Why tolerate religion?

• Author: Leiter, Brian

1. PRINCIPLED 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. While the historical reasons for the special "pride of place" accorded religious toleration are familiar, (1) what is 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 or other 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, commitments, and practices of its citizenry, but none of these single out religion for anything like the special treatment it is accorded in, for example, American and Canadian constitutional law. (2) So why tolerate religion? Not because of anything that has to do with it being religion as such--or so I shall argue.

   To see why this is so we will need to start 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. (3) 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 non-White or who are 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 flourishes 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 they 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 wouldn't be in that group's interest to incur the costs required to eradicate the other group's beliefs and practices.

   But it is not only Hobbesians who mimic commitment to a principle of toleration. On one reading of Locke, (4) his central non-sectarian 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. (5) In consequence, says the Lockean, we had better get. (5) 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 Locke's (understandable) failure to appreciate the full complexity of the psychology and sociology of belief inculcation.

   Not only Hobbesians and Lockeans, however, mimic principled toleration. A variation on the Lockean instrumental argument for toleration is apparent in a popular theme in American political thinking--one that receives a well-known articulation in Frederick Schauer's defense of free speech (6)-according to which government can't be trusted to discharge the task of intolerance "correctly," that is, in the right instances. Speech can harm, in all kinds of way, notes Schauer, and the various rationales for putting up with these harms--from John Stuart Mill's "marketplace of ideas" to Alexander Meiklejohn's conception of free speech as essential to democratic self-government--almost all fall prey to objections of one kind or another. But, says Schauer, there is still a reason to demand that the state "tolerate" many different kinds of speech (even harmful speech), and that is because there is no reason to think the state will make the right choices about which speech ought to be regulated. Schauer calls this "the argument from governmental incompetence," (7) and says,

   Freedom of speech is based in large part on a distrust of the ability of government to make the necessary distinctions, a distrust of governmental determinations of truth and falsity, an appreciation of the fallibility of political leaders, and a somewhat deeper distrust of governmental power in a more general sense. (8) It is not, then, as in the Lockean argument, that government lacks the right means for bringing about intolerant ends, it is rather that government is not competent, that is, can not be relied upon, to deploy its means in the right cases. Perhaps this kind of instrumental argument for state toleration is more plausible, but its justificatory structure makes it no different from that of the Lockean's: it doesn't tell us why we, morally, ought not to crush differing beliefs or practices, it tells us only that we (through the instrumentality of the state) are unlikely to do it right.

   Where a genuine "principle of toleration" gets its purchase is in the cases where one group (call it the "dominant" group) actively disapproves of what another group (call it the "disfavored" group) believes or does; where that dominant group has the means at its disposal to effectively and reliably change or end the disfavored group's beliefs or practices; and yet still the dominant group acknowledges that there are moral or epistemic reasons (that is, reasons pertaining to knowledge or truth) to permit the disfavored group to keep on believing and doing what it does. That is pure or "principled" toleration, (9) and the question, then, is whether there is such a reason to tolerate religion.

   My concern here shall mainly be with the principled grounds of state toleration, as opposed to toleration in interpersonal relations, though the issues are often similar. But for purposes of the argument, I shall confine my attention to the principled reasons why the state should refrain from a distribution of benefits and burdens that has as its intended consequence the disfavoring of religion or of particular religions. I frame the problem in these terms because, even though the historical problem about religious toleration was generated by conflict among religious groups, the contemporary problem, at least in the post-Enlightenment, secular nations (of which the United States may still be one) is different: it is why the state should tolerate religion as such at all.

2. PRINCIPLED ARGUMENTS FOR TOLERATION

   Before we consider religious tolerance in particular, it will be useful to consider the general structure of principled arguments for state toleration of group differences. The literature on the subject is voluminous, so necessarily I will be able to consider only a few themes here. Yet the themes I emphasize will, I believe, capture the main principled positions in the debates.

   We can distinguish between two broad classes of principled arguments for toleration, which I will call "moral" and "epistemic" (though the latter incorporates some moral considerations as well). The strictly moral arguments for toleration claim either that there is a right to the liberty to hold the beliefs and engage in the practices of which toleration is required; or that toleration of those beliefs and practices is essential to the realization of moral goods. The moral arguments divide, predictably enough...