Two days ago Tom Gilson alerted readers to some of the complexities associated with the contemporary notion of tolerance.
Is tolerance indeed a virtue, as North American conventional wisdom would have it? As a quality ascribed to human beings, virtue is necessarily ancillary to God’s call and our obedience to that call. To obey his call is to respond to something quite specific rooted in the general command to love God and neighbour (Mark 12:29-31). This love has different implications for the various social and communal contexts in which we find ourselves. It cannot be adequately understood or practised unless we are in tune with the norms God has built into his creation. Otherwise, to tolerate an activity harmful to the practitioner, not to mention the larger community, is to perform a most unloving act!
These norms vary according to context, which means that something tolerable in one context may be intolerable in another. To confess or deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ has different meanings within the institutional church and within the political community. Tolerating such denial within the state might be seen as a political virtue in so far as it is based on a recognition that regulating citizens’ ultimate beliefs lies beyond the competence of political authority. Yet to tolerate this rejection of a cardinal christian doctrine within an ecclesial body can hardly be a virtue, since it would harm the confessional integrity of the church. Therefore, what might be a virtue in the state must be recognized to be a vice in the church body.
Similarly church members may disagree on a variety of policy options, even if they are united in affirming that God calls political authority to do public justice. Will a rise in the minimum wage genuinely help the working poor or will it aggravate an already high unemployment rate? Church denominations would be unwise to pronounce on the specifics of something beyond the competence of ecclesial bodies, especially when there is legitimate disagreement amongst their own membership on the issue. Political parties, on the other hand, may and do take stances on such issues, since those disagreeing with them are free to go elsewhere with no damage done to the larger polity.
The only way to determine when and where tolerance is and is not appropriate is to grasp the respective norms governing state and church. A general appeal to tolerance will not take us very far and may in fact come to function as justification for any number of intolerables. North American protestantism in particular is filled with church denominations that tolerate all sorts of heterodox views, yet take firm, seemingly nonnegotiable positions on highly contestable social and political issues. This represents a general failure to grasp the norms most applicable to the institutional church and can only produce a skewed tolerance scarcely to be labelled virtuous. So is tolerance a genuine good? Yes, but only if we understand it as a differentiated normed tolerance.
October 30th, 2010 | 12:48 pm | #1
Nice points here.
I suppose that the democratic virtue of tolerance has something to do with the need for, and the possibility of, respectful disagreement. This virtue is greatly enabled if people can acknowledge merit and reasonableness in many of the views with which they fundamentally disagree. Fundamentalists sometimes have a difficult time with this–though sometimes not entirely without reasons of their own (given, e.g., the peculiar premise that deviation from the truth is a sin punishable by everlasting torment in hell).
October 31st, 2010 | 7:01 am | #2
The only way to determine when and where tolerance is and is not appropriate is to grasp the respective norms governing state and church.
Seems reasonable.
Suppose there’s slavery in some countries. And it’s sanctioned by the government in that country. And suppose there are Christian churches in that country where some of the Christians in that church own slaves.
The norm is the same in both church and state in that country. It is a normed tolerance for both church and state in that particular country.
Further suppose there’s a pro-freedom segment of churches in that country who’s against slavery, both within the churches of that country and in the country as a whole. It sets off a giant backlash against the pro-freedom Christians who are then thought of and portrayed as intolerant fundamentalists who are seeking to impose their particular religious Christian values and interpretations upon others who differ from them.
These pro-freedom Christians are loudly, publicly, and repeatedly rebuked for being intolerant and fundamentalist from both within the churches and outside of the churches in that country in which the norm is slavery.
Should these pro-freedom Christians shut up about slavery and just continue to preach the Gospel only in their churches?
Some pro-freedom Christians lose heart after all the incessant criticism and mockery and they cease to support pro-freedom and to cease to work on the ending of slavery. The pro-slavery contingent cheers this on and praises the moderate Christians who tolerate and accept the norm of slavery in the country and the churches. Many pro-freedom Christians move to becoming tolerant “moderate” Christians.
Is this a good thing?
Now substitute the issues of abortion and gay marriage above for the issue of slavery.
Should pro-life and pro-Biblical marriage Christians then move to becoming normed tolerant “moderate” Christians within both the Church and the State?
October 31st, 2010 | 10:10 am | #3
“Is tolerance indeed a virtue?” I’m pretty sure that God does not tolerate sin. I don’t think He expects us to tolerate it either. So David, are we speaking of the distinction between ‘loving’ our neighbor, yet ‘hating’ his sin? And then the way this is worked out in a society of Christians and non-Christians? Are we confusing ‘love’ with ‘tolerance’? TUAD’s example above is right on point and an apt analogy. How does ‘love our neighbor as ourselves’, and tolerance of the sins of a society, a majority of which are non-believers, work itself out in actuality? And who is to say that individual conscience along with the didactic teaching of Scripture should not be our guide here?
October 31st, 2010 | 10:20 am | #4
C. Ehrlich,
The only thing Biblically that will condemn one to hell is the rejection of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and a profession that He rose from the dead. If one’s adultery (substitute X) is keeping one from confessing with one’s mouth and belief in one’s heart that this is not so, then X becomes a means to the ends, does it not?
October 31st, 2010 | 2:04 pm | #5
This can hardly be news to anyone, but God does tolerate sin in this life. We know this both from personal experience and from the Bible. The wheat and the tares grow together until the final judgement (Matthew 13:24-30). Furthermore, Christians have recognized from the beginning that political authorities cannot address every sin that human beings might commit, only those that obviously endanger the common weal. Thomas Aquinas understands that law cannot suppress all vices (Summa Theologica, Ia-IIae, 96, art. 2).
To be honest, I am not exactly comfortable using the language of virtue to describe tolerance, since it implies that it could be virtuous to leave people in their sins in some circumstances, which is an odd notion. However, given the limits of politics and the state, the doing of proximate justice in the here and now may require that we tolerate certain sinful practices not egregiously threatening the larger society, confident that God will eventually set these right in his own way.
The institutional church, on the other hand, may be better equipped to address such sins through its own means. My point above is that what may be tolerable in one setting is not necessarily so in another.
The problem with the liberal tradition, with its lopsided emphasis on individual liberty, is that it would enforce the same standards of tolerance on every community, whether appropriate or not. The civil service should not discriminate against certain religious groups in its hiring policies. A synagogue had better discriminate against Catholics and Mormons in calling a rabbi; otherwise it will cease to be a Jewish congregation. One should not try to force the standards of the civil service on the synagogue. What is tolerable in the former is not in the latter.
November 1st, 2010 | 9:06 am | #6
Doesn’t God leave people in their sins in some circumstances?
Where do you find this in the liberal tradition? Which “standards of tolerance” do you have in mind? Perhaps we’re attacking straw men here.
November 1st, 2010 | 9:36 am | #7
Absolutely not. I can site plenty of examples of this phenomenon in both Canada and the US. Take a look at this Canadian case: Ontario Human Rights Commission v. Christian Horizons, as analyzed by Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal. See also this article by McGill University’s Douglas Farrow: The Audacity of the State.
November 1st, 2010 | 2:03 pm | #8
“church denominations that tolerate all sorts of heterodox views, yet take firm, seemingly nonnegotiable positions on highly contestable social and political issues”
It is precisely those issues on which a ‘firm, seemingly nonnegotiable position’ is taken that define the real core beliefs of an organization. All the rest is inconsequential fluff.
November 5th, 2010 | 12:29 pm | #9
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