SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE:We must do more than tolerate other religions

On a lovely recent noonday, I went to UC Irvine with my rabbi, Mark Miller, to meet colleagues, including our Episcopal campus minister, The Rev.’d Martha Korienek, for a midweek opportunity sponsored by the Academic Senate to affirm that people of different faiths and spiritual practices are safe and welcome to practice their religion on that campus. It was called “Stand Together for Tolerance.” Throughout it I kept thinking, tolerance isn’t enough. We need to be mutually respectful!

Our modern ideas of religious tolerance spring from the European Enlightenment when confessional states, like Anglican England, only put up with other persuasions. Some say that in contemporary nonconfessional countries, like our own, religious tolerance is a myth imposed by an anti-religious intellectual elite. “Tolerance” is defined as “a fair and permissive attitude toward those who are different from ourselves,” or the relativistic and indifferent “live and let live.” Tolerance always relates to what is considered “tolerable” by the reigning cultural milieu. I’ve long thought that tolerance really means, “Your way is OK, but mine is better!”

Tolerance for behaviors and ideas and people are lumped together, but these are hardly the same.

We rightly “tolerate” what we, given our human nature, find irritating: selfishness, obnoxiousness, rudeness. But it is insulting to suggest that we “tolerate” the persons behaving in ways that annoy us and make them less than they are.

Our Christian heritage tells us to respect all people because all are created in the image of God and all can respond to the love of God.

Respect means honoring the dignity of every human being and pursuing truth in freedom of inquiry with communication, instruction, and learning from others who are different than we are.

Respect for religious freedom stands above “tolerance” for religious belief and practice with the relativism it so often comprises.

I think this is what we were doing on that wonderful spring noontime in Aldrich Park.