Toleration

Religious toleration has long been the paradigm of the liberal ideal of toleration of group differences, as reflected in both the constitutions of the major Western democracies and in the theoretical literature explaining and justifying these practices. The American Constitution provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." As the German Constitution (or "Basic Law") provides in Article 4, "Freedom of faith and of conscience, and freedom to profess a religious or philosophical creed, shall be inviolable," adding, in a separate clause, "The undisturbed practice of religion shall be guaranteed." The first of the four "Fundamental Freedoms" in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is held to be "freedom of conscience and religion." And Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares,

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

While the American Constitution only mentions religion, the recognition for claims of "conscience" in the other documents is more perfunctory than substantive: litigated cases overwhelmingly involve claims of religious conscience. Indeed, if claims of religious conscience were not really the primary concern in each case, then surely the explicit mention of religion (or the mention of special protections for religion) would appear redundant on the protection purportedly afforded claims of conscience more generally.

While the historical reasons for the special "pride of place" accorded religious toleration are familiar, what may be more surprising is that no one has been able to articulate a credible principled argument for tolerating religion qua religion—that is, an argument that would explain why, as a matter of moral principle, we ought to accord special legal and moral treatment to religious practices. There are, to be sure, principled arguments for why the state ought to tolerate a plethora of private choices and conscientious commitments, as well as related practices of its citizenry, but none of these single out religion for anything like the special treatment it is accorded in existing Western legal systems. So why tolerate religion? The answer in this book is: not because of anything that has to do with it being religion as such—or so I shall argue.

Principled Toleration

To see why this is so we will need to start, though, with some distinctions that make possible a more perspicuous formulation of the question. In particular, we need to state clearly what is at stake in something called a principle of toleration. I shall take as a point of departure a useful formulation of the issues by the late English philosopher Bernard Williams:

A practice of toleration means only that one group as a matter of fact puts up with the existence of the other, differing, group.... One possible basis of such an attitude ... is a virtue of toleration, which emphasizes the moral good involved in putting up with beliefs one finds offensive.... If there is to be a question of toleration, it is necessary that there should be some belief or practice or way of life that one group thinks (however fanatically or unreasonably) wrong, mistaken, or undesirable.

For there to be a practice of toleration, one group must deem another differing group's beliefs or practices "wrong, mistaken, or undesirable" and yet "put up" with them nonetheless. That means that toleration is not at issue in cases where one group is simply indifferent to another. I do not "tolerate" my neighbors who are nonwhite or gay because I am indifferent as to the race or sexual orientation of those in my community. Toleration, as an ideal, can only matter when one group actively concerns itself with what the other is doing, believing, or "being." Obviously, in many cases, the attitude of indifference is actually morally preferable to that of toleration: better that people should be indifferent as to their neighbors' sexual orientation than that they should disapprove of it but tolerate it nonetheless.

But a practice of toleration is one thing, a principled reason for toleration another. Many practices of toleration are not grounded in the view that there are moral reasons to tolerate differing points of view and practices, that permitting such views and practices to flourish is itself a kind of good or moral right, notwithstanding our disapproval. Much that has the appearance of principled toleration is nothing more than pragmatic or, we might say, "Hobbesian" compromise: one group would gladly stamp out the others' beliefs and practices, but has reconciled itself to the practical reality that it can't get away with it—at least not without the intolerable cost of the proverbial "war of all against all." To an outsider, this may look like toleration—one group seems to put up with the other—but it does not embody what Williams called a "virtue" of tolerance (or what I will call "principled tolerance"), since the reasons for putting up are purely instrumental and egoistic, according no weight to moral considerations. One group puts up with the other only because it would not be in that group's interest to incur the costs required to eradicate the other group's beliefs and practices.

Yet it is not only Hobbesians who mimic commitment to a principle of toleration. On one reading of John Locke, his central nonsectarian argument for religious toleration is that the coercive mechanisms of the state are ill-suited to effect a real change in belief about religious or other matters. Genuine beliefs, sincerely held, can't be inculcated at gunpoint, as it were, since they respond to evidence and norms of rational justification, not threats. In consequence, says the Lockean, we had better get used to toleration in practice—not because there is some principled or moral reason to permit the heretics to flourish but because the state lacks the right tools to cure them of their heresy, to inculcate in them the so-called correct beliefs.

Locke, it is fair to say, did not fully appreciate the extent to which states and—in capitalist societies—private entities can employ sophisticated means to effectively coerce belief, means that are both more subtle and more effective than he imagined. That history offers up so many examples of societies in which the tyranny of the few over the many is accepted by the many as a quite desirable state of affairs is compelling evidence that states can successfully inculcate beliefs, even dangerously false beliefs. Locke's "instrumental" argument for a practice of toleration should provide little comfort to the defender of toleration given his...