On the Virtue of Intolerance

G. K. Chesterton opened his 1905 book Heretics by defining his subject.  A “heretic,” one learns, is “a man whose views have the hardihood to differ from mine.” His tongue was, quite evidently, in his cheek. His tongue was seldom anyplace else. But, as usual, there was gravity in his gaiety. He had a serious point to make, and he made it again in his sequel, Orthodoxy . There, in a chapter titled “The Suicide of Thought” he observed that the modern world is full of “the old Christian virtues gone mad.” 1 They have gone mad in that they are often misplaced and misapplied. In particular, the virtue of humility, whose function is to check human pride and arrogance, has been removed from its natural object, the “organ of ambition,” and has settled upon the “organ of conviction.” “A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.” 2

Chesterton observed that this misplaced modesty had made it highly unfashionable ever to assert the truth of any significant proposition without adding the requisite qualifier—“but of course, I might be wrong.”

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. 3

This is not, of course, to suggest that all views—even those that are mutually contradictory—are right. Nor is he urging his reader to adopt a stubborn unwillingness to revise any current beliefs in light of new evidence or argument, or a refusal to recognize that our beliefs may come with varying degrees of certitude.

Rather, the point has to do with the logic of belief itself. To believe a Thing  just is to believe that it is true . If I believe that the earth is more than four billion years old, then I take the proposition, The earth is more than four billion years old to be true.  For this reason, belief, by its very nature, is exclusive.  If The earth is more than four billion years old is true, then the claim,  The earth is fewer than ten thousand years old is false.  And so my believing the truth of the former entails my also believing the falseness of the latter. And thus, a “heretic” is anyone whose views have the hardihood to differ from mine.

This result is jarring to the modern ear. We are encouraged to believe that there is something arrogant and benighted about taking our own views to be true to the exclusion of the beliefs of others. We must be tolerant of the viewpoints of others, we are told, and, evidently, tolerance is often taken to be a matter of never thinking the beliefs of others to be false . But if this is the meaning of tolerance, then it would appear that the only tolerant people are those who believe nothing at all—including the proposition, We must be tolerant .

Nowhere is “exclusivist” thinking regarded as anathema any more than within the domain of religious belief. The motive is understandable: history is replete with “holy wars,” in which people have demonstrated a willingness to do the unthinkable in the name of religion. It is commonly thought that the belief that one’s own religion is exclusively true naturally fosters hatred and contempt for other viewpoints. The suggested remedy is to adopt a viewpoint that precludes the possibility of thinking that any one religious perspective might be true to the exclusion of others. The aim of interreligious dialog, according to such a view, is to promote mutual understanding, acceptance, and respect among people of differing religious perspectives. Paul J. Griffi ths describes what he takes to be the current orthodoxy among Religious Studies scholars.

This orthodoxy suggests that understanding is the only legitimate goal [of interreligious dialog]; that judgment and criticism of religious beliefs and practices other than one’s own community is always inappropriate; and that an active defense of the truth of those beliefs and practices to which one’s community appears committed is always to be shunned. 4

Consider, for instance, the comments of Amanda Millay Hughes, editor of Five Voices, Five Faiths, a sort of primer on the basics of five major religious traditions—each represented by a different author—and on interfaith dialog. The book is motivated by the noble desire to “live amicably” with those of differing religious perspectives and to “live with and value fundamental differences” while finding common ground for interfaith dialog. The reader is thus urged to avoid “unproductive dogmatic debate.” One is told that “exclusivist thinking” engenders “dark judgments about other religions.” 5 But the solution is not to be found in mere tolerance, because “tolerant forbearance” implies that one is in a “position of privilege” that is not enjoyed by the other. Thus, we are encouraged to “do more than tolerate difference.”  In addition, “we can honor it as a part of the richness of human experience.”  Hughes quotes approvingly from an essay on religious pluralism by a Christian pastor who says that “the Christian calling allows him to sing his song to Jesus ‘with abandon . . . without speaking negatively about others.’” Though Hughes, the representative Christian among the collection of five authors, once subscribed to the mandate to make disciples of all, now she “reflects more deeply” on Jesus’ “new commandment” to love one another. Her advice to the adherents of the different traditions these days is “hold onto the truths you have received.” 6

As well-intentioned as all of this may be, the basic outlook is flawed. Consider the dilemma that Hughes encounters in her dialog with the other contributors to the book. Writing as an Episcopalian Christian, Hughes lays out a basic outline of essential Christian beliefs.  Among other things, she affirms, “Christians believe that all human life needs the redemptive action of God in Christ Jesus.” 7  This apparently does not sit well with the pluralist motivation behind the book project, as her Advaita Vedantan collaborator, Anantanand Rambachan, asks her in a Q&A section, “How do you relate [this claim] with the reality of different religions?” 8  After all, how can she tell her Hindu friend to hold onto Hindu “truths,” while, at the same time, claiming that Christ’s atonement is essential for the salvation of all humans? The Hindu account of both the fundamental human predicament and the ultimate solution to that problem is strikingly different from the Christian account. Nor have they the same concept of what constitutes ultimate salvation, as the one imagines the retention of personal identity in fellowship with a transcendent God and the other envisions the final absorption of that identity in unity with the Absolute.  Hughes confesses that “it is hard to give a definitive answer to your question.”9   Her decidedly  non-definitive  answer urges the need for love and the universal “desire to live in harmony,” and then appeals finally to “mystery.” It is a mystery, indeed, how both accounts may be regarded as “truths” in any robust sense of that word.  In fact, she might have returned the favor by asking Rambachan how the Advaitan account of the ultimate religious object, Brahman, may be related to the “reality” of any and all religions that conceive of ultimate reality differently.  He might reply, as he asserts in his own essay, that the Hindu doctrine of ishtadeva and its corresponding doctrine of margas or “approved ways” has “enabled Hindus to think of the world’s religions in complementary and not exclusive ways.” 10  But in the event that Rambachan’s own account of Brahman is to be taken with any seriousness, Hughes’ own theistic belief enjoys such “approval” only insofar as it is viewed as an instrumental stepping stone to the absolute truth of Brahman—little more than a useful fiction.

Hughes’s dilemma in attempting to answer Professor Rambachan’s question is symptomatic of the sort of pluralistic perspective behind the book. She wishes to affirm her own Christian faith while commending other, seemingly competing, traditions, as “sacred truths.” She wants to “sing her song to Jesus without speaking negatively of others.” Her trouble arises from the simple point of logic that we considered earlier: To believe something is to believe that it is true.  And to believe that it is true entails believing that its denial is false. The truth of the Advaita doctrine of Nirguna Brahman entails the strict falseness (though, perhaps, instrumental usefulness) of any and all varieties of monotheism because it is impossible that the ultimate religious object is both literally property-less and possessed of determinate attributes. If the Buddhist doctrine of anatman, which denies the existence of any sort of substantial self, is true, then the Jain doctrine of the jiva , or soul, is false.  If the Islamic doctrine of Allah is true, then the Christian doctrines of the trinity and incarnation are not only false but blasphemous.

One may assert the truth of all of these seemingly conflicting beliefs and belief systems only at the expense of either revising the notion of “truth” or overhauling the doctrines themselves.  The latter strategy involves a reinterpretation of one or more doctrines so as to render them all compatible. But it is difficult to see what, for instance, might be done with There are enduring, substantial selves  and  It is not the case that there are enduring, substantial selves that would reconcile the two while also leaving both intact.  

The former strategy entails a reinterpretation of the very notion of truth such that “doctrinal truth” is not a matter of a doctrine’s successfully reporting what there is.   One apparently popular suggestion, then, is that religious truth is relative, so that There are no souls is true for Buddhists , while There are souls is true for Jains. Presumably, though, Buddhists and Jains have one and the same world in mind, and what is at issue is just what is or is not included in that world (just as surely as There are jelly beans and There are no jelly beans are conflicting reports about the contents of the candy dish).  Unless the “true for” suggestion is the entertaining claim that a Buddhist just is a person who hasn’t any soul and a Jain is a person who has, the only meaningful sense that I can discover is just the observation that Jains believe there are souls and Buddhists do not. But we already knew that. And the apparent conflict between the two beliefs remains.

One might instead suggest that the two statements are not really about the existence or non-existence of souls. Perhaps when the Jain says, “There are souls,” she should be understood to be saying, “I intend to lead a life of absolute non-violence.” And when the Buddhist says, “There are no souls,” he is, in fact, indicating his dedication to a life of non-grasping. This certainly reconciles the two original statements, but it does so at the expense of reinterpreting those statements to be saying something that precious few Jains or Buddhists (who are not members of Religious Studies departments) have ever intended. The Jain doctrine is a claim about what there is; the Buddhist doctrine about what there is not.

Another suggestion is that doctrinal truth is to be assessed pragmatically, so that a doctrine is “true” just in case adherence to that doctrine results in some desired goal. Perhaps both the Jain belief in the soul and the Buddhist disbelief in such result, respectively, in virtuous Jains and compassionate Buddhists.  Perhaps so.   But this is to impose a theory—one perhaps concocted and cherished by Western Religious Studies scholars—that may be foreign to the many religions whose adherents seem to think that the best reason for believing their doctrines is that they tell us something about the way the world actually is or offer the correct diagnosis of and cure for the human predicament.  Here we have succeeded in offering a sense in which both the Jain and Buddhist doctrines may be true only at the expense of suggesting, that one, or both, of the two doctrines is simply a useful fiction in a way similar to that discussed above. Actual adherents of actual religions may rejoice to learn that their beliefs are useful, but most will be apt to struggle with the “fiction” part. The goal of pluralist projects such as that discussed above is to avoid exclusivist thinking in such a way that everyone is invited to the table. But believers are likely to be sorely disappointed upon learning that the invitation is conditioned upon their willingness to exchange their original beliefs for saccharine substitutes. It is hard to see how I am displaying the requisite respect for my Hindu friend when I tell him that, strictly speaking, Hindu doctrines cannot be taken seriously as truth claims, but I am pleased to see the fruits of those false beliefs in his life. This seems not to rise to the level even of the “tolerant forbearance” that Hughes deemed arrogant. It is a condescending pat on the head.  Chesterton once more:

We talk much about “respecting” this or that person’s religion; but the way to respect a religion is to treat it as a religion: to ask what are its tenets and what are the consequences. But modern tolerance is deafer than intolerance. The old religious authorities, at least, defined a heresy before they condemned it, and read a book before they burned it. But we are always saying to a Mormon or a Moslem — “Never mind about your religion, come to my arms.” To which he naturally replies — “But I do mind about my religion, and I advise you to mind your eye.”

In his critique of such pluralist projects, Paul Griffiths observes,

Religious claims to truth are typically absolute claims: claims to explain everything; claims about the universal applicability of a certain set of values together with the ways of life that embody and perpetuate them; and claims whose referent possesses maximal greatness.

Griffiths continues,

It is just this tendency to absoluteness that makes religious truth-claims of such

interest and gives them such power; to ignore it is to eviscerate them, to do them the disservice of making them other than what they take themselves to be. 11

Contrary to the increasingly fashionable opinion on such matters, I assert that it is more respectful of a religious tradition to take its truth claims seriously as truth claims and to offer honest assessment of them as such than it is to dismiss their original import for the sake of a desired inclusiveness. Taking each religious truth-claim seriously for what it is must inevitably result in the judgment that at least some of the many conflicting claims are false.  As we have seen, since believing anything at all requires believing that other things are false there can be no valid objection to “exclusivist thinking” per se. And taking religious truth claims seriously also calls for an honest appraisal of their merits.  Nor is there any necessary connection between thinking a given belief false and either treating or regarding the believer with anything less than the respect that is due all persons.

Notes

1 . G. K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Heretics, Orthodoxy,

The Blatchford Controversy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 233.

2 . Ibid., 235.

3 . Ibid.

4 . Paul J. Griffiths, An Apology for Apologetics (New York: Orbis Books, 1991), xi.

5 . Amanda Millay Hughs (ed.), Five Voices, Five Faiths (Boston: Cowley

Publications, 2005), 88.

6 . Ibid., xviii.

7 . Ibid., 79.

8 . Ibid., 88.

9 . Ibid., 88.

10 . Ibid., 7.

11 . Griffths, Apology , 3.