A Little Christmas Tolerance (For Intolerance)

In this holiday season, while we hear about the “war on Christmas” and watch Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee fight for the votes of religious conservatives, I want to put in a good word for tolerance. Not just for other races and religions, but for intolerance.

I am a religious liberal. By that I don't just mean that I'm religious and that I'm a liberal, but that I follow a particular tradition (Jewish) while subscribing to the idea that "the paths are many but the light is One". This makes it easy to get along with Christian religious liberals, with Muslim religious liberals, and with atheist liberals (who acknowledge spirituality albeit without God).

But what about those religious conservatives who take "You shall have no other gods before Me" strictly, who believe that theirs is the One True Faith, and who believe that denying my religion is an essential part of asserting their own? The ones who think that our nation, and our government, should be devoted to their religion? Do I owe their religious views respect, or does their disrespect for me (and others) put them beyond the pale?

The answer is not mutual respect, which is impossible, but mutual tolerance. They may think that I'm bound for hell and I may think that their attitude towards Judaism is offensive, but we'll let each other have our opinions — and proclaim them publicly — anyway. Let me go to synagogue and I'll let you go to church, no matter what the sermon is about. Let me engage in politics, and I'll let you do the same.

From my perspective, it would be nice if everybody was a religious liberal who had genuine respect for Judaism. But implementing that wish would mean stamping out fundamentalism, and that's just as intolerant as stamping out Judaism. Let’s not go there.

The lesson of the Enlightenment is that religion is important, and that sharp religious differences (and the disrespect they carry) are inevitable, but in the public sphere we have to pretend that these don't exist if we're going to get along. We don't delude ourselves into believing that they don't exist, but we ignore them anyway, as long as the overall principle of tolerance is adhered to.

I'll leave it to each of you to decide whether religiously motivated political positions, such as opposition to abortion rights, gay rights, or separation of church and state, are in the same category — things that we can (and must!) strenuously oppose in the political arena, but that must be tolerated as sincere expressions of religion. I believe that they are.