology professor at Brandeis University, lecturing on Latin American politics, told his students that Mexican immigrants to the U.S. used to be called "wetbacks." The bare fact cannot be contested. In fact, when in 1954 the Eisenhower administration attempted to repatriate more than a million illegal Mexicans, the official name of the project was Operation Wetback. In today's environment, however, a student complained. In the kerfuffle that followed, two students, apparently, said that Hindley's remarks were more than an explanation of a historical fact. At the time, Professor Hindley had been lecturing for forty-eight years with no previous recorded complaint. After prolonged administrative to-ing and fro-ing, the University found Hindley to be guilty of ethnic harassment and imposed a classroom monitor on him to ensure his speech was never out of line - all without granting him a formal hearing or putting the charges in writing before reaching the verdict. Unwilling to be labeled guilty of such harassment, Hindley has fought back. As of early 2010, the case had not been resolved, but the heated discussion has brought relations between faculty and administration to a tense standoff and prompted FIRE for Individual Rights in Education) to put Brandeis University on its list "as one of the worst abusers of liberty on campus."6
In the medical field, it is hard to remember that a few decades ago doctors took the Hippocratic Oath, which includes explicit clauses against taking life, understood to forbid both abortion and assisted suicide. Since then, almost all medical schools have dropped the Hippocratic Oath, or at the very least the offending clauses. The story, however, does not end there. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who still want to live under the constraints of the Hippocratic Oath because of beliefs that prevent them from performing or participating in what are now legal but still ethically controversial acts find themselves in a strange situation. More and more pressure is being exerted on them either to act in violation of their consciences or to abandon medicine. Until recently, "conscience clauses" protected these medical professionals, permitting them to opt out of medical procedures contrary to their conscience. Now, however, various legislative proposals are attempting to eliminate such conscience clauses. Medical professionals who judge, say, abortion and assisted suicide to be immoral would have to violate their consciences or leave the profession. The most strident voices declare that doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and the rest must put patients' rights first. If they foresee that that could be problematic for them, they should choose another profession. Thus in the name of more tolerance for patients' rights, the rights of doctors and other medical professionals would be curtailed - even though those patients could always go to another doctor, and even though a bare four decades ago all doctors had to abide by the very ethic that the new tolerance wants to make illegal.
If present trends continue, the procedures at the center of this debate will go beyond abortion and assisted suicide. It is not unthinkable that medical practice will accommodate eugenic infanticide (already openly practiced in the Netherlands) and harvesting organs from patients with catastrophic cognitive impairment (long advocated in not a few medical journals). It is still uncertain how these matters will play out in court decisions.7 My point is that the drive to enhance tolerance for diverse patients and their rights is demonstrably promoting intolerance to medical professionals.
The rising number of Muslims in England has prompted subtle (and not-so-subtle) eviction of pigs and their stories. In some schools, the story of the three little pigs is now banned, as Muslim school children might be offended by stories about unclean animals. The trend reached its silliest moment when the Council of Dudley, Worcestershire (West Midlands), banned all images or representations of pigs from its benefits department, on the ground that Muslims coming in for benefits might be offended. Calendars with pigs, porcelain porcine figurines, even pig-shaped stress relievers (spongy things you squeeze in your hand to relieve stress), all had to go, including a tissue box depicting Winnie the Pooh and Piglet - all this in a part of the country that traditionally has grown a lot of pigs. When pressed as to why pigs have to go, Mahbubur Rahman, a Muslim Councillor in West Midlands, explained, "It's a tolerance of people's beliefs." Stunning doublespeak! What about tolerance of those who think differently about pigs? In the name of tolerance toward the beliefs of Muslims, intolerance is imposed. In this instance, as one media outlet has put it, "tolerance" has on the lips of Mahbubur Rahman and in the decisions of the Dudley Council become confused with "Islamist supremacism."$ No one should doubt that Muslims ought to be free to express their dislike of pigs and pig representations; the problem, rather, is that Mr. Rahman thinks that getting rid of pigs and pig representations is a moral obligation that upholds the virtue of tolerance, whereas he senses himself under no obligation to uphold the virtue of tolerance and permit those who rather like pigs and their representations to keep them. Multiply this sort of confrontation a hundred times, and throw in a small but significant number of vociferous jihadist imams, and one understands why Prime Minister Cameron is at least raising some questions about how British immigration policy should be reviewed, not least to preserve a fundamentally tolerant (in the first sense) culture.
Or visit the website of the Harvard Chaplains.' Not all religious groups join the United Ministry organized by the Harvard Chaplains, so the Chaplains feel it necessary to warn against "certain destructive religious groups" who are not part of the United Ministry. The Chaplains "are committed to mutual respect and non-proselytization. We affirm the roles of personal freedom, doubt, and open critical reflection in healthy spiritual growth.... We're here to help you have a healthy, happy experience of your own spiritual journey while you're here at Harvard." I wonder if they think that's why Jesus came: to help us have a healthy, happy experience on our own spiritual journey. Meanwhile the Chaplains warn against, among other things, those who claim "a special relationship to God," and especially anything that qualifies as "ego destruction, mind control, manipulation of a member's relationships with family and friends."
On the editorial page of the New York Times for 24 November 2004, Nicholas D. Kristofwrites a stinging attack on the "Left Behind" series written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, on the ground that these novels "enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter ev eryone who is not a born-again Christian." Kristof accepts "that Mr. Jenkins and Mr. LaHaye are sincere," but then again so are Muslim fundamentalists. He adds, "Now, I've often written that blue staters should be less snooty toward fundamentalist Christians, and I realize that this column will seem pretty snooty. But if I praise the good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief efforts in Darfur - I'll also condemn what I perceive as bigotry." He then goes on to talk about the money the series is earning, impugning the motives of the authors, while poking fun (with not a little justification) at previous efforts in date-setting.
I suppose it is too much to hope that Kristof would distinguish between divergent Christian understandings of what takes place at the end. Christians who do not accept all the interpretations advanced by LaHaye and Jenkins, however, cannot hide behind these divergences, for the Bible itself not only mandates Christians to alleviate suffering (hence the kind of service in Darfur to which Kristof alludes) but also contains a broad swath of exclusivism in which judgment by God is finally poured out on unbelievers. Kristof, however, does not wrestle with how such teachings in the Bible might be integrated with everything else the Bible says, or with whether what it says might be true, or how every position, including his own, is making a truth claim that excludes other truth claims. He simply condemns what he does not like as bigotry.
Michel Houellebecq is one of France's most respected (if least comfortable) contemporary writers, with a sheaf of literary awards to his credit. His tone is that of a younger Albert Camus. In 2002 he was taken to court by four leading Muslim bodies in France. The charge was "making a racial insult" and "inciting religious hatred." This arose because in a magazine interview he made some derogatory comments about Islam. He dismissed Islam as "the dumbest religion" and unfavorably compared the Qur'an with the Bible: the former, he said, is poorly written, while the Bible "at least is beautifully written because the Jews have a heck of a literary talent." In the court case that followed, several prominent French intellectuals defended Houellebecq, but not a few sided with his accusers. The influential Human Rights League accused him of Islamophobia; many leftist writers insisted he was so vulgar he was not worth defending. But per haps the most astute comments came from Salman Rushdie (who knows something of what it means to arouse Islamic ire), writing in the Guardian:
But if an individual in a free society no longer has the right to say openly that he prefers one book to another, then that society no longer has the right to call itself free. Presumably any Muslim who said the Koran was much better than the Bible would then also be guilty of an insult, and absurdity would rule.
Mercifully, the French court found in favor of the defendant.
In 2006, the wind ensemble of the Henry M. Jackson High School in Mill Creek, Washington, in line with its tradition of choosing a piece of music to play at graduation, voted unanimously for Franz Biebl's Ave Maria. The ensemble had played it for their winter concert and wanted to play it for graduation as well. The district superintendent, Carol Whitehead, turned it down: winter concerts were one thing, but to play the piece at graduation might be construed as endorsing religion. One student, Kathryn Nurre, sued, insisting that her constitutional rights had been violated. To read the letters to the editor in the Seattle Times is to gain an education on how tolerance so easily becomes intolerance. One writer applauded Whitehead for her decision, "for correctly insisting the wind ensemble play a more secular piece for commencement." After all, the "melody is very familiar to all of us [one suspects the writer is thinking of a different piece with the same title, but we'll let that pass], and when we hear the instruments play, the words are immediately heard in our brains."" As Jay Nordlinger comments, "Now we are in the vicinity of thought-crime: We may not be singing about God, and we may not be hearing words about God, but the notes make us think of God, which is verboten at graduation."12 In Nurre v. Whitehead, the federal district court in Seattle ruled against the student. The case was appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the ruling against the student. On 22 March 2010, the Supreme Court declined to hear a further appeal, which effectively left standing the decision of the Ninth Circuit, against the student.
Four years after thirteen people were shot and killed at Columbine High School, the school won its struggle to ban religious messages in its remembrance display. The father of victim Daniel Rohrbough wanted to include words that reflected his faith in the wake of this monumental tragedy; the school forbade it. The case worked its way up through the courts; the Supreme Court refused to hear it, so the decision of a lower court stands: the school won, and so did intolerance. The remembrance display must not include anything that suggests remembrance in ways that this particular family found most meaningful and helpful to them.
Enough. I could add many scores of examples, but you get the idea. In the name of not offending anyone, we are in danger of appealing to the virtue of tolerance to become more intolerant. It may be helpful to demonstrate how common this is in particular domains.
The Domain of Education
Here it might be useful to distinguish between what is going on in the broader academic world and what is transpiring in Christian colleges, seminaries, and universities.
In the former, it is easy to chart the rising pressure to conform to the new tolerance. Take the case of Scott McConnell, a graduate student in education at Le Moyne College. In 2005 he wrote a term paper arguing that the ideal classroom environment would be "based upon strong discipline and hard work" that could include "corporal punishment." He received an A- for his paper, in line with his 3.78 GPA. Some months later, however, he was dismissed from the College by the chair of the education department. She cited a "mismatch between [his] personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning and the Le Moyne College program goals." With the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), McConnell took Le Moyne to court and won: he was reinstated into the program. He argued that the College had acted in bad faith: they had promised freedom of expression and then expelled him when he expressed himself.
Also in 2005, Noah Riner, then president of the Dartmouth Student Assembly, spoke at a convocation welcoming freshmen to the campus - a traditional responsibility of the student body president. He said that the acquisition of knowledge is less than what they should be striving for; the development of character is a more important goal. Then he added, "Character has a lot to do with sacrifice, laying our personal interests down for something bigger. The best example of this is Jesus.... He knew the right thing to do. He knew the cost would be agonizing torture and death. He did it anyway. That's character."13 Noah Riner went on to talk briefly about what Jesus achieved on the cross.
Inevitably a controversy erupted. On the one hand, a vice president of the student body wrote to Riner, "I consider your choice of topic for the convocation speech reprehensible and an abuse of power. You embarrass the organization, you embarrass yourself." On the other, a Jewish student wrote, "Many of us in the Dartmouth community proudly disagree with that and other aspects of Riner's religious beliefs, but our disagreements do not give us the right to limit his speech."14 One of the most insightful reflections on the brouhaha came from Noah Riner himself: "The problem is not that Dartmouth has a formalized speech code. That would be easy to deal with, and easy for students to break. The problem is that Dartmouth has a speech culture, where some topics are off limits and some perspec tives shouldn't be uttered." In other words, in this tolerant world some things are intolerable - especially those judged to be intolerant. Dartmouth College, of course, is the same institution which, several years earlier, forbade Campus Crusade from distributing one thousand copies of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity on the grounds that it might offend non-Christian students. Note well: the banned publication was not pornography, instructions on how to make a bomb, a book on pedophilia, or lessons on anarchy. Would Dartmouth have banned any such volumes on the ground that certain students might be offended? This book was a rather mild Christian apologetic first delivered as lectures on British radio during World War II. Vigorous protests eventually forced Dartmouth to reverse its decision.
Indeed, during the last ten years there have been attempts to "derecognize" chapters of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at Tufts, Harvard, Rutgers, the University of North Carolina, and elsewhere. In each case, the local chapter was charged with being discriminatory, either because it insisted that its officers (though not its members) must subscribe to its statement of faith, or because it refused to accept among its officers those who advocated or practiced homosexuality. Thus the Undergraduate Council (or whatever body was involved in any specific case) discriminated against Christians on the ground that these Christians were discriminating against others. Usually there was little if any recognition on the part of the authorities that their zeal for non-discrimination was not only ironically inconsistent but was leading them into the specific form of discrimination forbidden by the First Amendment. So far, when these cases have been settled in court, the settlement has been in favor of the Christian organization.
Not so in the Hastings College of Law in the University of California. There the local chapter of the Christian Legal Society (CLS) was banned by the College on the ground that the chapter is discriminatory: it allowed only those who agree with the CLS statement of faith to fill leadership positions. In particular, Hastings asserted that CLS cannot require that its leaders, on the basis of the statement of faith, pledge to abstain from "unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle." The lawsuit that followed wound its way up to the Supreme Court, which on a 5-4 vote ruled in favor of Hastings. Because the ruling comes from the highest court in the land, some see this decision as a harbinger of what will come: every evangelical group that takes a moral stand on U.S. campuses will be banned. The groups would continue, of course, off campus if necessary, in the catacombs as it were. Frankly, however, many legal experts do not expect that these nightmare scenarios will unfold: the ruling is narrow, and another case could be taken all the way to the Supreme Court if it could be shown that the policy is allowing infiltration of the group for subversive purposes, or if a similar ruling were not reached regarding, say, the requirements that a campus Muslim group might place on its leadership. Time will tell.
These struggles between Christian groups and universities have not been restricted to the United States." In Britain, for instance, the same decade witnessed attempts by Birmingham University, Hull University, the University of Edinburgh, and two or three others to ban the local Christian Union (CU - a local chapter of Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship [UCCF], the British equivalent of American IVCF) from their campuses for very similar reasons. Although these challenges sometimes go on for two or three years, so far they have had a happy result. What is so interesting, however, is the way in which universities, historically the bastions of free speech and free thinking, have repeatedly, in the name of tolerance, exhibited remarkable intolerance. In the case of Edinburgh University, for instance, the authorities banned the CU from meeting on campus to discuss sexual ethics, on the ground that the orthodox Christian view is offensive to homosexuals. In one case the situation became so ludicrous that even the liberal newspaper the Guardian became sympathetic to the CU, opening its editorial pages to an essay by Richard Cunningham, the Director of UCCF. Cunningham wrote, "GK Chesterton once said that, `The purpose of an open mind is the same as that of an open mouth - to close it again on something solid.' If `open mindedness' is being defined as a refusal to make judgements about religious truth and sexual ethics (for instance) then we are prone to contracting a form of intellectual lockjaw.
Not all of this academic passion for the new tolerance is directed against Christians, of course. In 20o6, Bob Averill, a student at the Art Institute of Portland, Oregon, and a committed atheist (he even ran a blog called Portland Atheist), walked up to an informal group of students who, after class, were discussing spirituality. Averill challenged one particular student's religious beliefs. He did not question her right to hold them, but asked, rather, what evidence she had to back them up. The nature of these beliefs? She believed in astral projections and leprechauns living on another energy level. The student complained to the authorities, and after several rounds in which Averill's exchange with the other student was described as an "altercation" and his attempt to bring in another student who had witnessed the exchange was taken as "rude and belligerent behavior," Averill was dismissed from the Institute with less than a year to go before graduation.17 For its part, the Institute claimed it dismissed Averill on the ground that his behavior was "aggressive, demeaning, and threatening."18
Nor are these pressures restricted to students. On 15 September 2004, a longtime adjunct professor at DePaul University, Thomas Klocek, observed a pair of tables set up by student activists. Those activists represented two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and United Muslims Moving Ahead (UMMA). He engaged the students on their claims, pointing out that historically the term "Palestinian" is problematic because it was once a generic term that referred to Muslims, Jews, and Christians who lived in a geographical area rather than to a single ethnicity. One of the students said she was deeply insulted by his remarks. Inevitably the discussion was ratcheted up until the students claimed the Israelis are treating the Palestinians the way Hitler treated the Jews. Klocek argued that there are some important differences. What happened next is disputed. Klocek claims he realized that discussion was futile, put down the flyer calmly, and thumbed his chin, Italian-style, to indicate "I'm outta here!" The students claimed he threw his flyer onto the table and gave them the finger. The entire encounter lasted about fifteen minutes. Despite the fact that he had an enviable record of teaching, Klocek was promptly suspended. He took the case to court, suing DePaul for defamation. After four years (!), Cook County Circuit Court Judge Charles Winkler dismissed the case (March 2009). Klocek appealed; at this writing, the case has not yet been decided.19 Regardless of the rights and wrongs of particular arguments, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that DePaul University destroyed Klocek's academic career to placate a group of students who could not tolerate an opinion counter to their own without complaining they were insulted and demeaned - and the cultural assumption of the new tolerance tends to work in their favor in the adjudication process. In his important 2005 essay, John J. Miller details many instances of professors in America who have faced similar challenges.20
In one sense, of course, the spirit of tolerance on college and university campuses can be a helpful thing: it is sometimes easier for a Christian to find a place at the table today than it was thirty or forty years ago. But the price is high: if the Christian maintains that there is an exclusive element in Christian confessionalism, which of course implies that others are in some measure wrong, the place at the table is often quickly withdrawn. The grounds for the withdrawal are not, formally speaking, that the Christian is a Christian, but that the Christian is intolerant, which cannot be tolerated. Thus the world of academia exerts not-so-subtle pressures for Christians to develop a form of (ostensibly) Christian expression that disowns or at least silences the exclusiveness claims that are grounded in Scripture itself. As Nathan Hatch puts it:
The modern intellectual world is adrift, incapable or unwilling to allow any claim of certainty to set the coordinates by which ideas and commitments are to be judged. The positive side of this situation, of course, is that toleration and subjectivity have become the principal virtues of our age, meaning that marginal groups - even evangelicals - are accorded far more respect than they were earlier in the century. The danger ... is that the gentle lamb of toleration often returns as the wolf of relativism. Christians, then, are both better off and worse off: better in that they are tolerated like everyone else, worse in that no claim to truth carries weight any longer.21
If these are the things that are going on in the broader academic world, what is transpiring in Christian tertiary institutions?
These pressures must be faced not only when the Christian academic operates in, say, a state university, but even when he or she is ensconced in a Christian college. The uniqueness of Christ, Trinitarian theology, the claims of what was achieved exclusively by Jesus' death and resurrection, the insistence that the God of the Bible is the Creator and judge of all - "these claims are intolerable, and Christians will be constantly pressured, both directly and indirectly, to tone them down. If we do not, there will be a price to pay, in reputation or prestige if no other. No matter how winsomely we manage to handle ourselves, if we in Christian higher education are determined to live out our allegiance to Christ we will, as Jesus himself instructs us, experience some of his reproach."23
Genuine pluralism within the broader culture is facilitated when there is a strong Christian voice loyal to the Scriptures - as well as strong Muslim voices, skeptical voices, Buddhist voices, atheistic voices, and so forth. Genuine pluralism within the broader culture is not fostered when in the name of tolerance none of the voices can say that any of the others is wrong, and when this stance is the only ultimate virtue.
The Domain of the Media
Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio conducted a Lexis-Nexis database search of how three newspapers, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, wrote about the culture wars during the decade 1990-2000. During that span of time, these three papers published only eighteen articles "linking the culture wars to the secularist-religious cleavage dividing the Democratic and Republican parties."24 During the same span, they published fifty-nine stories about the role played by secularists in these conflicts, along with a whopping 929 articles about the political machinations of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. In other words, in the media perception, the divergences developing in the country are regularly laid at the door of those who are not well-represented in the media.
Because the new tolerance, an ostensibly value-free tolerance, has become the dominant religion among media leaders, this vision is constantly reinforced. For instance, the media may present popes such as John Paul II and Benedict XVI in a positive light, provided these popes are restricting themselves to ceremony or world poverty, but if they show how their beliefs impinge on social issues such as premarital and extramarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia, then they must be bigoted, out of date, slightly bizarre, even dangerous, and certainly intolerant.
In 2001, former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg published a book with the title Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News.25 His thesis is not that the media are controlled by a liberal versus conservative bias per se, nor by a Democrat versus Republican bias. Rather, their bias is generated by a kind of social, cultural, intellectual, and professional inbreeding. They think of themselves as wonderfully diverse and broadly representative of the nation because they make sure they hire a representative mix of gender and race. What is lacking, however, is a representative mix of intellectual and cultural positions; there is little diversity of thought. The media will display a deep and thoughtful commitment to ensuring they have a representative number of women on board, but these women - and men - will not hold representative views on abortion, gun control, homosexuality, and the importance of religion in one's life. Thus, while they feel they are on the cutting edge of a profound tolerance, there are many domains of the media's life that are hugely intolerant. Inevitably, even while hardworking journalists are doing their best to be responsible and as objective as possible, the common narrowness of these horizons fosters patterns of distortion in the news that become troubling.26
This has been going on for decades. In 1972, Pauline Kael, movie critic for the New Yorker, won a bit of immortality for herself by announcing, after the elections that returned Nixon to power, "I can't believe it! I don't know a single person who voted for him." Considering Nixon won forty-nine of the fifty states, Kael managed to do nothing more than demonstrate her rather sad isolation from most people in the nation.
The Domain of Homosexual Behavior
For more than two decades, the Boy Scouts of America have been under attack for (a) not admitting girls; (b) not admitting atheists; and (c) not permitting avowed homosexuals to serve in any leadership capacity. After numerous expensive lawsuits, the Boy Scouts thought they had secured some tranquility when in 2000 the Supreme Court's Dale decision ruled that as a private organization the Boy Scouts were entitled to choose their own members. But although the ACLU (= American Civil Liberties Union) lost in that ruling, it did not give up. Instead, it has joined with assorted gay-rights groups to attack the Boy Scouts' ties to public institutions, which are numerous and complicated. For instance, the Scouts often recruit in public schools and are given special treatment in the use of state and national parks for their jamborees. On the other hand, these privileges are in one sense paid for. In the summer of 2008, for instance, the Order of the Arrow organized "Five Sites, Five Weeks, Five Thousand Arrowmen," a project in which five thousand volunteers devoted five weeks to assorted conservation projects and improving of public facilities in national forests across the country. Since 2004, the Boy Scouts have devoted something close to ten million hours in assisting public programs and improving public property. Another project of the Boy Scouts, "Good Turn for America," cleans up hundreds of city parks and schoolyards. To become an Eagle Scout, a candidate must lead his troop in a community service project. Scouts in Arizona have invested thousands of hours in fire prevention and conservation projects in and around the Grand Canyon.
So the ACLU and others have pounced on the Scouts in numerous struggles, none directly related to homosexuality, all having to do with the relationship of the Scouts to public land and public institutions. In 2003, the ACLU, on behalf of a lesbian couple and an agnostic couple, argued that the Scouts are a religious organization and therefore its leases with San Diego violate the establishment clause. These leases have enabled the Scouts to run Camp Balboa and a halfacre on Fiesta island for almost a century, during which time they have spent millions of their own dollars to develop the properties, keeping them open to the public. The resulting lawsuits continue.
In 1928, Philadelphia leased a half-acre of property to the Scouts, and they in turn constructed a 7,500-square-foot Beaux Arts headquarters at their own expense. In 2000, the Philadelphia city council tried to evict the Scouts, and when that demand failed, demanded $200,000 per annum in rent. The Scouts must pay up or stop discriminating against homosexuals and atheists. Quite apart from questions of equity - who really owns that building in which none of the money invested came from the city? -would it not be more pluralistic and genuinely tolerant for the city to say that if homosexuals and/or atheists want to build a similar institution, the city of Philadelphia will be just as helpful to them as they have been in the past to the Scouts? No, that will never do: what the new tolerance means is that government must be intolerant of those who do not accept the new definition of tolerance. These two locations, San Diego and Philadelphia, stand for numerous other struggles the Scouts have endured during the past decade, mostly on the coasts, all in the name of tolerance.
It is not easy to predict how these and similar cases will turn out. Two years ago in Massachusetts, Catholic Charities was told it had to withdraw from its adoption service or change its policies and become willing to place children with same-sex couples. Catholic Charities stopped its service. How this will benefit needy children in that state is less than clear. One might argue that Catholic Charities could have and should have put up a better fight. World Vision, an evangelical charity, requires that its employees refrain from extramarital sexual activity, including, of course, homosexual activity. In 2005, World Vision was awarded $1.5 million by the Office of Justice Programs to address escalating juvenile and gangviolence in Virginia. Eventually lawyers were called in to determine if World Vision was discriminatory. The Department of justice eventually (2007) ruled in favor of World Vision on the basis of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993. After all, as Carl Esbeck, a law professor at the University of Missouri, observes, "[N]onreligious organizations receiving federal grant monies freely hire based on their core mission, just as Planned Parenthood requires that employees be pro-choice and Sierra Club screens applicants based on their view of global warming. Religious groups likewise cannot remain true to their founding creedal purposes unless employees are aligned with the energizing core of the mission."27 Indeed, Esbeck goes on to say, "One who has never disagreed with others about religion is not thereby commendably tolerant, but is treating re ligious differences as trivial, as if religious beliefs do not matter. That is just a soft form of religious bigotry."28
Sometimes common sense prevails.
And sometimes it doesn't. "On June 29, 2004, Pastor Ake Green was sentenced to one month in jail for showing `disrespect' against homosexuals in the sermon he delivered from his pulpit in the small town of Borgholm, Sweden on July 20, 2003."29 In 2008, the Supreme Court of California ruled that two physicians could not legally refuse artificial insemination to a woman because she is a lesbian. The doctors had not withheld the service because they disagreed with her: they argued that they happily provide medical care to all kinds of people with whom they disagree. They would not withhold cancer treatment from a rapist, for example. But where they felt they had to draw a line was in their own participation in an act that they judged to be immoral. It was not as if the patient, Guadalupe Benitez, could not obtain the services elsewhere; the lawsuit was not about being unable to obtain the medical services she desired, but about making a point. In its decision, the Court stated, "Do the rights of religious freedom and free speech, as guaranteed in both the federal and the California Constitutions, exempt a medical clinic's physicians from complying with the California Unruh Civil Rights Act's prohibition against discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation? Our answer is
The wording is important. If homosexuality is made an exclusively civil rights issue, then courts will be tempted to limit First Amendment rights time and again. The issue is becoming complicated. Elane Photography, a business owned by an evangelical husband-and-wife team, refused to photograph the gay commitment ceremony of two women. In 20o6, Vanessa Willcock filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Commission, which eventually found against Elane Photography and ordered it to pay $6,637 for Willcock's legal fees. The decision was appealed to the District Court, where once again Elane Photography lost (December 2009). Elane Photography is appealing: if business owners are forced to do something against their own conscience, such as a photography company owned and operated by deeply committed vegetarians being forced to photograph the slaughter of animals and the preparation of meat for a butcher shop, where is the tolerance and equity in that?31 Outside the U.S., nations ostensibly in favor of human rights are becoming increasingly restrictive. In England, a Catholic school was recently forbidden to fire its openly gay headmaster. Parochial (Anglican) schools are forbidden to teach that homosexuality is sin. In Canada, the Alberta Human Rights Commission forbade a Christian pastor from making "disparaging" remarks about homosexuality, or even repeating biblical condemnations.
In the past, there has been no shortage of cruel and contemptible things said about and to homosexuals by conservatives. But it seems to many of us that unrestrained venom now more characteristically flows in the opposite direction. When she was still Miss California, Carrie Prejean was asked what she thought of gay marriage. She replied that "marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised." She did not turn out to be the best defender of the traditional view, but her language was mild compared with what was thrown back at her. "A dumb bitch with half a brain," opined Perez Hilton, a gay columnist. "An ignorant disgrace" who "makes me sick to my stomach," writes Giuliana Rancic, E! News anchor. This is the tolerance that is being commended?
Target: Christianity
At the risk of sounding paranoid or petty, I must say that a disproportionate part of the intolerance that masks itself as (the new) tolerance is directed against Christians and Christianity.
Public libraries have been known to ban a book such as John MacArthur's Safe in the Arms of God.32 In several countries - Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom - legislation has been passed that has resulted in Christian pastors being hauled before the courts, and sometimes found guilty of hate crimes, on the ground that they have given public addresses that contrasted Christianity and Islam in ways that were judged to vilify Islam. I know of no instance in these countries where similar charges were brought against an imam for comparisons running in the opposite direction.
In 2004, in the Russian city of Beslan, Islamic terrorists took 1,200 people hostage in a public school. They ultimately slaughtered 344 people, 186 of them students. On a smaller scale, but still horrific, two disturbed students massacred thirteen people at Columbine High School. In the wake of such events, it is not surprising that many schools have run drills so that teachers and students alike will have some idea how to react if such violence breaks out in their schools - locking classroom doors, staying below window level, and so forth, while coordinating the work of police and other public safety officials. In New Jersey in April 2007, one such drill was run by the Burlington Police Department. And who were the mock terrorists supposed to be? Homeschooling Christian fundamentalists. Three years earlier, a similar drill in Muskegon County, Michigan, featured homeschooling wackos who detonate a bomb on a school bus.
Some local exasperation followed. But can you imagine what would have happened if the mock terrorists had been depicted as turban-wearing Islamic jihadists? Can one think of a single instance of organized Christian homeschoolers threatening, let alone carrying out, terrorist violence?
I have already listed a handful of instances of intolerance in colleges and universities. Of course, anecdotal evidence by itself does not demonstrate a trend. One or two recent essays, however, in addition to providing many more examples, document case after case of astonishing intolerance where the only common ingredient was that the student or faculty member in question was a Christian.33 Scott Savage volunteered to serve on a book selection committee that recommended books for freshmen. Others on the committee listed a number of books from a leftist perspective; Savage, a quiet pacifist, suggested several conservative volumes, including David Kupelian's The Marketing of Evil, which refers to homosexual behavior as sinful or evil. Some homosexual faculty complained that this book recommendation made them feel "unsafe" on the campus, and so the faculty voted, without dissent, to accuse the student of sexual harassment. Emily Brooker saw no problem in exploring alternative views on sexual and family matters in the classroom, but refused to sign a joint letter whose purpose was to support same-sex "family" adoption. For this stance she was investigated by the social work department and charged with ethics violations. A professor of English literature at Sonoma State University, lecturing on James Joyce, drew a picture of two mountains on the board at the front of the class, stated that Joyce's ecclesiastical background taught him that the one mountain represented God and the other represented human beings, and the only way between the two - here he drew a cross in the valley, touching both peaks - was Christ on the cross, connecting people with God. He then broke into peals of laughter, drawing the class into the humor.
Quite apart from the fact that this is not a good way to teach English literature'34 can one imagine getting away with this if the derision had been directed against Buddhism or Islam? Or against Muhammad himself? Remember those Danish cartoons? In many circles it seems that the only broadly sanctioned derision still permitted is anti-Christian. In the nature of the case this derision is in support of what is widely perceived to be a more tolerant outlook.
It is not the derision that perplexes Christians. If they know their Bibles, they will not be too surprised (e.g., John 15:18-25). What surprises and perplexes Christians when they face this sort of opprobrium is that it is offered in defense of large-hearted "tolerance." In any society, various sectors criticize other sectors. The right criticizes the left, and the left criticizes the right.35 None of that is troubling; in a liberal democracy, all of it is healthy. What is unhealthy is derisive criticism that does not engage with the views of a particular party, but merely dismisses them and tries to expel them from the discourse on the ground that they are intolerant.36
As this book was being written, the remarkable responses to Brit Hume hit the press. He was asked on a Fox News panel what advice he would give to Tiger Woods in the wake of Tiger's tragic sex scandal. Among other things, Hume said, rather softly and gently:
The explosive reaction was predictable. Tom Shales, TV critic of the Washington Post, derisively mocked the notion that Christians should "run around trying to drum up new business." Hume "doesn't really have the authority, does he, unless one believes that every Christian by mandate must proselytize? ... [T]he remark will probably rank ... as one of the most ridiculous of the year"; he has "dissed about half a billion Buddhists on the planet." Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC, declared that Hume had tried to "threaten Tiger Woods into becoming a Christian." David Shuster, Olbermann's colleague, charged that Hume had denigrated his own religion by bringing it up on a talk show, and found Hume's comments "truly embarrassing." Blogger Andrew Sullivan called Hume's comments "pure sectarianism," an improper attempt to abolish "the distinction between secular and religious discourse."
The criticisms of Hume prompt a raft of reflections. (1) Factually, what Hume said about Buddhism was essentially correct. Every religion includes in its structure some understanding of what is "wrong" with human beings and presents a "solution." For Christianity, the root problem is sin - idolatrous defiance of the one CreatorGod; the solution is forgiveness of sin, secured by Christ's death and resurrection. For Buddhism, the root problem is ignorance about the true nature of reality, in particular the impermanence of all things, an ignorance that results in craving and attachment; the solution therefore is enlightenment.38 One may argue which of these two perceptions of reality, if either, is true. Hume's point, however, is this: he understands Tiger Woods to have committed sin, and what Tiger most needs is forgiveness, not least forgiveness by God, as part of the healing and transformation he hopes Tiger experiences. That is a Christian analysis, of course, but granted that this sort of forgiveness is what Tiger needs, Tiger is not going to find it in Buddhism, where the structure of thought is entirely different. There is no "sin" in Buddhism, as many religions conceive of "sin." Some thoughtful Buddhists replied by offering their alternative structure: that is fair dialog in a liberal democracy. And that is what was lacking from so many media pundits. (2) When the critics mock Hume for supposing he has a "mandate" to "proselytize," Christians quietly smile and remember the Great Commission. If by "proselytize" one means something like "try to win people to faith in Jesus by humble articulation of the gospel and without any external coercion," that is exactly the mandate that Christians have. (3) In the long haul, there can be no freedom of religion unless people of competing faiths and of no faith are free to proselytize, free to try to convince others. (4) In any case, isn't that exactly what Olbermann, Shuster, and Sullivan et al. are trying to do - convince people that theirview of reality is correct? Thoughtful Christians will not want Olbermann, Shuster, and Sullivan to be silenced or to withdraw from the marketplace of ideas; they merely note, with quiet irony, that the most intemperate language is being used by those calling for "tolerance." To accuse Hume of "dissing" Buddhism because he disagrees with it is to cast a rhetorical spin on Hume's comments - but fair-minded readers may be excused for thinking that Hume is being "dissed" rather more virulently. (5) Sullivan's charge that Hume has crossed the border between secular and religious discourse already presupposes (a) the intrinsic superiority of secular discourse and (b) that religious discourse is viable and respectable only when it is utterly private. But countless millions cannot agree with (a), and Sullivan presents no argument for justifying that stance: he merely presupposes it and tries to impose it on others. As for (b), the assumption that religion in general and Christianity in particular must be entirely privatized, that is something to be explored a little later in this book.
We ought to remind ourselves, however, of the way that liberal democracy is supposed to work. The price of citizenship in a liberal democracy is that citizens will not impose their convictions on others; they will not use the power of the state to coerce belief. Each person is free to practice his or her belief or unbelief. But as Ross Douthat rightly points out, "That's the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one's own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home."39 Of course, these illiberal notions have as much right to a hearing as does the Christianity of Brit Hume. But if those illiberal notions gain broad sway, they, and not Hume's Christianity, would be responsible for squashing pluralism.
This needs a little more unpacking. After the destruction of the World Trade Center, Andrew Sullivan wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine comparing Christian fundamentalists with Muslim terrorists on the ground that both hold to exclusivist But this analysis misconstrues both the nature of democracy and the locus of the real danger. The danger does not lie in tenaciously held exclusivist beliefs: compare the mutually exclusive economic analyses of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Mutually exclusive beliefs, religious or otherwise, are not dangerous, provided there is also a mutual commitment to ongoing discourse, to the older kind of tolerance. As Duane Litfin puts it, "The danger, whether under religious auspices (the inquisition, the Taliban) or secular (Nazism, Stalinism), stems from the totalitarian recourse to coercion. In this light, for Sullivan to equate the fundamentalism of a Jerry Falwell to that of Osama Bin Laden is both unfair and