Imagining Religious Toleration

The question of tolerance, especially among so-called religious minorities, is one that gets regularly raised. Certain founding mythologies of the post-Reformation world are all bound up with fatuous claims about "wars of religion" requiring the supposed peace and tolerance of the nation-state to resolve (a notion William Cavanaugh handily dispensed with). Supposedly "religious" groups were not "tolerant" until the state was founded.

But when cameth this tolerance? Who conceived of it? What did it look like? These are questions taken up in a collection being published later this year: Imagining Religious Toleration: A Literary History of an Idea, 1600–1830, eds. Alison Conway and David Alvarez (University of Toronto Press, October 2019), 304pp.

About this collection the publisher tell us this:

Current debates regarding religious tolerations have come to a standstill. In investigating the eighteenth-century novel, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance. Largely reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, discussions of religious toleration are relatively limited, with very few literary scholars exploring the subject.

Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contribution that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. By tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, this book reveals the tropes and figures we associate with literary texts, delving into such topics as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire.

The Intolerance of "Tolerance"

How many Christians today have been, figuratively speaking, bludgeoned into silence about various issues--especially those having to do with sexuality--by people appealing to "tolerance"? How many of those same Christians, in discussing, say, marriage, have been condemned with that idiotic neologism of "homophobic"? In his great 1997 essay "The Unhappy Fate of Optional Orthodoxy," the late priest Richard John Neuhaus put it very acutely: "Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed." With Neuhaus we could say, mutatis mutandis, "Where tolerance is optional, tolerance will sooner or later be proscribed" and, moreover, the effects of such proscription will be--irony of ironies--highly intolerant.

Along comes a new edition of a book from a biblical scholar to examine this: D.A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance (Eerdmans, 2013), 196pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Tolerance currently occupies a very high place in Western societies: it is considered gauche, even boorish, to question it. In The Intolerance of Tolerance, however, questioning tolerance -- or, at least, contemporary understandings of tolerance -- is exactly what D. A . Carson does.

Carson traces the subtle but enormous shift in the way we have come to understand tolerance over recent years -- from defending the rights of those who hold different beliefs to affirming all beliefs as equally valid and correct. He looks back at the history of this shift and discusses its implications for culture today, especially its bearing on democracy, discussions about good and evil, and Christian truth claims.

Using real-life examples that will sometimes arouse laughter and sometimes make the blood boil, Carson argues not only that the "new tolerance" is socially dangerous and intellectually debilitating but also that it actually leads to genuine intolerance of all who struggle to hold fast to their beliefs.