nuance

My friend Buck sent me an email the other day with a link to this NY Times article about religious tolerance. Buck expressed his angst over the main thesis being presented among the stats and figures, and now I’d like to express some, too.

The thesis: “The…U.S. Religious Landscape Survey reveals a broad trend toward tolerance and an ability among many Americans to hold beliefs that might contradict the doctrines of their professed faiths.” That is, there are lots and lots of Christians and Muslims and Jewish folks who think that there are ways to God outside of their own faiths. Michael Lindsay of Rice University opines, “It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything. It’s that we believe in everything.” Further down he explained that “it is hard to hold a strongly sectarian view when you work together and your kids play soccer together.”

The counterpunch comes from the Gordon-Conweller Todd Johnson: “It could be that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view.”

In other words, most religious Americans are not so much tolerant, just stupid.

On a certain level, that might be true. Most people are bombarded with the politics of tolerance from every direction: school teachers, media, opinionated friends. If there is no deep immersion in the truths of one’s faith - if there is nominal or at least trivial commitment - then most likely this uneducated person will integrate the cultural mantra into his feeble religious dogma. Because he cannot enter into dialog with other faiths on their differences, he will have no defense against the cultural charges of intolerance.

And besides, real knowledge of a particular faith is not a necessary requirement for lambasting said faith for being, like, totally intolerant, primitive, backwards, irrelevant, and fascist. All you need is a picket sign for that. All you need is the latest issue of the Times, or better, Seven Days.

I mentioned the phrase, “politics of tolerance” above. I could easily have written “religion of tolerance” and been rather safe in doing so, for the way tolerance has been developed and defined as a concept in the religious sphere is indeed very much a religious dogma in itself. In this we see that the problem is not just ignorance, for if the ignorant merely accept the dogma, then the root issue lies with those who craft the dogma.

I have always had a problem with the Unitarian Universalists for this reason. Within the pale of “Christian” churches, the UUA is the clearest representative of tolerance dogma:

Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religion that encompasses many faith traditions. Unitarian Universalists include people who identify as Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Pagans, Atheists, Agnostics, Humanists, and others. As there is no official Unitarian Universalist creed, Unitarian Universalists are free to search for truth on many paths.

Unitarians uphold the principle of “free faith.” The church of our very own Church St. is part of the UUA.

But as alluring as the notion of a free faith might be, the question becomes one of identity and meaning. That is, when a church declares that it will not exclusively emphasize any one faith tradition but will instead draw from all of them in its teaching and liturgy - and when a church does this in the name of religious freedom or tolerance - the result is clearly a new church dogma. Sure, I can be a “Muslim” and worship at the First Unitarian Universalist Society, but the only reason I would choose to do so instead of the local mosque is because I have accepted the universalist dogma - that there are many spiritual paths and truths.

Ironically, this is exclusivistic in nature. I cannot be a traditional Christian in that church. And to be sure, all the substantial identifying factors of traditional Christianity - beyond a few symbols, concepts, and references - will be lost in favor of this dogma of tolerance.

It is in light of this that my friend Buck says the word “tolerance” has been hijacked, and he’s right. The issue is not tolerance at all, but whether or not it is acceptable for one to embrace a singular (as opposed to universalist) religious identity. Am I allowed to identify myself as a Christian in every way - from exclusive belief to biblical teaching to traditional Christian liturgy to Christian evangelism and social action - or am I required to embrace universalism?

Surely, exclusivity in religious belief can sometimes lead to negative societal factors, such as Islamic extremism, the crusades of old Christendom, etc. But this does not prove that exclusive faith is always harmful, or intrinsically harmful, nor does it take into account the ways in which it is often behind remarkably positive social action, not to mention individual transformation and renewal.

And this is where we arrive at our definition of religious tolerance. Religious tolerance is not dogmatic universalism in belief - it is instead mere peaceful and appropriate social behavior among those of different religions. The imperative of religious tolerance is not that I must throw off Christian identity anymore than cultural tolerance demands that I throw off Irish identity; and it is in this cultural comparison that we can see the lie of tolerance dogma most clearly. How many times have you heard the public outrage against colonialism? And what is colonialism if not the forced removal of cultural identity?

If anything, we have come to acknowledge how important it is for cultures to retain their deepest identity, even in the midst of competing identities in a melting pot like America. And in Christian missiology we have learned that asking an evangelized people group to throw off their cultural identity is harmful to the success of the gospel. Instead, missionaries ought to contextualize the method and the message.

And I anticipate the objection here that one’s cultural identity, especially in an ethnic sense, is inherited and not chosen. The objector might say that religion, on the other hand, is not always inherited - it is often a choice; and especially traditional Christian faith, since it is a proselytizing faith, shows that it is not itself the same as cultural identity. And I agree. They are not completely the same, and yet when the liberal purveyors of tolerance dogma in religion ask us to throw off exclusive Christian identity as if it’s a moral evil, there is something similar to the violence of colonialism there.

Again, our definition of religious tolerance is expressly that a Christian must be able to peacefully live alongside a Muslim or a Unitarian - and as a good Christian must further be willing love those of other faiths, affirm them as people made in God’s image, enter into respectful dialog with them on issues of faith and life, join them in co-belligerence against issues of injustice and immorality, co-labor with them in caring for the poor and oppressed, and sustain authentic friendship with them whenever possible. But our definition is expressly not that he must abandon his identity in the process.

Indeed, a Christian is free to embrace a different identity, if he is convinced by the evangelistic efforts of the other; he is free, even, to become a Unitarian Universalist.

And the Unitarian is similarly free to become a Christian.