The T-word is back. And about time. I have lost count of the times politicians have called on me to show respect for people’s religious faith. Respect a woman’s right to hide her face, respect the Church of England’s earnest debates over women and homosexuality. Respect religious holidays, festivals, rituals and dogmas.
Absurd millennia-old diktats on what to eat and when, demand respect. Bizarre rituals with men in frocks and boys in cassocks demand respect. Anglicanism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and any –ism or schism you might care to conceive all demand it. Perhaps if Scientology became Scientism we might be obliged to respect Tom Cruise too.
Religion is the comfort of fools. A beautiful, seductive comfort that inspired the Al-Hambra and Mozart’s Requiem. A banal, hateful superiority displayed in suicide videos and televangelism. As a cathedral chorister I played my part in a form of institutionalised child labour, performing baleful psalms in the haunting emptiness of a Norman cathedral, filling the space between prayers with anthem, magnificat and nunc dimittis – all for the spiritual edification of a handful of Norfolk dowagers.
To respect religion runs the risk of giving the supernatural an intellectual credibility that the heroes and heroines of modern thought spent centuries fighting. That’s where New Labour’s whiny injunction to respect one another was doomed to fail, and why tolerance is making a welcome return to the political stage.
Tolerance has nothing to do with respect. It is the skill you have to practise in a society where liberal values and a cosmopolitan citizenry mitigate against permanent confrontation with ones neighbours.
Tolerance appears in trading centres, ports and markets – in places where people’s motives for doing business with their fellow human beings overcame their religious reluctance.
The limits of tolerance allow me to accept different standards in different place. It allows me to hold my opinions without feeling compelled to walk into a Quaker Meeting House and deny the existence of God. It allows me to excuse belief in fairies or paganism. All so long as the thresholds of liberalism on which my particular society is based are not transgressed.
Although tolerance arrived on the statute book a year after the Glorious Revolution in 1689, there is little glorious about it as a political concept. It was the means by which freedom of religious worship was granted, on certain prescribed conditions, to Dissenting Protestants. It ameliorated rather than ended religious oppression. Macaulay wrote approvingly in his History of England: “The sound principle…is, that mere theological error ought not to be punished by the civil magistrate. This principle the Toleration Act not only does not recognise, but positively disclaims.” By Macaulay’s day, Roman Catholics too had been allowed a modest place in Britain’s public life.
It took the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to kick tolerance in the teeth. It granted “freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest…religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.” Three years after the Holocaust, tolerance sounded dangerously complacent. Rights could be enforced.
The use of tolerance relieves us of the burden of making sense of folly or reconciling views that flatly contradict our own. But it is more useful still. We can be tolerant and we can set limits on tolerance. It implies there are some things that will not be tolerated.
By making clear what we will not tolerate we can challenge the narrow-mindedness of small communities that can imprison and humiliate people by virtue of our respect for their traditions. Politicians too will have a vocabulary that appeals to a society where their own contribution, like that of so many others, is neither respected nor trusted but tolerated.
We can live with a grey world of moral ambiguity and compromise. The virtue of age is tolerance not respectfulness.