[ p. 215 ]
Anysopy who has gotten near enough to the churches during the last few years to know with what wild and whirling words many of the followers of Jesus have been assailing one another must wonder about the present estate of tolerance among us. “Toleration in Religion—the Best Fruit of the Last Four Centuries” was one of the inscriptions chosen by President Eliot, a generation ago, for the court of honor at a world’s fair. If by toleration one means that folk are no longer whipped through the streets of Boston for being Baptists or deprived of their ears because they are Quakers, we obviously have made some progress. But if by toleration one means the fine grace of tolerance, with its love of free field and fair play for divergent ideas, with its delight in independent diversities of opinion and its open-minded endeavor to understand and appreciate them, with its willingness to include in fellowship and work folk of good-will who [ p. 216 ] exhibit many varieties of mind, then toleration is at a low ebb in America.
Some of this recrudescence of intolerance, against which even the President of the United States has publicly protested, may reasonably be ascribed to war’s psychological effect. Tolerance of independent opinion is no virtue in war. From the day that hostilities are declared, truth, for its own sake, is at a discount, and the standardization and massing of public opinion so that everybody will think one thing is as important as guns and ships. To that end, by fair means or foul, propaganda unifies the nation’s mind, and every one who dares to differ is treated as a pariah. That was done in all the nations during the Great War, and it is not easy to sober up from so prolonged and so complete a debauch of intolerance.
There is more to be said about the matter, however, than this familiar, omnibus ascription of all our ills to the late conflict. Intolerance has a long history and it bids fair to have a prosperous future. ‘Too many interests in human life are served by it to make it easy to outgrow. By intolerance of other people and their opinions men protect in comfort their [ p. 217 ] sense of their own unique superiority; they save themselves from open-mindedness and from the consequent, painful necessity of changing their ways of thought and life; they defend their racial, religious, or class prejudices, which to them are sweeter than the honeycomb; they confirm their right to force their views as dogmatically as they are able on other folk; they achieve gangway for their pent pugnacity and, like the fabled Irishman, ean freely ask about every fight in which their views are concerned, whether it is private or whether anybody can get in. Intolerance is an agreeable vice to its possessor. Moreover, it produces some powerful consequences. It was Martin Luther who said, ‘““He who does not believe my doctrine is sure to be damned.” Obviously, therefore, the proper way to begin a discussion of tolerance is by being tolerant of intolerance and trying to discover what good there may be in it. That it has driving power, supplies to its possessor persistence, obstinacy, doggedness and fortitude is clear. Intolerant folk who have believed so singly in their own opinions that they have hated all others and have thought the holders of them [ p. 218 ] damned have done some of the most momentous business ever prosecuted on this planet and, in comparison with them, the mild expositors of tolerance, willing to lend an ear to every opinion under heaven, have often seemed feebly to lack moral sinews and thighs. ‘There is virtue as well as vice in narrowness. Men looked broadly at the heaven for many centuries without seeing what was going on there; it was only when they peered through the restricted slit of a telescopic lens that they saw what was afoot in the sky. So a certain exclusive, highly specialized, intolerant narrowness has characterized some of the greatest pioneers in thought and achievement. They were not, in any ordinary sense, open-minded. They were terrific believers in some one thing which they saw clearly, and they often labored under the impression that any one who did not share their thought deserved perdition. Tolerance would better beware, therefore, lest in calling itself a virtue and lording it over its opposite vice, it slip to a lower level even than intolerance and become feeble indifferentism. There is more hope in the Athanasian Creed, with its damnatory clauses against all [ p. 219 ] who disagree, than in the futile sophism of neutrals to whom all ideas look alike. A distinguished visitor at the Mosque el Azhar in Cairo, headquarters of the most influential university of orthodox Islam, is said to have inquired concerning the cosmology taught there, whether they held that the earth went about the sun or that the sun went about the earth. “Your Excellency,” said the obliging and amiable Mosler, “on that point we are entirely liberal—we teach both.”
Granted, however, that a man does have convictions, is inwardly and earnestly committed to ideas on whose truth he banks and causes for whose success he is sacrificially concerned, what shall be said about the amazing intolerance which to-day is exhibited in almost every area of American life?—the Ku Klux Klan hatred of Roman Catholics, Jews, and Negroes, the frequent and startling invasions of our constitutional guarantees of free speech, the itch for a standardized mental type, the earnest endeavor by law to impose upon everybody the moral customs of a group, the attempt to exclude evolution from the mental horizon of whole states, by forbidding its teaching [ p. 220 ] in the public schools, the fundamentalist passion to enforce orthodox unanimity in the churches—in a word, this general and widespread distaste for intellectual individuality and independence, and this eager desire to make up other people’s minds for them. That this is one of the most remarkable phenomena of our time must be clear. It presents a serious problem to all educational agencies working for a virile national life, and, in particular, a crucial problem to religion.
The temptation of religion to be intolerant is very strong, as all its history shows. In primitive days the welfare of the whole tribe was thought to depend on the favor of the gods, so that any religious irregularity on the part of an individual, which might displease the gods, imperiled the entire group. Tolerance, under such circumstances, meant social ruin. The unruly individual must be stamped out. To take him out and stone him was the entirely logical penalty in the brave days of the Old Testament, when anybody displayed careless [ p. 221 ] disregard of tribal custom or dangerous originality in religion.
From that day to this, religion has always had a hankering for uniformity and a deadly dislike for variety and difference. Considering the ideas of religion that have prevailed, this is natural. If religious truth is an inerrant, supernatural revelation, if some book has been written in heaven or verbally inspired on earth, or if a church has been gifted with infallibility, then, of course, variety of opinion is synonymous with betrayal of the faith, and heresy and falsehood are the same thing. Under such circumstances the extirpation of heretics, by persuasion if possible, by force if necessary, can be made to seem a sacred duty, Any toleration of divergent opinions in religion, which being divergent must be false, and, being false, must destroy the souls of men, would be impiety. Indeed, under such a theory, the only true mercy to the community as a whole is to be merciless to heretics—more ruinous monsters by far than those who merely slay the body. In consequence, Roman Catholics and Protestants alike have exhausted the possibilities of mental duress and physical torture [ p. 222 ] in compelling religious unanimity and, long after these American shores were colonized, men of our kind thought the whole idea of toleration in religion an invention of the devil.
We need not suppose, then, that having recently progressed to the point where old expressions of intolerance, the dungeon and the flaming stake, no longer are allowed, we thereby have left behind the thing itself or soon are likely to. Plenty of people still hold a theory of infallible authority in religion, think that they and their kind alone know what the infallible authority is and what it means, are sure that all others are beyond the pale of salvation and that their influence is endangering human souls. Plenty of people, therefore, are m a state of mind to think that tolerance of religious divergence is sin and that almost anything, allowed by the police, which will blacken the reputation and destroy the influence of another type of religion is a holy weapon to defend the faith. Even when so thoroughgoing a theory does not have its logical effect, an earnest man’s religion is so precious to him, doubt of its unique and absolute truth is so [ p. 223 ] unbearable, allowance of equal privileges to competitors and rivals is so difficult, that we may expect to have intolerant religion among us for a long time to come.
Nevertheless, the number of those to whom religious intolerance seems a barbarous survival is on the increase. The ascendency of this new way of thinking will mark an unprecedented era in mankind’s religious life, and the basic ideas which underlie the position of this school of tolerance are at least worth the stating.
For one thing, intolerance to-day is frequently not a sign of strong, but of weak faith. It is the man who is sure of his wife who is free from jealousy, and it is the man who is certain of his truth who can afford to be courteous to rival opinions. Said Milton in his Areopagitica, “Though all the winds of doctrine were Jet loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth [ p. 224 ] put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” From that day to this, trust in truth to win its own way, if given a fair statement and a free field, has become more and more a mark of the great believers. He who thinks that his gospel needs to be bolstered up by artificial enforcements, by heresy trials and excommunications, by personal discourtesy and defamation, does not really believe in the validity and power of his gospel. His reliance on the extraneous instruments of intolerance is a betrayal of his own unstable faith.
That this trust in truth, given a fair field, to make its unforced way, is not impractical idealism, the whole method of modern science makes clear. The typical scientist looks on intolerance as intellectual sm. Open-mindedness, mental hospitality to fresh ideas, careful consideration of opposing views, willingness to keep fellowship in the same university or even in the same laboratory with those who differ— such attitudes are the scientist’s bushido, his code of honor and his pride. Science relies on no exclusive and final creeds, no heresy trials nor excommunications to settle differences of [ p. 225 ] opinion. Bad blood enough, to be sure, exists between scientists, because they are human, but it is taken for the ill temper that it is and not for a holy method of defending truth. Here at least in one realm, and that the most influential in the modern world, the methods of intolerance have been in theory and to a surprising degree in practice eliminated.
But who, in consequence, would accuse scientists of having no convictions, of being feeble indifferentists and mental neutrals? As all the world knows, they are tremendous believers, whose assurance about the great outlines of truth evidentially arrived at is vigorous and creative, and who express themselves with decision and candor. Intolerance as a method of bolstering up science has been largely dispensed with, not because of invading dubiousness and indifference, but because of increasing confidence and faith.
When will the churches learn that intolerance, whether personal or ecclesiastical, is an evidence of weakness? 'The confident can afford to be calm and kindly; only the fearful must defame and exclude.
[ p. 226 ]
In the second place, intolerance to-day, in spite of the dogmatic vigor it sometimes imparts to its possessors, is ineffective. It does nothing but damage to the cause it seeks to defend. Like Saul, the intolerant man or church falls on his own sword. Attack a heretic and you give him an audience. Condemn a book and everybody reads it. Stamp on the spark of an innovation and you spread, the flame. Let an ecclesiastical body assail an idea and, if there is any truth in the idea, no professional propagandist could advertise it half so well. Let a state pass a law forbidding the teaching of evolution, and the universities report multiplied numbers of students studying biology, and more books on evolution are published and sold than ever before in the nation’s history. All the apparent victories of intolerance to-day are Pyrrhic. No stranger spectacle for irony to look on is easily imaginable than our persistence in using the attitudes and methods of intolerance long after they have become suicidal to the user.
This inefficiency of intolerance, moreover, [ p. 227 ] runs much deeper than its practical incompetence to kill an idea. The churches are supposed to be presenting Christ. If they are not, they would better be for he is their supreme asset. But how can the churches present him controversially, commend him by pugnacity, make him who was “full of grace and truth” acceptable by dogmatic intolerance?
Wars have been waged for the glory of Christ, crusades have been bloodily forced through to victorious conclusions for his sake, persecutions have been mercilessly carried on to further his cause. Did any such methods ever do anything except obscure the real Christ in Stygian night and plunge the world fathoms deeper into Christlessness? And is it not plain that now, when we keep the same spirit and merely modify the weapons of our intolerance, we still are doing nothing for Christ and everything against him? We cannot commend the highest spiritual beauty and truth by the use of intolerant moods and bad tempers. We cannot exalt love by encouraging hate.
Tolerance is not a weak thing; it is the unconquerable ascendency of personal good-will over all differences of opinion. If that is not [ p. 228 ] Christian, I do not know where to find Christianity. And what is more, it works. It is the principle of persuasion without which, in the long run, nothing else will work at all.
In the third place, intolerance involves a false and ruinous idea of the church. It presupposes that a church should be a group of people holding the same opinions in religion. That idea is so deep-seated in most Christians that it will take many a year to dislodge it. Get a pet idea in religion, desire ardently to make every one else agree, feel intolerant unwillingness to work with those who refuse to agree, organize a group of people like-minded with yourself to propagate your idea, exclude all others, and set out to make up other people’s minds for them as fast as possible— that has been the almost universal prescription for a church in Christendom.
The consequence is that to-day nearly two hundred different kinds of Christians are organized in the United States to present their specialties, and the American people, as a [ p. 229 ] whole, however much for tradition’s and respectability’s sake they may ‘join the church,’ are so little impressed by all these small dogmatisms and infallibilities that, as the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church fearfully noticed in their last pastoral, a large proportion of the children of this Christian nation are “growing up without religious influence, or religious teaching, of any sort.”
The mistake involved in this suicidal procedure lies deep—the whole idea of the church is wrong. Uniformity of mind, which intolerance is always seeking, we cannot get; we should not want to get it. In union there is strength, but not in unanimity—there is death in that. All life, movement, vigor, progress spring from independence and variety. The church of the future can never be one of these unanimous sects, but rather a comprehensive communion, including in its fellowship, around the organizing center of a common devotion and a common purpose, the greatest possible variety of temperament and diversity of mind. When we have done our best in this direction we doubtless shall find still divergences of opinion so wide as to disrupt community of [ p. 230 ] purpose and so make impossible co-operation in the same church. There still will be different organizations to express religion as there are different schools of philanthropy and medicine. But there will not be nearly two hundred Christian varieties of them in America. Until tolerant inclusiveness takes the place of intolerant exclusiveness in the ideals of the denominations, there is little hope for the denominations at all. The church of the future will be the one that succeeds in being the most comprehensive.
Intolerance, therefore, is one of the great failures of history. It turns out at last to be an evidence of weak conviction, a suicidal method of propaganda, a destroyer of the churches by endless schism.
Let no one evade this truth on the ground that obviously there are some people altogether intolerable. Of course there are—murderers, and the state must give them short shrift; shysters, and law associations should have them disbarred; quacks, and the medical profession [ p. 231 ] should show them up; hypocrites, making moral mockery of their Christian ministry, and the church should drive them out. In dealing with men of social ill-will no one in his senses would plead for benevolent neutrality. The _ uses of righteous indignation are manifold. In this paper, however, we have been thinking of men of good-will, sharing a common purpose and devotion, deeply concerned to further the interests of religion in the world but widely differing in their opinions, and, in that realm, the long and short of the matter is that intolerance has no contribution to offer. Even between Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Mohammedans it has no contribution to offer. It can shed no light on the questions at issue. It brings nothing to a good end, but degenerates by inevitable stages into bitterness and blackguardism. As for its effects within Christianity, they are fatal. When will the churches, as a whole, find this out? When will Christ receive an adequate presentation to the world through a fraternal fellowship of various folk who in learning to be Christians have also learned to be gentlemen?