4. Worse Than Inconsistency
Initial Comments to Orient the Discussion
Every culture and every age necessarily displays some tolerance and some intolerance. No culture can be tolerant of everything or intolerant of everything: it is simply not possible. A culture that tolerates, say, genocide (e.g., the Nazis) will not tolerate, say, the Jews it wants to kill or homosexual practice. A culture that tolerates just about every sexual liaison may nevertheless balk at, say, rape, or pedophilia, or in many cases bigamy and polygamy. If we are going to think carefully about tolerance and intolerance, a little historical perspective will help.' As the chapter title suggests, these are mere jottings, observations on certain movements and writers who have influenced discussion of tolerance across the centuries, including some contemporary thought on the matter.
Since we are casting an eye backward across the centuries, the tolerance of which I am now writing is of course what I have called the older tolerance. It is nicely defined by Edward Langerak:
Toleration is the enduring of something disagreeable. Thus it is not indifference toward things that do not matter and it is not broad-minded celebration of differences. It involves a decision to forgo using powers of coercion, so it is not merely resignation at the inevitability of the disagreeable, although begrudging toleration can be granted when one believes that coercion, while possible, would come at too high a price. Tolerating another's actions is quite compatible with trying to change another's mind, as long as one relies on rational persuasion - or, perhaps, emotional appeals - rather than blunt threats or subtle brainwashing.
It may be helpful to indicate briefly the direction that the historical jottings take in this chapter. These jottings are not merely random observations on what took place in the past; rather, they illustrate that across the ages the best thinking on the subject, however diverse, displays a remarkable connection between one's understanding of tolerance and one's understanding of "natural law" or "public moral law" (or whatever it is called in various contexts). Historical treatments that fail to probe this connection, however interesting their discrete observations, have wittingly or unwittingly elevated tolerance to the place of supreme virtue, so that its relations with other virtues are largely obscured.3 The result is that tolerance itself is distorted.
J. Daryl Charles rightly argues that in the pre-Christian GrecoRoman world, the line from Heraclitus (c. 535-475 B.c.) through Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) down to the Stoics embraced a form of what would later be called "natural law" theory - a vision of moral order based on human nature and the outworking of that nature in reason.4 In the Christian heritage, the massive influence of Thomas Aquinas - whether within the Roman Catholic tradition and the articulation of natural law, or sometimes adapted, especially in the Reformed tradition, to speak of the imago Dei and the constraints of common grace - worked itself out in a variety of ethical structures that sought the common good in any culture. Within such large frameworks of moral reasoning, tolerance is seen as a virtue because of its concern for the common good. Once tolerance is cut loose from this larger moral vision, however, and becomes shackled to notions of individual freedom to do what one pleases absent much consideration of the common good, it becomes quite a different sort of beast. Charles might usefully devote more attention to the teaching of Jesus regarding the distinction between Christ and Caesar and the role that Jesus' teaching played in the development of tolerance in the West. (We will shortly have occasion to reflect on this theme.) Yet the tight connec tion Charles maintains between tolerance and moral vision is not only historically important but also must play a major role in our assessment of what is happening today.
A. J. Conyers argues along similar lines.' He too traces toleration and its application through history, focusing especially on such figures as John Locke (about whom I say more below), to demonstrate that, historically, toleration was tied to societies that had a shared moral vision and a conscience, while today it is far more tightly tied to individual freedom. Instead of protecting minority groups as part of public policy for the common good, the enforced sanction of individual freedom encourages, ironically, the centralization of power and fosters indifference to values other than the value of tolerance itself.
Amy Chua's analysis of the history of tolerance is rather different. In her book Day ofEmpire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall,' she argues that world empires - China's Tang Dynasty, Achaemenid Persia, Imperial Rome, the British Empire, the United States - demonstrate, in their expansion periods, a remarkable tolerance for pluralism and diversity, which has the effect of leveraging the contributions of all these diverse voices to enhance the empire itself. This is what she calls "strategic tolerance." The decline of an empire is marked by increasing desire to control everything and a consequent diminution of tolerance. The tipping point comes when enough people begin to rebel against the intolerance implicit in these restrictions, generating strife, discord, hatred, and violence - in short, the seeds of the decline and destruction of the empire.
This is the sort of sweeping thesis that has just enough plausibility to make a splash in the public square. There are enough historical holes in the work, however, to make one pause. In her treatment of the early period of any empire, Chua tends to lavish praise for every instance of tolerance while ignoring instances of intolerance - and then reverse the procedure for the later period. Doubtless the Romans were "progressive" in their day. In the time of Jesus, it was imperial policy to allow the diverse religions in the Empire to operate fairly freely. Indeed, it was an offense, a capital offense, to desecrate a temple, any temple - the aim being, of course, to avoid major religious conflict. I suppose this is a kind of tolerance of diverse religions. Of course, the Romans also insisted on god-swaps: local conquered peoples were expected to accept some of the Roman gods into their own pantheon, while the Romans happily adopted some of the local gods into theirs. This god-swap might appear to be happily tolerant and ecumenical, but of course it was for the sake of stifling rebellion: if locals were tempted to throw off the Roman yoke, at the very least they could no longer count on the local gods to be only on their side. Moreover, once the Senate got into the habit of deifying deceased emperors and demanding that its citizens offer a pinch of incense to the deified Caesar, and, increasingly, to the deified living Caesar, the polytheists who made up most of the Empire had no difficulty complying. But was this strategic tolerance or Machiavellian manipulation? The Jews, of course, were an exception to Roman imperial policy, since they had no gods to swap and no figures representing gods. Worse, they stubbornly insisted that their God was Lord of all and that they were not going to offer incense to any Caesar, dead or alive. The Romans gritted their teeth and viewed them as miserably intransigent but not a big enough threat to squash, until, of course, A.D. 66-7o and again in the second century (A.D. 132-135). As long as Roman authorities perceived Christians to be a species of Jews, Christians could more or less hide under Jewish exceptionalism. When the divide between Jews and Christians became ever clearer, Christians faced repeated rounds of Roman persecution until about A.D. 300, when Constantine professed conversion to Christ. Indeed, it is often argued that emperors such as Trajan, who wanted to return the Empire to pagan discipline and who was therefore more brutal with Christians, and thus less tolerant, was nevertheless "better" for the Empire itself at that juncture, precisely because he imposed extra discipline - i.e., he was more intolerant. Life and Roman history are more subtle than Chua thinks.
As for her treatment of the United States, she praises the U.S. for being tolerant toward Jews and other Europeans, many of them scientists, who gained access to the country during Hitler's rise to power, and in consequence strengthened the U.S. and put it into a position where it could defeat the Axis powers. But she says nothing about American internment of Japanese during World War II, at roughly the same period - scarcely an act of strategic tolerance. Indeed, at the time the internment was viewed as an act of wise strategic intolerance. She lavishes praise on the U.S. for allowing and sometimes inviting so many people in the previous century to enter the country, citing this as early strategic tolerance, but tends to gloss over the treatment of Native Americans. Writing as she does toward the end of the Bush era, the focal point of her curiosity is how close America is to the loss of "strategic tolerance" and the adoption of intolerance that will spell its decline. But she exhibits no feel for the increasing polarization between the old tolerance and the new, and little grasp of how there is rising, ironically, an increased "tolerance" that is being (intolerantly) enforced by law on those who disagree! Similarly, unlike the works of Charles and Conyers, Chua's book neglects to place tolerance within a broader assumed moral vision framework.
Early Christian Thought
What is transparently obvious in all of these analyses is how every society mixes tolerance and intolerance in complex ways, a mix that is grounded in a certain moral vision, and all the pragmatic (and even corrupting) decisions that flow from that vision. This is true in the pagan world, the Christian world, and any other world for that matter. During the church's first three centuries or so, the dominant criticism Christians received from the diverse pagans of the Roman Empire was that their religion was too exclusive. Celsus, Porphyry, Symmachus, and many other scholarly pagans were happy to defend one branch of pagan thought against another, but none of them claimed to represent the only way to the divine. It follows that all of them took umbrage at the claim of Christians that Christ provides the only way to eternal life.
All the ancient critics of Christianity were united in affirming that there is no one way to the divine.... It was not the kaleidoscope of religious practices and feelings that was the occasion for the discussion of religious pluralism in ancient Rome; it was the success of Christianity, as well as its assertions about Christ and about Israel.... By appealing to a particular history as the source of knowledge of God, Christian thinkers transgressed the conventions that governed civilized theological discourse in antiquity.'
This antipathy toward Christians, all in the name of a more tolerant view of different (pagan) religions, inevitably constituted part of the backdrop that made the cycles of official Roman persecution of Christians - the most violent intolerance - a morally acceptable pattern in the culture, until the numbers of Christians and the quality of their lives and sufferings began to modify public perception. Until that occurred, intolerance toward Christians was widely perceived as a virtue.
Not surprisingly, during the early centuries of the church's existence Christians could passionately defend tolerance. Toward the end of the second century, Tertullian of Carthage wrote, "It is a human law and a natural right that one should worship whatever he intends; the religious practice of one person neither harms nor helps another. It is no part of religion to coerce religious practice, for it is by free choice not coercion that we should be led to religion" (To Scapula 2.1-2). Again: "See that you do not give a reason for impious religious practice by taking away religious liberty and prohibit choice in divine matters, so that I may not worship as I wish, but am forced to worship what I do not wish" (Apology 24.6-10). About a century later, Lactantius wrote, "Religion is to be defended not by putting to death, but by dying, not by cruelty but by patience, not by an impious act but by faith.... For nothing is so much a matter of free will as religion [Nihil est enim tam voluntarium quam religion], for if the mind of the worshipper turns away it is carried off and nothing remains" (Divine Institutes 5.19). He goes on to say, "religion cannot be a matter of coercion [religio cogi non potest]"; it has to do with the will (voluntas).
With the Constantinian settlement, Christians suddenly found themselves allied with imperial power. Instead of being the disadvantaged religious community in the Empire, they now enjoyed the advantages of being associated with the emperor. That called forth new rounds of reflection on the relations between church and state and on the dynamic tension between tolerance and intolerance. Once Christianity became the official religion, believers were no longer in danger of officially sanctioned persecution; inevitably, however, they faced two new threats: (a) pressure from the state to be controlled by the state and (b) the temptation to pursue power for its own sake in a way that was impossible for them before the Christian profession of Constantine, or to use the power of the state to establish Christianity.
So far as we know, the first Christian leader to demand, by appealing to Scripture, the suppression of pagan cults was Firmicus Maternus in his On the Error of Profane Religions 346). More influential by far was the authority of Augustine. His struggle against the Donatists, which occupied much of his energy in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, chronicles his shift in perspective. He became Bishop of Hippo in A.D. 395 and determined to end the ugly schism between Catholics and Donatists as expeditiously as possible. Initially he took only peaceful measures," but in the early part of the fifth century his attitude changed. In part he was responding to violence against Catholics; in part he discovered that compulsory measures were often effective. Augustine remained implacably opposed to torture and physical coercion. Nevertheless, the stances he adopted toward the Donatists and the steps he took reshaped Christian understanding of how others should be treated. He deployed the command "compel them to come in" (Luke 14:23) from the parable of the great supper as sanction to enforce the submission of unbelievers and heretics (a formidable display of ripping a text out of its context); more importantly, he appealed to the civil authorities for help. "What death is worse for the soul than the liberty to err?" he asked (To the Donatists). Augustine thus "established a precedent which fortified the practice of repression by the Medieval Church."9 This is not to say that everyone followed Augustine's line. For instance, in A.D. 591 Gregory the Great wrote to Virgilius, Bishop of Arles, and to Theodore, Bishop of Marseilles, commending them for their zeal in evangelizing Jews, but criticizing them for the use of coercion instead of resorting to "the sweetness of preaching." Nevertheless, Augustine's hardening position pointed the way for many church leaders in later centuries.
The Intolerant Road to Tolerance in the Modern Period
As the papacy increased in power across the centuries, and civil authorities waxed and waned, it sometimes became difficult to decide if the greatest threat came from Rome attempting to control kings and other rulers or from those rulers attempting to control Rome.10 What is quite clear is that by the eleventh century "Europe became a persecuting society."11 This did not happen overnight: for six centuries after Augustine, there is no record of execution on religious grounds. Nevertheless the great theologian's words provided some of the sanction for developments from the eleventh century on. The advice of some was relatively mild. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), for instance, in answer to the question as to whether unbelievers should be compelled to the faith, wrote,
This, of course, is not exactly freedom of religion as it is currently understood in the West.
The Middle Ages cough up many examples of more violent intolerance. The Papal inquisition set up large numbers of tribunals throughout Europe. For example, in the late twelfth century Pope Lucius III sought to destroy the Albigensian heresy in southern France, an effort that continued for decades. One of these tribunals was set up in 1232 in the Kingdom of Aragon; there was never a tribunal set up by the Papal inquisition in nearby Castile. In 1478, convinced that the Papal inquisition was too weak, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile established the Spanish inquisition - or, to give it its proper name, the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the inquisition. It was designed to preserve Roman Catholic orthodoxy by replacing the tribunals under papal control. The Spanish inquisition remained under the direct control of the Spanish monarchy until it was formally abolished in 1833.
In theory the Inquisition examined only Christians. Jews, Muslims, and other minorities did not come directly under its mandate. Such minorities often faced other highly discriminatory laws, but on occasion they could achieve positions of power in the nation. The Inquisition was most interested in examining conversos - mostly Jews, and later significant numbers of Muslims, who professed conversion to Catholicism but whose conversions were suspect. Jews were apparently converting in serious numbers, owing to fresh outbreaks of anti-Semitism; the Muslim Moors were converting, too, as their military forces had been thrown off the Spanish peninsula, leaving behind many Moors who were now ruled by the Spanish throne. The first six victims of the Inquisition were burned at the stake in 1481. The Inquisition was very active from about 1480 to 1530. Estimates vary, but probably no fewer than two thousand people met their death in similar fashion. Those who were found guilty by the tribunals were handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. Moreover, although the Inquisition focused on the conversos and had no direct authority over the unconverted Jews and Muslims of Spain, eventually it was decided that one of the things that tempted apparently converted Jews to live a dual life and maintain Jewish rites and customs was the presence of unconverted Jews - so attempts to banish all Jews from certain large Spanish cities followed.
None of this was done in the name of intolerance, of course. Undoubtedly some of the motives were ugly and corrupt: the lust for more power vested in the throne, the populism that finds it easy to blame minorities and stir up hate, even confiscating the goods of the wealthier victims. Part of the motivation was to preserve what the authorities felt was the true religion. What must be observed, however, is that this effort to preserve what was judged to be true religion was grounded not so much in argument in the marketplace of ideas as in coercion - coercion of the particularly powerful sort where church and state are so intertwined that the church uses the state to impose the most severe sanctions. In other words, it was not so much the commitment to a certain understanding of truth that brought about these excruciating results as the defense of the truth by the use of physical coercion backed up by the state.
One of the results of the Reformation was that Europe became divided between Catholic and Protestant states. By and large, Catholics did not tolerate Protestants, and Protestants did not tolerate Catholics: that is, on both sides there was a link between theological commitments and secular authority, for both sides were heirs to the medieval stance that presupposed that some degree of intolerance bathed in coercion was necessary to defend the truth. The culminating slaughter of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) brought incalculable horror. How much of this bloodshed was primarily a conflict generated by theologians arguing about truth, as opposed to rising nationalism, powerful fiefdoms, and lust for political independence, is much disputed. "The role religion had played in the war has always been a matter of some debate among historians. By 1648 it was more a matter of establishing rights to land; religion had been transmuted into moral geography."" But insofar as the wars were religious, they forced many people to conclude that there had to be a better way.14 And as we shall see, the rising tolerance that was eventually spawned for groups belonging to minority religions did not come about through skepticism or apathy about religion, but sprang up, as much as from anything else, through the refusal of minorities to be silenced and crushed.15
Notes on the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The raging storms of intolerance, a substantial part of it religious, inevitably spawned renewed reflection on the justification and appropriate place of tolerance. The targets of the intolerance were many: Lollards, Albigensians, Anabaptists, Calvinists, Jews, Lutherans, Muslims, assorted Protestant separatists, and many others. Apart from wars between states, grounded in mutual distrust and intolerance, intolerance manifested itself within states by mandating, for dissidents, church attendance, banning their clergy, imprisonment, fines, required oaths of allegiance, restrictions on movements, social banning that made it difficult to find employment, various forms of public embarrassment, and, in the worst cases, torture and execution. One of the merits of Alexandra Walsham's study is that it demonstrates that at least until 1700 no religious group in the United Kingdom abandoned the ideal of religious uniformity.16 In other words, rising appeals for toleration and gently escalating legislative acts of toleration were widely viewed as temporary measures to limit the violence until religious uniformity could be restored. Nevertheless this pattern was not reproduced everywhere. In the United Provinces (what came to be the Netherlands or Holland), there was much more breathing space for Mennonites and other Anabaptists, along with a variety of Unitarians and other heterodox thinkers, not to mention Jews from Spain.
The appeals for more toleration arose both from religious see tors and from sectors that were perceived in the long haul to be more secularizing. In the former camp, some of the writings of John Owen stand out,17 as does Roger Williams's The Bloudy Tenet, of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience (1644), which argues that no person should be prevented from worshiping according to his or her conscience. Unusual for a seventeenth-century Protestant, Williams was willing to grant such toleration to Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and any other religious group. More influential in the seventeenth century was John Milton's Areopagetica (published in November 1644, at the height of the English civil war), an impassioned defense of the principle of the right to freedom of speech and expression. Milton appeals to at least three controlling criteria: (1) the criterion of the public good, the view that any society will be a better society with augmented well-being if human autonomy is preserved and people can do and say and publish what they want to; (2) the criterion of promoting certain virtues - e.g., toleration fosters attentive listening to others, the virtue of selfcriticism, and the like; (3) the criterion of epistemology - i.e., toleration is well suited to attaining well-grounded beliefs, to ascertaining the truth.
This certainly does not mean that all Christians were persuaded by Milton. Five years after the publication of Milton's Areopagetica, Samuel Rutherford (1600-1661), a Scottish Covenanting theologian and onetime Rector of St. Andrews University, published A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience - essentially a response to Milton. All his life Rutherford sustained and nurtured a horror of pluralism, strengthened in him, perhaps, by his years in London where he spent time from 1643 to 1647 as one of the Scots Commissioners to the Westminster Assembly. Rutherford advocated that the civil magistrate - what we would call the power of the state - should be deployed to make people conform to true Christian doctrine, as adjudicated by the best judgment of the orthodox ministers of religion (which, of course, aligned with his own views). He insisted that such exertion of authority should be designed to compel behav ioral conformity, for he insisted equally that heart and motive were known only to God. Moreover, he was self-critical enough to recognize that such a stance would likely foster hypocrisy, i.e., hypocritical religious behavior out of step with actual belief, even though he himself was one of the most pious and insistent advocates of true heart religion. The dissonance between his underscoring of the importance of heart religion and his insistence that the state should compel certain religious conformity was dissolved, in his view, in the importance of the public good: the magistrate's coercion might do no good to the one compelled to conform, but it would diminish the number of bad examples and unsound teachers in the community and thus protect the community.
Paul Helm helpfully argues that Rutherford was not entirely wrong.18 Rutherford was correct to perceive that the toleration at issue was not over matters of convenience (such as putting up with, i.e., tolerating, a noisy neighbor) but had an epistemological dimension - that is, the issues at stake were truth claims; they were matters that could be disputed as to their reasonableness and truth. Rutherford judged that intolerance was in this case good because the beliefs of his opponents were both erroneous and dangerous. Helm argues that, while Rutherford was wrong to advocate intolerance, he was right to perceive the nature of the issue: matters of religion do not turn on mere subjective feelings, but on issues of truth and falsity. The issues are neither trivial nor socially inconsequential. The problem is that Rutherford argues from the infallibility of Scripture, and, implicitly, the (self-perceived) infallibility of his understanding of Scripture, to intolerance. One cannot legitimately defend intolerance by an appeal to infallibility, however, when that very claim to infallibility is precisely what is being challenged. And if one persists in this tactic, one is forced to concede that one's opponents are justified in their intolerance, when they are in power, granted that they perceive the infallibility of their own position, grounded in different authority.
In the long term, another group of thinkers, trending toward what would become more secularizing thought, exerted greater influence on later developments than the Christian thinkers just described. John Locke (1632-1704) published his Letter Concerning Toleration in 1689. Thirty years earlier, in his Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause, Locke had argued that religious toleration was impractical and dangerous because it would foster civil unrest. At the time he wrote his Letter, however, England was still being tossed hither and yon by the impact of the Glorious Revolution and the Restoration, not to mention conflict between the Church of England and the Dissenters and ongoing fears that a Catholic heir might come to the throne. Now Locke argued that both history and human nature show that toleration is actually necessary for civil order:
Of course, Locke, along with other thinkers of his time, was developing the metaphysical dualism of Rene Descartes. The realm of the subject (mind or soul) is private, invisible, and inaccessible; the realm of the object is "out there" and is observable in line with rational objective principles. In Locke's adaptation, we must recognize that each individual is a unique union of these realms, forcing us to accept the dualism of the external and political realm of power and the internal religious realm of faith in which no coercion has any legitimate place. This dualism, this fundamental contrast between the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere, has become one of the foundations of many contemporary notions of religious toleration and religious liberty.
We shall have reason, a little later on in this book, to query the public/private dualism. At the moment we cannot help but remember that, rather notoriously, Locke argued for intolerance toward Catholics and atheists for reasons of public order: Catholics could not be trusted since they owe allegiance to a foreign prince (the pope), and atheists could not be trusted because those who do not believe in divine rewards and punishments have insufficient motives for faithfulness. In principle, however, Locke was advocating the separation of church and state, even if his own application was spotty and his undergirding metaphysics is suspect.
Before we reflect on what this potted history contributes to our assessment of contemporary tolerance, we must enter a few observations on more recent developments.
More Recent Developments
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), British philosopher and civil servant, accepted something of the same dualism as did Locke but was a proponent of Utilitarianism. In his famous On Liberty (1859), Mill asserts that intolerance is so natural to human beings that religious freedom owes more to growing religious indifference than to principle.21 If, however, a principle is to be established, one "very simple principle" will suffice, namely, "the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection."22 The idea is that adopting such a stance and abjuring the use of coercion when one has the power to coerce is the best safeguard against being coerced when one does not have the power. This is highly utilitarian, of course, and more than a little naive. After all, even the agents of the inquisition thought that they were protecting society. That is why Mill also deploys his controversial distinction between conduct that concerns others and conduct that concerns only oneself - his update on the distinction between the public, objective sphere and the private, subjective sphere.23 Inevitably he relegates more religious and many moral matters (even monogamy!) to the latter.24 Combine these stances with the growing nineteenth-century respect for the rights and autonomy of the individual conscience, and one begins to understand the nature of contemporary commitments to tolerance.
Mill introduced a further innovation: he offered a positive appreciation of diversity. As Edward Langerak observes, "Locke was not the one to celebrate diversity: he merely argued the irrationality of not enduring it.... Beginning with Mill, however, we see arguments not simply for enduring diversity as conducive to peace or progress, but also for celebrating, approving, and affirming it. Thus he claimed that public opinion, and not just legal coercion, was an undesirable constraint on human flourishing."25 "Indeed, he argued that society's beingjudgmental about diversity maimed individuals in a way similar to the Chinese practice of foot-binding."26 This has led to the increasing perception that
Four observations on developments in the wake of Mill bring us not only to the present day but also to the conclusion of this chapter.
First, what began as complicated and sometimes nuanced debates about (1) the ways in which tolerance and intolerance should be worked out so as to promote the public good, (2) how to affirm truth and protect people from untruth (especially when various sides have differing visions of what the truth is), and (3) the extent to which the church should or should not appeal to the civil magistrates to enforce ecclesiastical stances increasingly became a discussion about the appropriate relationship between church and state.
The important thing to recognize is that Christianity itself has rich theological resources to think through these things in biblical categories. These resources include Jesus' famous words, "Give back to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17; cf. John 18:36), and the principled running tension between Christian requirements to submit to the state because it is ordained by God (Romans 13:1-7) and the Christian recognition that sometimes the state is a persecuting beast (e.g., Revelation 13; 19), between the biblical obligation to seek the peace and prosperity of the city (Jeremiah 29:7) and the biblical expectation that believers will face persecution (John 15:18-16:4; Revelation 13:7). Moreover, Christians have regularly demanded fair treatment of human beings on the ground that human beings have been created in the image of God. Further, at their best Christians have insisted that truth borne along by the Holy Spirit has the power to illumine and convert, while state-imposed sanctions achieve, at best, external conformity but no regeneration. I have dealt with such matters at some length elsewhere28 and therefore need not repeat that material here. The issues are complicated, but perhaps three further reflections on the separation of church and state should be entered before we leave this first observation.
(1) Owing not least to the kinds of utterances just quoted from the Bible, Christianity has always, at some level, wrestled with the relationship between church and state. For the first three centuries of the church's life, of course, Christians were a minority in the Roman Empire, often a persecuted minority. But even with the conversion of Constantine, bishops continued on occasion to rebuke emperors (as Ambrose rebuked Theodosius in the fourth century). The complex interplay between popes and monarchs during the Middle Ages reminds us that power was never vested in only one domain. All sides acknowledge that there has been much more self-conscious Christian reflection on the relationships between church and state since the seventeenth century than there was in earlier centuries. Nevertheless, the history of the church, not only in Europe but elsewhere, reminds us that the distinction between church and state is intrinsic to the Scriptures that govern Christians. At the most basic level, we recall that the locus of God's people in the Old Testament, under the old covenant, was a nation, the nation of Israel, while the locus of God's people in the New Testament, under the new covenant, is not a nation, but the church - an international community of believers never entirely identified with any nation.
One of the effects, for good and ill, of the varied developments regarding the relationships between church and state is the almost inevitable and certainly incessant pressure to restrict religion to private domains. We start by insisting that the state can neither establish nor prohibit religion, and agree that, reciprocally, religion does not have the right to control the state. Then in a mighty bound many infer further that religion does not have the right to influence any of the decisions of the state, and therefore conclude that religion must be restricted to a small and privatized world or the great barrier between church and state is jeopardized.31 If this conclusion were ruthlessly carried out, millions of citizens would be disenfranchised on hundreds of topics, as we shall see. What seems like a simple and useful ideal - the separation of church and state - is suddenly fraught with widely accepted cultural assumptions that few thinking Christians could ever accept.
(3) Discussion about the relationships between church and state becomes staggeringly more difficult when we abandon Christian assumptions and enter the world of Islam. Many have noted that Islam has no theological resources on which to draw so as to think freshly about the relationships between church and state. There is no utterance, for instance, akin to "Give back to Caesarwhat is Caesar's and to God what is God's" (Mark 12:17).32 This does not mean that Islam has exhibited no strains of tolerance. Historically, some caliphates have been more tolerant than others. In the last century-and-a-half or so, a minority of Muslim scholars have argued that the important jihad is not the fight against external enemies but the spiritual struggle within. As some Muslims move to Western countries where questions of tolerance occupy more space in public discussion, it is not surprising to read important essays like that of Ismail Acar, "Theological Foundations of Religious Tolerance in Islam: A Qur'anic Perspective."33 What is fascinating about such exercises, as welcome as they are, is that they never, as far as I can see, explore the relationships between church and state. They envisage how devout Muslims might properly live in the West; they conjure up how Muslim states have treated, or might or ought to treat, religious minorities in the name of Allah the Merciful. But they do not envisage a church and a state operating in somewhat different domains. "Islamic fundamentalism, uninfluenced by the Western debate about the separation of church and state, a question it may find unintelligible ... , contends that the religious law (Shari a) of the Qur'an does not distinguish theological from moral or political grounds for law and thus is normative for a country's legislation."34 Indeed, the entire notion is likely to seem vaguely blasphemous to them: the understanding of the nation-state that developed in eighteenth-century Europe is largely alien to much Muslim thought, while the notion of a "church" or of different denominational "churches" is entirely foreign. The people (ummah) of Allah are not easily differentiable from the people who constitute Muslim nations; the law of Islam applies to every domain of life (including the state), and Allah brooks no rivals. How then shall one drive a wedge between church and state? Moreover, privatized religion is incomprehensible and incoherent to most Muslims who have never lived in the West, and not infrequently unattractive to those who do. In a well-written and influential work, Shabbir Akhtar, who lectures at Old Dominion University in Virginia, argues that ultimately Islam will (and ought to) win worldwide domination, because Islam alone, and certainly not Christianity, is internally constituted to be an imperial religion.35
The importance of this observation becomes clearer when we recognize that expressions such as "freedom of religion" mean very different things in different parts of the world. In the West and in some other parts of the world, it presupposes not only the freedom to practice one's religion without let or hindrance, but equal status before the law, freedom to convert to another religion or no religion, and freedom to proselytize in favor of one's religion within the bounds of open debate and dissemination of information and arguments.36 But in most Muslim nations, and certainly wherever Shari a law is applied, non-Muslims may convert to Islam, but Muslims may not convert to anything else. There will always be sanctions, and in the most extreme cases the sanction is death. The claim that Islam at its heart is already a religion of peace and tolerance does not stand up very well if one applies this simple twofold test: (a) Are members of the ummah, the people of Islam, free to convert to some other religion without fear of sanctions? (b) May members of any religion or no religion propagate their beliefs as openly as Muslims do?37
Once one understands these realities, the perennial accounts of what happens to Muslims who wish to abandon Islam are understandable. After becoming a "democracy," in the sense that its citizens had cast a democratic vote,38 Afghanistan, whose constitution is based on Shari a law, prosecuted Abdul Rahman for the crime of abandoning Islam when he became a Christian in 2006. The death penaltywould have been imposed had it not been for massive international pressure. Rahman was released in March 2006 and accepted asylum in Italy. In Muslim countries where the interpretation of Shari a law is not so strict (e.g., Malaysia), the sanction imposed on, say, Malays who abandon Islam in favor of another religion will certainly include lengthy spells of enforced indoctrination, possibly prison terms, and a variety of social and fiscal restrictions. For example, two ex-Muslims converted to Christianity will not be able to marry, because they remain registered as Muslims and may marry only as Muslims (even though Chinese Malaysians who are registered from birth as Buddhists or Christians may marry their coreligionists). In Jordan, the North Amman Shari'a Court annulled the marriage of Mohammad Abbad, a Muslim convert to Christianity, on the ground that "marriage depends on the [Muslim] creed, and the apostate has no creed" (22 May 2008). This result stands even though Jordan's constitution affirms freedom of religion, and its penal code does not specifically outlaw apostasy. More broadly, when world leaders fear violence, bombings, and widespread killings because of the prospect of burning a copy of the Qur'an, but do not fear that there will be violence, bombings, and widespread killings because of the prospect of burning a copy of the Bible, what does that tell you about the tolerance levels of the two respective religions?
To summarize: the first observation on developments since John Stuart Mill is that much of the controversy about the nature of tolerance and intolerance has come to revolve around what is meant by the separation of church and state, a notion that has regularly been defended by Christians from their study of the Bible. Yet the notion of the separation of church and state, as valuable as it is, has come to mean quite different things in different sectors of the West, including, very often, the privatization of religion, while in some parts of the world the concept is incoherent.
Second, the processes of secularization have, as it were, flipped a cultural switch. This claim needs unpacking.
Secularization is a highly debated topic.39 Neither the forces behind secularization nor its meaning are widely agreed upon. The recent magisterial volume by Charles Taylor canvases the options superbly.40 Most hold that nineteenth-century Europe throws up the most pivotal forces that drive the movement.41 The political ethic at the heart of secularism
Most scholars today also concur that these forces do not necessarily mean the abolition of religion; rather, secularization may squeeze religion away from the public sectors of politics, the media, and the academic world, into the purely private sectors. By some assessments, a nation may become more secularized and more religious at the same time. It's just that the religious side does not matter very much anymore in the public square and therefore in the direction of the nation, in its public pulse.
The switch that these cultural developments have flipped lies in the domain of presuppositions. Until the early part of the nineteenth century, the overwhelming majority of people in Europe and of European descent presupposed the existence of God. That meant that questions about tolerance and intolerance had to be worked out within the framework of this presupposition, within the framework of what people thought about God. By the end of the century, however, a cultural switch was flipped: either people did not presuppose the existence of God, or, if they did, they no longer presupposed that he was immediately relevant to all the questions raised in the public square. That in turn meant that questions about tolerance and intolerance had to be worked out within grids that were either non-theistic or whose theism was so attenuated by the rising forces of secularization that they exercised little control.
That recognition leads us to the next observation.
Third, the twentieth century, the bloodiest in human history, exhibited spectacular instances of intolerance - and the most violent exemplars had very little to do with religion. Of course, there was at least a religious component in the strife in the Balkans and again in the bloody violence between Tutsis and Hutus. Yet most observers recognized that even here the more important factors were tribalism, racism, perceived economic injustice, very different interpretations of history, and "honor" and vengeance killings that escalated to the scale of genocide.
Few religious factors played much part in the largest of the slaughters of the twentieth century, the violence espoused by Fascism and Communism.43 Perhaps fifty million Chinese died under Mao, about twenty million Ukrainians under Stalin, and then we come to World War II and the Holocaust. In both its Russian and its Chinese forms, Communism was overtly atheistic. In both its German and its Italian forms, Fascism was nominally Christian but only in the sense that it was happy to appeal to God and religion in pursuit of its own social and political agendas, never so as to be reformed by Scripture or Christian truth or morality, never in any sense to belong to the great tradition of historic creeds. Despite the best efforts of Jonathan I. Israel not only to ground the Enlightenment in the thought of Spinoza but also to demonstrate that only atheism provides adequate resources to generate toleration - in his analysis, theism and religious belief in all their forms are intrinsically intolerant44 - the outcome in the twentieth century is scarcely reassuring. Atheism, whether theoretical (as in Communism) or practical (as in Fascism), far from being tolerant, spilled oceans of blood.
It is not hard to see why. In both cases, the defenders and rulers of these systems firmly believed that they were defending the truth of a large system of thought that supported the greater good. Whether, on the one hand, Marxist dialectic, an essentially economic analysis of human dilemmas, and the urgent need for Revolutionary Man to prepare the way for the New Man, or, on the other, the demand for discipline, the ideal of the one pure Volk, and confidence that most evils were tied to despicable Jews and other abominable elements, there was no authority capable of questioning the authority of the state. Even in the bloodiest of the religious wars in Europe, there were competing authority centers. By contrast, under both Communism and Fascism the authority of the state was totalitarian.
From the perspective of the larger thesis of this chapter, we observe, once again, that tolerance and intolerance were worked out within the framework of a larger system of thought. Granted, say, the truth of Marxism-Leninism, how much lenience could the state legitimately extend? In other words, neither tolerance nor intolerance was viewed as an independent virtue or vice, but as an arrangement to be worked out within the framework of the dominant system of thought.
Fourth, regardless of the widespread inability to agree on what it is, postmodernism has exerted incalculable influence in much of the world. Disagreement over the essence of postmodernism cannot blind us to its effect. Almost all sides agree that as a movement postmodernism is dead. Except in some American undergraduate programs, its luminaries are no longer read - certainly not in Europe, whence most of them sprang. Yet the effluents of postmodernism, however defined, are still very much with us, shaping our thoughts and cultural values. What cannot be denied is that, in its wake, countless millions of people find it difficult, at least on some subjects, to think in terms of truth and error, much preferring to think in terms of differences of opinion, of varying perspectives. The dawning of postmodernism coincided, at least in part, with the increasing diversification of the populations of many of the world's metropolises. The impact of this increasing empirical pluralism is multiplied many times over by the digital revolution: with minimal effort we find ourselves exposed to an incredibly broad diversity of cultures, opinions, interpretations of history, languages, and so forth. Moreover, in the virtual world we can create our own realities. All of this conspires to push questions of truth to the margins while magnifying the importance of tolerance.
It is not as if everyone has shifted from the paradigm of modernism to the effluents of postmodernism. Within our universities, for example, there is considerable diversity. Thinkers operating with a postmodern epistemology are more likely to be found in English, sociology, anthropology, and religion departments, and often history departments, than in physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science departments. Lecturers in the latter departments are often unreconstructed modernists - or, still more commonly, they are modernists with respect to their own disciplines, but postmodernists in the arenas of ideology, religion, and morality. Transparently, postmodernism has softened somewhat in the last ten years or so (twentyfive years in continental Europe), as the weaknesses and absurdities of its more extreme forms have become transparent to many. Regardless of the terminology, pragmatism now commonly eclipses both nature and religion as cultural authority.45 But if in its most aggressive forms postmodernism has declined, it has left a residue of subjective eclecticism that fosters the elevation of tolerance to the enthroned status of supreme virtue.
This is not to say that postmodernism has single-handedly caused this elevation of tolerance. If the survey provided in this chapter has any validity, it demonstrates how complex and intertwined are the historical and cultural movements that bring about tectonic shifts in cultural perception. Not least in America, the relevant forces were in play long before the rise of popular postmodernism. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer visited America in the 193os and tried to make sense of the American church scene, "he was fascinated that tolerance trumped truth."46 Coming as he did from continental Europe, it is easy to understand why Bonhoeffer read the American scene that way. Whether or not that reading was entirely right at the time, there can be little doubt that the impact of postmodernism since the 1930s, plus the globalization of much of the world and certainly of many of the world's metropolises (with both good and bad effects), have reinforced the perception that tolerance has trumped truth, at least in this sense: for the first time in history, tolerance is today rarely perceived to be something that has to be worked out for the good of society within the matrix of a widely adopted system of truth and morals; it is now perceived as an independent virtue, perhaps the highest virtue.
Concluding Reflections
One of the clearest thinkers on this subject is J. Daryl Charles:
Tolerance in its conception took on the cast of a virtue because of its concern for the common good and its respect for people as persons. We endure particular customs, behaviors or habits - sometimes even (relatively) bad habits - of people in the interest of preserving a greater unity. In the Lockean context, tolerance was advocated for religious non-conformists. Never was it construed, however, to imply - much less to sanction - morally questionable behavior. Consider, however, the devolution of a concept. What was a public virtue in its prior state becomes a vice if and when it ceases to care for truth, ignores the common good, and disdains the values that uphold a community. The culture of "tolerance" in which we presently find ourselves is a culture in which people believe nothing, possess no clear concept of right and wrong, and are remarkably indifferent to this precarious state of affairs. As a result of this transmutation, "tolerance" becomes indistinguishable from an intractably intolerant relativism. The challenge facing people of faith is learning how to purify tolerance so that it remains a virtue without succumbing to the centripetal forces of relativism and the spirit of the age.47
The new tolerance, then, has become a supreme virtue, if not the supreme virtue, of much of the Western world and beyond. No longer a function of a broader ethical and moral cultural consensus, tolerance is not worked out in terms of what might be permitted - legally, intellectually, socially - granted the "givens" of this broader consensus, but becomes an absolute good that gains the power to erode other cultural distinctives, including moral and religious distinctives. In the mind of many observers, this new tolerance thereby rushes in to support moral relativism. Because of its independent status, this new tolerance becomes, ironically, a moralizing support of moral relativism. One of the purposes of this chapter has been to show how great a change this is from the understanding and function of tolerance in the past, when tolerance was not perceived to be an intellectual stance but a social response.
In addition to the ways these changes in our understanding of tolerance have affected Western culture, we need to become aware of how people in other cultures are reading these changes. In his book Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage,4S Meic Pearse spells out how this new understanding of tolerance is perceived to be a threat to other cultures:
The currency of the term tolerance has recently become badly debased. Where it used to mean the respecting of real, hard differences, it has come to mean instead a dogmatic abdication of truth-claims and a moralistic adherence to moral relativism - departure from either of which is stigmatized as intolerance.... Where the old tolerance allowed hard differences on religion and morality to rub shoulders and compete freely in the public square, the new variety wishes to lock them all indoors as matters of private judgment; the public square must be given over to indistinct ness. If the old tolerance was, at least, a real value, the new, intolerant "tolerance" might better be described as an antivalue; it is a disposition of hostility to any suggestion that one thing is "better" than another, or even that any way of life needs protected space from its alternatives.49
The result is that this new tolerance tends to stifle and subdue the distinctive claims of other cultures. The antivalue of this new tolerance dilutes and destroys all the hard and otherwise unyielding components of cultural identity, for they are judged to be marks of intolerance. The West, not least with its fiscal and digital power, is perceived by many to be culture-destroying, superficial, self-righteous, parading superiority because of its "tolerance," while that very tolerance destroys everything that disagrees with it. The charge may not be entirely fair, but it is very widespread.
If the potted history in this chapter brings the innovative and dangerous nature of this new tolerance into clearer focus, the next chapter shows that this new tolerance regularly indulges in the kind of inconsistency that makes it even more dangerous than it might otherwise be.