Toleration

Toleration
 
Recently, I have been thinking about the issue of toleration.  It is very interesting being a Christian thinking about this topic because the church, it seems, has been on every conceivable side of this issue over the years.  At the very beginning, the church was a persecuted minority.  Occasionally, Christian thinkers wrote treatises about the practices of the church to show authorities that they were not downright evil people as some were saying (there were some rather disturbing rumors going around about what happened during the Eucharist, for example).
 
Later in Western history, you had the Protestant Reformation, where various secular leaders aligned themselves with different religious leadership, effectively choosing what brand of Christianity their domain would practice.  Those who dissented from the majority made appeals for toleration, that they might be able to continue practicing the religion they chose.
 
Now we find ourselves in the modern day, in a country that, in so many ways, was founded on the idea of religious toleration (or at least, such an idea was close to the main few ideas included in the Bill of Rights).  And yet, it feels like there is just as little toleration as there has ever been.  Sometimes, it is the church that persecutes people of other religions or people of no religion at all.  Sometimes, even, the persecution goes the other way.  What is fascinating to me as a Christian leader is to see that Christianity can be seen simultaneously as the dominant religio-cultural influence in America and yet also be a persecuted body, perhaps in some instances, as a persecuted minority, depending on the context.
 
When one glances back over Western history, the cry for toleration has been nearly ever-present.  Somebody always wants to be tolerated by someone else and does not feel like they are being so tolerated.  However, it has not always been the same groups.  What that means is that, as persecuted minorities become tolerated and eventually become more and more dominant, there seems to be a trend that they then deny other groups the toleration they battled so hard for.  Why should that be?  Should not those who have yearned for tolerance be that much quicker to show it?  Or perhaps, to be somewhat cynical, do those who have more acutely felt the need for toleration withhold it precisely because they were denied it in the past, a kind of “I’ll do unto you as they did unto me,” attitude?
 
There is much that could be said on this topic, and I do not pretend to have studied this particular issue as deeply as I might, but I have a few thoughts to share.  It seems that, when people refuse to tolerate others, it is because, to their mind, those others are wrong.  To tolerate people who are wrong, it would seem, is a disintegrating force in our society at its most basic level.  When people are tolerated, it is as if we are saying, “We don’t agree with you, but you might possibly be right.”  This is, of course, perhaps part of the reason why many people do not want to tolerate others in the first place.  Toleration can easily be read as tacit approval, and, if the opposing group is wrong, they ought not to be approved.
 
I think that this has done tremendous disservice to the idea of toleration.  It seems that to tolerate someone is precisely to tolerate them as someone who is wrong, at least from your point of view.  If I think that you might be right, it would seem that it is best to say that I conditionally accept you rather than say that I tolerate you.  But once I have conditionally accepted you, toleration is really not the issue.
 
It might seem that I am asking for people to be more harsh with one another, since I am not necessarily advocating “conditional acceptance” for all, but rather “toleration.”  The reason for this is because to insist that we all “conditionally accept” one another is, in practical terms, to superimpose a kind of uniformity (or at least a meta-uniformity) that just does not exist in everyday experience.  I think that, in order to really find unity among people, we need to allow the differences to be what they are so that those differences can be in dialogue with one another as differences.
 
What this means is that I still reserve for myself the right to think that someone else is wrong, but it also means that I reserve for others the right to think that I am wrong.  What it also means is that I will tolerate you, not because I secretly think that you are more right than I am, or that I, deep down inside, wish I could think like you do, but because you are another human being for whom Christ died.  It means that I don’t want you to tolerate me because you think that I have some secret key to happiness that you have missed, but simply because I am another human being, even if, from your point of view, I am completely wrong.
 
It is simply foolish that Party A should persecute Party B, then tolerate Party B so that it can gain a foothold in the culture and even rise to prominence or dominance, only for Party B to deny toleration to Party A because they are “wrong.”  Since when did “right” and “wrong” enter into the rules of toleration?  A toleration that says, “I will tolerate you so long as you fit into my definition of ‘right,’” is not toleration at all.

Let us strive for genuine toleration, that we might join together to seek genuine truth.