Tolerance in the West is necessarily religious in its grounding principles

Practicing Tolerance: A Reconsideration for Our Day

by David J. Davis

It is easy to forget that tolerance was not original to the Enlightenment. After all, this is the narrative handed to us by most scholars and pundits. We forget that during the Reformation entire regions and cities like Alsace, Ravensburg, Lausanne, and Augsburg developed types of bi-confessionalism, where different confessions shared civic power and public space. We forget that tolerance in the West is necessarily religious in its grounding principles. In his bookDivided by Faith, historian Benjamin Kaplan summarizes this point: “As a practice, toleration long predated the Enlightenment. Ever since the reformations…Christians in Europe had been finding ways to live peacefully with one another despite their religious differences.”

Thinking of tolerance as a practice, rather than an ideal, allowed it to be much more robust and versatile, because it lacked the absolutist tendencies of an ideology. Our historical myopia toward earlier practices of tolerance indicates just how significantly the Enlightenment narrative of rationalism has severed us from this past and threatens any benefits we have gained and continue to gain from it. When, in our day, thinkers as diverse as Martha Nussbaum and D.A. Carson question the future of current notions of tolerance, it is vital that we begin to reassess our history of religious coexistence. Reviving earlier practices is likely one of the only ways to successfully develop a functional understanding of tolerance in the twenty-first century, as we move to an increasingly integrated multi-religious society.

Today, most people see tolerance as historian Perez Zagorin describes it, “a very basic principle that society and the state should as a matter of right, extend complete freedom of religious belief and expression to all their members.” Zagorin spells out tolerance as an ideal, with which he replaces truth as our intellectual anchor, making this ideal a kind of idol before which all public discourse must kneel. Tolerance is mandatory, singular, and absolute, and it permits no rivals in the public square.

The history of tolerance before this idealization exhibits a much more complex and problematic cultural phenomenon.

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