Questions about religious toleration have arisen in many great civilizations, including those of China, India, and the Islamic world. In Western Christendom, however, they became most salient after the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation triggered persecutions and wars across Europe, with such highlights (or lowlights) as the burning of Michael Servetus at the stake in Calvinist Geneva, the drownings of Anabaptists, the French Wars of Religion, and the devastating Thirty Years’ War in the early seventeenth century. These events—and much more of the same kind—created a hunger for theological and philosophical ideas to support greater toleration.
These ideas eventually led to concepts of separating church and state, which means restricting the ability of governments to impose their preferred religious beliefs on their citizens. As it’s often put, this involves a freedom of religion that includes freedom from religion. In theory, that is, a separation of church and state includes freedom from state imposition of officially sanctioned religious beliefs.
A current concern in the United States is that this aspect of religious freedom is being eroded as a conservative U.S. Supreme Court increasingly retreats from any robust understanding of the Establishment Clause. The Establishment Clause may soon, if not already, be toothless, much like the equivalent wording in the constitution of my own country, Australia. On this occasion, however, I have wider concerns about toleration of ideas and ways of life that we or others might dislike or object to.
In early modernity, the most pragmatically successful argument for religious toleration came down to the idea that it is not a proper role of the state to make decisions about what’s required for spiritual salvation in an afterlife. Rather, the state’s role is to protect “the things of this world,” such as its citizens’ lives, liberty, and property. That being so, the state should not attempt to impose the “correct” religion on its citizens, nor should it attempt to stamp out religions that it regards as false. Once this principle is accepted, it greatly constrains the range of legitimate state activities. Furthermore, the chief architect of this approach, John Locke, hoped that once various churches and sects no longer needed to fear state persecution, they would soften in their attitudes toward each other. Arguably, this has actually happened to some extent since Locke was writing in the 1680s.
Unfortunately, Locke’s approach leaves room for much intolerance. Most notoriously, Locke held that the state should not tolerate atheists—or, indeed, anyone who denies that there is an afterlife with rewards and punishments. This was not an unprincipled or hypocritical position on Locke’s part. His argument was not that state officials are well-placed to decide on the existence or otherwise of an afterlife. Rather, he argued that people who deny the existence of an afterlife with rewards and punishments cannot be trusted to abide by their oaths, and hence they are socially dangerous. It is possible, in fact, to follow Locke in restricting the role and competence of the state in deciding theological issues while still finding ostensibly secular grounds to support a fair bit of persecution.
Arguments such as Locke’s had the virtue of clearing ground for still other arguments. Once the state is widely seen as having no legitimate role in deciding blatantly theological questions, and once its role is largely confined to protecting the things of this world, there’s a natural pressure to limit its powers. It also becomes possible to present more sweeping arguments for individual freedom, including a broad freedom of inquiry and discussion—and including freedom from social condemnation as well as from state persecution. As with Locke’s arguments about the fundamental role of the state, these Enlightenment and liberal arguments have considerable appeal.
Nonetheless, all such arguments have limits as grounds for toleration. Toleration means, in essence, forbearance (to a greater or lesser extent) in respect of things that we dislike or object to. For example, I object to a great deal in the way of traditional Christian sexual morality, but I’m prepared to exercise considerable forbearance—perhaps arguing against various Christian moral ideas but not trying to harm people who espouse them or try to live by them.
In the circumstances of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century Europe, there was a social need for principled arguments for toleration. Irrespective of the reach and force of those arguments, and how much they really demonstrated if they were accepted as far as they went, Europe faced an emergency. People of rival faiths simply had to find ways of getting along to prevent a continuous bloodbath. If they could appeal to principled arguments and not just establish an unstable modus vivendi, so much the better. Until recent decades, the general direction in Western liberal democracies was toward increasing toleration, including toleration of allegedly objectionable ideas.
I doubt that that’s now the case. The traditional arguments for toleration are not exactly wrong: they still have considerable rational force. But the current fashion on all sides of social and political debate is to criticize them and narrow their application. Whatever their force, these arguments may, strictly speaking, support a degree of toleration that is less than what’s needed for people with different worldviews and values to live harmoniously side by side. Highly motivated ideologues can usually point to some consideration that they view as overriding the traditional arguments for toleration.
Today, I see little defense of the general idea of tolerating opinions and actions that we object to. In particular, the gap between objecting to opponents’ opinions and attempting to punish those opponents and suppress their opinions seems to be closing. At issue here is whether we see an imperative to get along with our opponents, perhaps even learning something from them, or whether the imperative is to defeat them once and for all. In the absence of literal warfare and burning of heretics, traditional ideas of toleration seem to have lost their appeal, which suggests that we’ve entered a post-liberal phase of Western society.