As I was preparing to write a column on "toleration," I ran across this gem from the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus' "The Public Square" section of First Things. First Things generously allowed the Deseret News to reprint "Truth and Tolerance" from its October 1994 issue:

"Tolerance is not a religious virtue," a feisty rabbi is fond of declaring in public, gleefully scandalizing the properly liberal in his audience. Truth, not tolerance, he goes onto say, is what religion is about. None of us should want to dispute that religion, at least biblical religion, is about truth. And there may be pedagogical shock value in challenging our liberal culture's uncritical attachment to tolerance. But in our more serious moments we are compelled to recognize that an awful lot turns on whether we think there is a trade-off between truth and tolerance. Historically and at present, many (most?) religious folk have assumed that there is such a trade-off. Forced to make a choice, the militantly orthodox opt for truth at the expense of tolerance, while the flaccidly liberal opt for tolerance at the expense of truth. Dissenting from this view of the matter, some of us have been arguing for a long time that truth and tolerance go together, and necessarily so. Put differently, it is Christian truth that makes tolerance imperative.

These reflections are prompted by a remarkable book by a young Englishman who teaches theology at the University of Exeter. His name is Ian S. Markham and the book is titled "Plurality and Christian Ethics" (Cambridge University Press). Markham's argument has many parts, and following it requires close attention even by the theologically and philosophically trained, but it richly rewards the effort. In summary form, Markham is making two claims, one philosophical and the other historical. They are admittedly very big claims, which is why he devotes an entire book to defending them. Markham also knows that his claims run counter to conventional wisdoms about tolerance and truth, which is why he attends so carefully to the arguments of his opponents.

The philosophical claim is this:

The contemporary threats to plurality do not come from religion but from secularism. The secularist, who has given up the quest for truth and therefore moral debate and rational dialogue, is the greater danger to tolerance. A religious foundation for tolerance is grounded in the reality of God that ensures the intelligibility of the universe. This foundation is the only effective antidote to secular reason, which cannot avoid the dangers of nihilism. Truth claims depend upon the conviction that the universe is intelligible, and that in turn depends upon belief in God.

And the historical claim is this:

The United States has made a cultural discovery. It has found good religious reasons why we ought to affirm plurality. The British (and European) debate about plurality is still firmly rooted within the confines of premodernity and modernity. However, the nation of immigrants was forced, right from the start, to engage with plurality. And slowly a culture emerged that was both religious and tolerant. This led some to suggest that America had created a new religion -- civil religion; but in fact Christians, Jews, and Muslims were discovering the importance of plurality. ... In this sense, Americans are postmodern.

Do not be distracted by Markham's use of "plurality." He avoids "pluralism" because that term is associated with another set of arguments in the United Kingdom. By plurality he means what most of us call pluralism -- a society in which people who subscribe to quite different accounts of reality, including moral and religious reality, are thrown together and must decide what to do about it. It is the very considerable achievement of modernity that people decided that the thing to do is to be tolerant. It is the very considerable problem of modernity that tolerance is often purchased at the price of denying the differences, including the differences that make the most difference, such as differences over what people believe to be most importantly true.

Reprinted from October 1994 issue of the journal First Things, for Joseph A. Cannon's column. Reprinted by permission of First Things, firstthings.com.