Freedom and Tolerance

I found two items in the news particularly interesting today. First, a car bombing targeting Denmark’s embassy in Pakistan in an anti-Danish attack over 2006 cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad and secondly, a Texas judge has ordered the return of more than 400 children taken from a polygamist group's ranch by state authorities. Why are these two things linked? For myself, it got me thinking about the difference and similarities between (religious) Freedom and Tolerance.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations defines freedom of religion and belief as the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion and to manifest this religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance. Some think Freedom is almost synonymous with Democracy, at least in one sense of that word, while others see Democracy being nothing more than the tyranny of the majority. Either way, the idea of Freedom is generally tied to political philosophy, and yet, Freedom is one of those hard to define, fundamental rights that serves as a litmus test for the civic, religious, and moral authority of the state.

The word “tolerance” on the other hand, is an integral part of our description of western democracy that expresses an attitude of being open to the views of others in matters of world-views and religion. Tolerance is an answer for questions of life-style choices, religion, race, and morality or, more generally, political world-views. The civilized man is a tolerant man, and he sees people who don’t practice his kind of tolerance as backwards or unsophisticated. More and more it seems that tolerance is substituted for freedom. Where once we spoke of freedom of religions, now we are tolerant.

What is the problem with tolerance? Tolerance is entirely subjective, with its own system of values, which may or may not agree with classical ideals of freedom, ethics or natural law. Moreover, as it is something relative and subjective, questions of right and wrong can be trivialized as merely a matter of taste or popular opinion. The ideology of tolerance has become one of the most important requirements of “political correctness”.

The more we substitute the word tolerance for Freedom, the more we will be faced with an ethical dilemma. This is dangerous not only because tolerance is subjective, but because the more we are asked to be tolerance, the more permissive we are asked to become, and ultimately the more we are manipulated to speak and think in terms of tolerance in place of morality, permissiveness in place of conscience. There is a real danger here. Aristotle, in his Politics, observed that a man without morality is “… the most unholy and the most savage of animals.” The subjective nature of tolerance suggest that it must be tempered, lest it mean anything and ultimately nothing. But how does one temper tolerance, what does that even mean?

Part of the problem is that there is no commonality to the application or understanding of the term tolerance, making debate on it difficult. Some regard toleration and religious freedom as quite distinct things and emphasize the differences between the two. They understand toleration to signify no more than forbearance and the permission given by the adherents of a dominant religion for other religions to exist. Others define tolerance as all inclusive, claiming all values, all beliefs, all lifestyles are equal and brands anyone holding the opposite opinion as "intolerant." The differences are subtle. For myself, I think it is important to be open and to be willing to recognize and respect the beliefs or practices of others, without necessarily holding that other beliefs are necessarily true. In short, I do not require people to believe what I believe, and I can respect them for theirs. Moreover I realize that there are things that I am tolerant of (same sex marriage, abortion, puppies) that would make other people cringe.

Interestingly, in his Letter Concerning Tolerance, John Locke posits that, rather than being divisive, a wider diversity of religious groups might actually prevent civil unrest. Locke argues that civil unrest results from confrontations caused by any magistrate's attempt to prevent different religions from being practiced, rather than tolerating their proliferation. Locke's primary goal is to "distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion." The thing that he wants to persuade the reader of is that government is instituted to promote external interests, or freedoms relating to life, liberty, and the general welfare, while the church exists to promote internal interests, i.e., faith, tolerance, and salvation.

Unfortunately, what we have instead is a growing predominance of three or four “world” religions, whose ideologies and methodologies grow ever closer to the institutions of world government. This blending of government and religion is evident not only in the blurring of tolerance and freedom, but in individual political policies as well. Consider research for same sex relationships. This topic came up recently with my sister-in-law, a professor of Human Development at U. of Wisconsin in Green Bay. In her Human sexualities class, the students' research requirement is to do four research reports wherein they take something from class, select the two best sources and contrast/compare them. Each semester, while searching in multiple databases, they discover that there are a vast number of experiments, lab tests, genetic tests, work with primates, surveys, etc. done on the “cause” of homosexuality, while virtually no research is available on other aspects of human sexuality, including female ejaculation or the G-spot. She said “the amount of money spent and the amount of knowledge of basic female anatomy is teeny tiny in comparison. That brought us to a much larger discussion of how research funds are allocated, and how Congress has actively interfered in sex research. They have been (no surprise) particularly active in the last 7 years, pulling or stopping funding for nearly all research that has even a tangential relationship to sex unless it has some promise of "curing" homosexuality or promoting abstinence.”

The more religious ideology encroaches in the arena of politics, the more likely we are to see a lessening of true tolerance, and finally moral, civic and religious freedom. Ultimately, the greatest threat to religious freedom is religion's institutional intrusion into the control of the state and, ultimately, the lives of individuals, because the loss of freedom means that only one viewpoint is tolerated…