Toleration – past and present In violent times, what can we learn from 17th-century thinkers who faced similar problems? Professor Susan Mendus, FBA draws some conclusions from a British Academy discussion meeting on 'Toleration Past and Present', held on 8 October 2007. This is followed by links to further material. |  | Religious violence and toleration Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, there has been an alarming increase in acts of violence and of terrorism which are (or seem to be) religiously motivated. The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001, and the London Underground bombings of 7 July 2005 are perhaps the most dramatic recent examples of religiously-motivated acts of violence, but they are certainly not the only examples, and the 21st century has, so far, been characterised in no small part by what one commentator refers to as a 'dark alliance' between religion and violence. For historians, and especially for those historians with an interest in problems of religious toleration, the emergence of this alliance prompts bewilderment and déjà vu in roughly equal measure: déjà vu because our age is not the only one in which religion has been a cause of conflict and bloodshed (these characteristics also defined Europe in the 17th century); and bewilderment because the demise of religious violence and the rise of toleration were, until very recently, thought to be permanent attainments and indeed to be manifestations of progress and of increased rationality. In his contribution to a British Academy Public Discussion on the theme 'Toleration Past and Present', Professor John Dunn recalled how 'for most of my lifetime I had assumed that religiously inspired mayhem, at least within my own society, if not perhaps on the other side of the Irish Channel, was not merely spiritually unprepossessing but also reassuringly anachronistic, a feature of the distant past ? The principle of toleration seemed pretty evident, and the 17th- and 18th-century intellectual and political effort to focus and vindicate it seemed a strenuous and not over-rapid march towards the obvious.' Perspectives from 17th-century thought However, the events of 9/11 and of 7/7 have cast doubt on the safety of this assumption. Increasingly, religiously-motivated violence has become a problem for our world. Indeed, it is amongst the most pressing problems of our world. But if the problems that confront us are problems that were familiar in 17th-century Europe, then perhaps the responses that were offered by 17th-century thinkers to those problems might be illuminating for us today. This was the hope that motivated 'Toleration Past and Present', an occasion on which specialists in the history of political thought reflected on the ways in which 17th-century thinkers understood and responded to the problems of religious violence and intolerance that characterised their age, and asked whether these, 17th-century, responses might offer lessons for us. From these reflections and the public discussion that followed, four strands of thinking emerged as particularly important. Toleration from religious belief The first begins from the fact that, in the 17th century, philosophers argued for religious toleration as a necessary implication of religious belief itself. This is noteworthy because it is often thought that religious belief necessarily leads to intolerance and persecution, and that this is all the more so when the religious belief is salvationist in character. Those who think that their (and our) future in eternity depends upon having the right religious beliefs have a duty to use coercion if that is what is required to ensure that others are on the path to salvation. Or so it is claimed. In fact, however, 17th-century writers such as Pierre Bayle and John Locke denied that this was so. They emphasised both the fact that belief cannot be coerced and the fact that God does not wish us to coerce others. God wants volunteers, not conscripts and, in any case, 'fire and the sword' will not turn people's minds in the right direction but will only, and at most, alter their outward behaviour. In short, then, Bayle and Locke responded to the religious persecution that characterised 17th-century Europe by arguing that such persecution was both irrational and displeasing to God. Reason The second strand of thinking concerns the character of their appeal to rationality. This was part of a more general 17th-century emphasis on reason rather than revelation as the most reliable source of information about God's wants. In addition to revealing His will in the Bible, God had endowed everyone with a power of reason sufficient to enable them, through reflection and through study of the Bible, to know what God wanted of them. Since everyone had been fitted by God with the capacity to discover and to grasp for him or herself what God's purposes were, it was wrong for others to appropriate this role, much less to use coercion in an attempt to force everyone to do what they believed to be right. In the first place, then, and according to these 17th-century writers, religious believers have reason, from within their own religious beliefs, for refraining from any attempt to coerce the heterodox. Moreover, and in the second place, it is reason itself which shows them both the moral wrongness and the irrationality of religious persecution. Roles of Church and State The third strand of thinking concerns the emphasis the thinkers of the 17th century placed on distinguishing between the proper business of the Church and the proper business of the State. This distinction between the institutions of religion and politics is particularly prominent in John Locke's defence of toleration, and it is notable that Locke does not take the distinction for granted but (again) offers reasons which (he thinks) religious believers themselves must acknowledge for separating the two spheres of authority. For Locke, any attempt to use the power of the State to coerce religious belief is not only irrational (since belief cannot be coerced), it is also contrary to what reason (and so God Himself) has declared the proper role of the State to be. It is not, Locke thinks, God's will that politicians should take it upon themselves to save souls and therefore the use of the coercive power of the State to enforce orthodoxy is in fact a misuse of political power. Persuasion and prudence The fourth strand of thinking is the pendant of the other three. Taken together, those three strands indicate that 17th-century theorists of religious toleration took religious belief very seriously indeed and offered defences of religious toleration which tried to persuade the believer that religion itself demanded toleration, or at least an end to persecution. Faced with conflict and bloodshed on a massive scale, their strategy was to persuade members of the warring factions that both reason and religion spoke in favour of an end to religiously-motivated violence. But this strategy was allied to a very clear practical sense of the difficulties involved in so persuading them and a clearer understanding still of when persuasion had to come to a stop: if politicians misused political power in the name of religion they were rebels to be resisted; if some citizens looked to subvert the state in the name of the same cause, they too were to be restrained. In both cases what was needed was not only a well-founded theoretical understanding of what the respective limits of religion and politics in fact were, but also the prudence and courage to judge wisely and fearlessly when and by whom these limits were being over-stepped and to respond accordingly. Lessons for the 21st century The problems that confront us now (in the world post-9/11) are similar in many respects to the problems that confronted the inhabitants of 17th-century Europe. Our world, like theirs, is deeply divided on religious grounds, and our world, like theirs, is one in which people are prepared, in the name of religion, to engage in acts of violence and of terror. Perhaps, then, if we wish to understand and respond to the religious violence that disfigures our age, we must re-learn what it means to think about the problems of religious toleration and violence with the combination of imagination, breadth and seriousness that characterised the greatest minds of the 17th century. 30 October 2007
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