Toleration is not Relativism

I don't know if I have ever read anything in the Weekly Standard that I agree with until today. But Kenneth Anderson has an article entitled Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism that I found interesting and compelling. Anderson was once a Mormon and has no beef against Mormons despite being an ex-Mormon:

Although I once three decades ago served a Mormon mission in Peru, and am proud that I did, I am not a Mormon believer and have not been for a very long time. I hold no brief for the religion. On the contrary, I gave it up because I found I could not continue to say I believed a religion that had been rash enough to make many historical claims, the testability of which was not safely back in the mists of time in the way that protects Christian belief and worldly reason from meeting up to implode like matter and antimatter.

I might disagree about Christian belief being protected by "the mists of time" but what I agree with is his real beef with the idea that some liberals hold (not as many as he thinks, I would guess) - and according to Anderson Mitt Romney too - that toleration of many religious faiths in the public square means that we hold that all expressions of faith are equally valid and therefore we have to allow them to be themselves, even if being themselves might involve them denying the essential teachings of our American experience or even holding that it is right to harm others in the name of their religion.

Anderson takes up the history of Mormonism in America as an example and notes that in the 19th century the Mormons were forced by the government to give up on one of their religious practices based on their scriptures - polygamy. What they believed about Jesus and Satan and planets and gods was their business because those beliefs did not bleed into the realm of how they lived their lives among their fellow citizens, but their beliefs about polygamy were a matter of public discussion and concern because this belief affected the lives of real people, some of them women too young to make adult decisions.

Mormons, Anderson says, came around over time and changed their practices on marriage to the point where they fit in seamlessly in American culture despite holding other religious beliefs very different from many of their fellow Americans.

Anderson's real concern is how we respond to the influx of Muslims in America and to the rise of Muslim extremism around the world. Again, the fact that a Muslim might believe something very different about Jesus than a Christian isn't important. But what they believe about the separation of church and state, the treatment of women, and the meaning of jihad, etc. is important because all of these beliefs have broader implications for American society.

Anderson thinks we have lost sight of the meaning of the unique American value of toleration, a legacy of the Enlightenment which holds that we both respect other faith traditions and bring to bear reason and critical thinking to those beliefs when they impact matters in the public square:

On the one hand, religion has been regarded as something that can be shaped by rational discourse and necessarily sometimes even the application of political and state power. An individual in this light must consider the rationality of his or her religious beliefs and subject them to reason. On the other hand, religion also has an accidental and immutable quality to it which, in the extreme case of one's eternal soul, can force an individual to the most harrowing choice. Liberal toleration has always taken account of both of these things. The canonical instance of the state forcing the issue in the United States was the outlawing of Mormon polygamy in the 19th century--and these were harrowing cases indeed, breaking apart families, even if they were not families recognized by the good Christians of the eastern United States.

Despite this history, Western liberalism has unaccountably decided to treat Islam and Muslims--not just Islamism or so-called "political Islam," but Islam as such--as though only one prong of religiosity mattered, the immutable part. Islam is treated as a race, ethnicity, or skin color--an immutable characteristic not alterable by believers and therefore not a proper moral basis on which to judge them. The consequence has been, particularly in Europe, to put anything claimed to be Islamic beyond the bounds not merely of rational debate but of public regulation or even public protest.

...Toleration is not an assertion of relativism. It is, rather, the forbearance from judging and acting on judgments in the public sphere that one might well believe oneself entitled to make in private. Toleration entails the suspension of public disbelief, or at least political action thereupon, about matters that one might nonetheless consider well within the realm of private moral judgment. Relativism, by contrast, is denial of grounds for judging at all. They could not be more different--and, crucially, relativism removes the possibility of toleration because it removes the possibility of reasoned judgment.

This is why I am not a pure multiculturalist and definitely not a moral relativist. I do not hold that Christianity is superior to other faith traditions. I welcome the involvement of all faith traditions in the public square. I believe in religious toleration and in no force in religion or no religious test for public office. I also believe that what a person believes about God, the afterlife, and a host of doctrinal issues is a matter of personal belief.

But when a personal belief leads to actions that may adversely affect others, especially the most vulnerable, or to attempting to legislate beliefs that run counter to hard-won liberal (in the broadest sense) values then I think we have a right to challenge those beliefs and to "fight it out" in the public square.

I fear that we are slowly but surely losing sight of this great American value. I fear that the proliferation of private religious schools and the ascent of "values" voters and "Christian" candidates are eroding the value of toleration. I fear that the actions of the Christian right are paving the way for religious struggles ahead that would appall them if it were Muslims making the same kind of arguments as they are making today.

So take your medicine and go read this article.