A Question about the Literature on Religious Toleration

I am wondering whether any readers know of literature making the case for toleration of religion qua religion.  What has struck me in reading the literature is that while religious toleration is often a paradigm case for discussions of toleration, the arguments for it are not specific to religion:  arguments from autonomy and well-being would equally well encompass toleration of many other kinds of belief that are not religious in character; the Lockean argument is not specific to religion, since state tools for coercion are ineffective in inculcating belief simpliciter, not simply religious belief; Millian arguments from versions of the Harm Principle cast the net much more widely than religion; and so on.

The only exception to this generalization I have found in the literature is an interesting paper by Timothy Macklem (Law, King's College, London) on "Faith as a Secular Value," which appeared in the McGill Law Journal in February 2000.  Macklem argues that the distinctive religious state, faith, is one that has a special value that warrants its special treatment in liberal societies.  I don't think the argument succeeds, but that's not what concerns me here.  What I'm wondering is whether there are other articles that try to argue why religion in particular should be tolerated, arguments that make claims appealing to distinctive features of religious belief and practices.  Or as Macklem frames the question:  "What is it that distinguished religious beliefs from other beliefs, so as to make them worthy of distinctive, perhaps superior constitutional protection?"  That, to my mind, would be an argument for religious toleration.

Comments are open.  Because I have somewhat erratic computer access, it may take awhile for comments to appear, but please post your comment only once.  Thanks, as always, learned readers for your assistance.

Comments

[Mark Engleson]

It probably still doesn't get to the heart of your question but you might want to look at Sandel, Robert Putnam, and the book Habits of the Heart. There are arguments in those for religion as a special, socially binding institution.

[Alan Wong]

I'd have to recommend Jeffrey Stout's _Democracy and Tradition_ (2004). While Stout himself is not religious, his work is taken seriously by religious ethicists. Mainly because he's willing to offer internal critiques of religion to the effect that religious believers ought to be tolerant. If you want to shop more before you take the plunge into Stout, see Gary Gutting's review of the book in Ethics 115 (Oct 2004).

I hope this helps!

[Gary Kemp]

Well, isn't it pretty obvious? It is a firm, though contingent fact that people's most meaningful experiences are expressed by their religion (actually I don't believe this, but this is how the argument goes). Thus, to mess with his religion is to mess with a person's most meaningful experiences; the state should be at its most cautious in messing with people's most meaningful experiences, ergo ....

[Litowitz]

This topic is address by Sam Harris in the popular book The End of Faith (just came out in paperback). He concludes that there is nothing special about religious faith that deserves greater deference from any other groundless belief, say in fairies or witches etc. It's not the most rigorous analysis but it's a good place to start.

[Eric Rovie]

I don't know if any of these sources deal directly with the issues you are addressing, but I have the following in my bibliography on toleration in general:

Toleration, Preston King (Frank Cass, 1997)
On Toleration, eds Mendus and Edwards (Clarendon Press, 1987)
Trust and Toleration, Richard Dees (Routledge, 2004)
Toleration, Diversity and Global Justice, Kok-Chor Tan (U of Penn Press, 2002)

There is a brief survey piece (slightly dated now) by Stephen Macedo titled "Toleration and Fundamentalism" in the Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy.

[Simon Cabulea May]

Locke has a bunch of arguments - some of which are not specific to religion, and some of which are. Although coercion is ineffective in inculculating belief as such, there is more to the argument than that:

"[T]he care of the salvation of men's souls cannot belong to the magistrate; because, though the rigour of laws and the force of penalties were capable to convince and change men's minds, yet would not that help at all to the salvation of their souls."

The salvation of men's souls depends on sincere and wholehearted belief in the right religious doctrine. Even if it were the case that mere belief could be coerced, sincere, genuine, and wholehearted belief could not be. This seems to be an argument specific to the religious case, since it's only in that context that Locke seems to think such sincerity matters. Other types of beliefs would not fail in their purpose just because there may be a bit of arm-twisting in their genesis.

[Alan Wong]

Brian,
I am not sure if you got my comment, but ... I do recommend Jeffrey Stout _Democracy and Tradition_ (2004). Stout's work is taken seriously by religious ethicists. He teaches religious ethics at Princeton, and is affiliated with their philosophy dept. And he does have a fair amount of philosophical chops.

He tries to steer a middle way between Rawls and MacIntyre when it comes to religious toleration. Or more precisely, he is trying to ask what role religious talk plays in public discourse. He criticizes Rawls for prohibiting religious talk from public discourse for familiar MacIntyrean reasons. And he criticizes MacIntyre and his followers for being too sectarian. So he permits religious talk in public discourse insofar as they recognize they are playing by the game of liberal democracy.

This is, of course, brief. If you want more before you get/borrow the book, Gary Gutting has a review in a recent _Ethics_.

-Alan

[Cosim John Sayid]

Coincidentally, I just did a term paper on a related topic - some thoughts, for what they're worth, follow.

One recent claim of religion that I have read takes the view that religion actually asks of society for more than toleration. See David Novak, The Jewish Social Contract: An Essay in Political Theology 18 (2005) ("A historical, religiously constituted community asks for more than tolerance from civil society; it asks for respect of its historical and ontological priority."). Somewhat despairingly, I ask, 'How to contradict a claim of ontological priority?' Hobbes argued that obeying the sovereign's commands guaranteed one's eternal life (to say nothing of its mortal counterpart), thus incorporating into natural law the 'ontological priority' of civil law (except where it required the sacrifice of one's mortal life), even where it violated divine law (the sin being the sovereign's only, given the subject's duty to obey commands). As Bobbio expalined it, "Among all the laws of nature, the one prescribing obedience to civil laws take over. It is the essence of this law that, once it has been recognized and respected as the precondition for earthly security and eternal salvation, it makes all other laws of nature invalid, by founding the validity of all civil laws." Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition 170-171 (Daniela Gobetti, trans. 1993) (1989).

In American constitutional law, one line of cases seemed to go with the ontological communitarians (such as Novak). In Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205 (1972), the Court unanimously decided that religious objections grounded only in religious belief to compulsory secondary-school attendance trumped civil law. In a puzzling passage, Chief Justice Burger, writing for the Court, said:

Thus, if the Amish asserted their claims because of their subjective evaluation and rejection of the contemporary secular values accepted by the majority, much as Thoreau rejected the social values of his time and isolated himself at Walden Pond, their claims would not rest on a religious basis. Thoreau's choice was philosophical and personal rather than religious...

Id. at 216. I'm unsure how Burger would have reacted to some secular (or non-orthodox religious) community joining Throeau at Walden Pond - would that transmute Thoreau's position into something non-"subjective" and non-"personal"? Would it still, however, be "philosophical", and not "religious", and therefore, not entitled to religious immunity?

After that, the distinction once established propoagated through (caselaw) jurisprudence. Jehovah's Witnesses could refuse to take work at a war-munitions plant and remain eligible for unemployment benefits, but striking workers protesting oppressive working conditions were able to be treated even worse than those who had voluntarily quit their jobs for whatever inane reason. See Lyng v. International Union, 485 U.S. 360 (1988).

In 1990's Smith decision, the Court reversed course and refused to admit any religiously-based exceptions to a neutral law; of course, that's not exactly the greatest liberty allowable within a regime of similar liberty for others - it's more like zero liberty for all, except insofar as various groups can persuade legislatures to except them from laws they'd rather not follow.

Now, one can maybe say that in defense of the distinction drawn in Yoder that if one is among adherents to a religious community, we might more reliably judge the genuineness of one's (religious) belief, but that seems to me somewhat untenable. Was Thoreau not a genuine believer in slavery's, or war's, evils? Can one feign belief even if attending services and undergoing rituals regularly? Or is it that we should be able decide an actor's liability by looking only at external factors, and never trying to figure out what she is (really) thinking?

Is the distinction's warrant to be found within, say, the religion clauses of the constitution - in "free exercise", but neither "freedom of speech" nor "petition for redress of grievances"? Religion is somehow different would be the claim, among forms of belief and expression thereof.

McConnell claims that any argument for granting all expressive liberty - religion included - as expansively as is possible necessarily "ignor[es] the symmetrical character of the free exercise and establishment principles. Both 'single out' religion for special treatment, but sometimes this is an advantage and sometimes a disadvantage." As an example of this, he says, "When a Jehovah’s Witness refuses to work in an armaments factory, he is constitutionally entitled to unemployment benefits, while a secular antiwar activist in the same position is not", adding by contrast,

[I]f a public school football coach (or even a member of the team) offers a prayer or other religious inspiration before the game, he will be stopped; a girls' tennis coach who offers feminist words of inspiration before the game engages in protected speech. When the Reverend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University applied recently for public bonds, it was turned down because of its religious teaching; no one would consider turning down Antioch College because of its secular ideology.

Citations to Michael W. McConnell, A Response to Professor Marshall, 58 U. Chi. L. Rev. 329 (1991).

What he says, in slightly cruder form: turnabout really is fair play. I do mean that, by the way, as mere hyperbole. McConnell is arguing that the mistakes – as he views them – of the Court’s establishment clause jurisprudence should be rectified – in a roundabout way - through its free exercise jurisprudence.

Ultimately, I'm unable to find anything different about religion that should entitle its beliefs to special treatment in terms of a claim to tolerance. Not, mind you, that religion doesn't have awesome potential for good and evil, but so too do other forms of expression. Isn't there a deep symmetry in protection of expression? We protect political speech in the main, but shouldn't do so when the voices of the monied and their thirty-second spots drown out the voices of most citizens (such as this student, who cannot influence his co-citizens on television). We protect newspaper articles, but not when we discern in them, say, "actual malice" or "group libel". So likewise we respect religion for all the good it can do, but wary of its destructive potential we should be frightened of "establishments" thereof, for we do not, as Buber reminded us, write on a clean slate:

Generations of men have blamed this word [God] for the burdens of their troubled lives and crushed it to the ground; it lies in the dust, bearing all their burdens. Generations of men with their religious divisions have torn the word apart; they have killed for it and died for it; it bears all their fingerprints and is stained with all their blood.

Does that make religion special - does Martin Luther King, whose memorial approaches? Maybe in degree, but not, I feel, in kind. God is neither dead (as Nietzsche said) nor a shout in the street (as Joyce thought), and we grapple with that. So with religion, we maybe multiply our hopes and fears alike through a large factor.

Religion is still different, of course, in the way that any kind of belief that permeates one's entire life has to be. It's quite absurd, as Wittgenstein noted in Culture and Value to take a religion as some manner of historical narrative and to believe in it as (mere) historical narrative, or to think of it as something proven by visions and the like. Maybe the question you raise in the end shows how some beliefs are alike in that we're prepared to act upon them in ways that might even expose us to liability. What separates a non-believer mouthing words, from a believer's prayers; a politician's bullshitting (in Frankfurt's sense) rhetoric aimed to score votes from Thoreau's passionate stand at Walden Pond?

[BL]

Thanks for these comments and suggestions. In response to Gary Kemp, it's worth pointing out that that is a good example of an argument NOT specific to religion, since it argues for tolerating what is most meaningful to people, not for tolerating religion per se. Simon May comes up with a nice example from Locke of an argument that is clearly specific to religion, though not promising for other reasons (and not an argument, of course, that meets Macklem's challenge of explaining why religion or faith should be a secular value).

I welcome more suggestions and examples.

[Simon Cabulea May]

Right - I don't think there are any *good* arguments for protecting religion in particular, above and beyond free thought in general.

As an aside, what I would like to see are examples of pedagogically engaging arguments in support of religious *intolerance* - something more philosophically challenging than the spectre of Torquemada about why heretics should not be accepted on equal terms.

[david]

BL, your last comment has made me confused about what you're asking.

I take it that, according to the kind of argument you're looking for, there is some feature of religious belief which is such that:

(a) This feature explains why religious belief ought to be tolerated, constitutionally protected, etc.

Of course, (a) alone is not enough to give you what you want, because (a) doesn't make religious belief "distinctive" in the relevant sense. I'm confused about what would make it distinctive. Four ways to make it distinctive occur to me:

(b1) Necessarily, the above-mentioned feature (i.e., the one which is supposed to explain why religious belief ought to be tolerated) is possessed ONLY by religious belief.

(b2) As a matter of fact (contingently), the feature is possessed only by religious belief. If it were possessed by some other sort of belief, then it would make this other sort of belief ought to be tolerated, but it just happens that no other sort of belief has this feature.

(b3) As a matter of fact, the feature is possessed only by religious belief --but even if it were possessed by some other sort of belief, it would not have the same effect as it does have on religious belief. That is, the feature would not make it the case that this other sort of belief ought to be tolerated, even if this other sort of belief had the feature.

(b4) The feature is possessed by sorts of belief other than religious belief, but it does not have the same effect on those other sorts of belief. That is, the feature does not make it the case that these other sorts of belief ought to be tolerated, even though they have this property or feature.

I would have thought that (b2) would be enough to answer Macklem's question, at least as I read the version of it provided in the quotation above. But I take it that Gary Kemp's comment provides something along the lines of (b2), and you say that GK's argument isn't specific to religion. I think Simon May's argument is along the lines of (b4), so perhaps that means you are looking for something like (b4).

[DE]

I think William James offers what could be turned into an argument for the special toleration of religion. The types of questions religions propose answers to cannot ever be answered through any way other than faith. We'll never be able to prove through some scientific method or cogent argumentation that God does or doesn't exist or that this religion is better than that. This can't be said, at least not in the same way, about many other types of ideologies. So by definition, any religion that people find themselves drawn to believe is as good as any other or as none, and in so far as these beliefs have some sort of benefits for the person holding them (as James thinks they do), they are significantly better than none. The fact that you can't ever know that the position you're holding is superior to that of the religious group in question, and that its practices and teachings are very meaningful and helpful to those who follow it, seems to me like a special argument in favor of religious tolerance.

[Ophelia Benson]

Martha Nussbaum's article in reply to Susan Moller Okin's 'Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women', 'A Plea for Difficulty,' makes such an argument. Okin's article and the replies published in the book of the same name (including Nussbaum's) are all online at Boston Review.

[Les Swanson]

Why is religion singled out for constitutional protection?

1) The role of religion in the last 3,000 years of history.
2) The role of religion in the settling of America, and in the almost two centuries leading up to the ratification of the Constitution.
3) For many people religion is the most defining aspect of their lives. It is their primary source of identity. A Catholic, A Muslim, A Hindu is who they are in the deepest sense of what matters most to them and what joins them together with fellow believers, and separates them from others.
4) For many people religion is the primary source of their moral values, their cultural customs, and their family, and immediate, and larger social lives.

Secular beliefs can play a very similar role in people's lives. However, secular beliefs are usually more individualized, less institutional, and involve less social cohesiveness with "fellow believers." Also, throughout history, secular believers have usually been "outsiders" to a much greater extent than they have been "insiders" in their culture or state or society. I also think that "secular believers" are often much more skeptical in their approach to the large issues in life like morality, justice, beauty, death, etc. In this sense, they are not so much believers as questioners and seekers and often upset those who would prefer a more "formalized" approach to living. The familiar usually receives more protection; the unfamiliar is usually considered more dangerous.

[Heath White]

I think there may be a clear reason why you are not going to find arguments for toleration of religion qua religion--a lack of clarity about what constitutes "religion." Most toleration arguments go, "We have reason to tolerate beliefs/practices with feature F; religious beliefs/practices have feature F; therefore, etc." But of course such an argument is about F things, not religion per se. What you would need for a religion-specific argument would be a premise like, "F is a necessary and sufficient condition for being a *religious* belief/practice" and, since there are no N&S conditions for being religious, you are not going to find such an argument.

[Mark Engleson]

Heath White points out a major problem with "religion" - the definition of it. I think Kent Greenawalt's "Religion as a Concept in Constitutional Law" does a good job of setting out the various suggestions, and dissects all of them. This may come from your colleague, Doug Laycock, I can't remember for certain - there may be no such thing as "religion," just the different various religions.
One interesting book to look at for its use (or abuse) of religion is Dworkin's Life's Dominion. In summary the book's argument is this:
1.) Something is definied as a "Religion" dependent on addressing certain issues historically associated with religious doctrines.
2.) Beliefs about abortion and euthanasia, are, as properly viewed by the law, "religious."
3.) Religious beliefs ought to be given special legal protection.
4.) Thus, any views on subjects like abortion and euthanasia, overtly religous or secular, are, legally, religious beliefs deserving of constitutional protection.
1 and 3 are very controversial, 2 is as well, though perhaps not as much. As for 1 and 2, Greenawalt's argument about defining religion seem to apply: you can't definie, and there's probably some religion, somewhere, that doesn't address abortion and euthanasia.
We seem to run into the initial problem on 3 that we were looking to solve: why should religious belief be given special protection?
But one of the twists of this argument is that it doesn't really give religion any special protection at all. By casting the net of religion as widely as he does, Dworkin encompasses nearly any issue of conscience.
One criticism of this is that by expanding the concept as much as he does, Dworkin is not taking the distinctiveness of religion seriously. This argument could be made from both a religious and a secular perspective. The religious perspective would say that its insulting to have many ideologies considering religion; the secular humanist might well find his ideology being called religion repugnant.

[Matt]

You might want to look more closely at Locke's 'Letter' because he offers a number of arguments in favor of religious toleration as such. The most obvious of them is itself a religious argument, namely that faith can save only if it is genuine. 'I may be cured of some disease by remedies that I have not faith in; but I cannot be saved by a religion that I distrust'. But this argument obviously has little traction outside of his own theological commitments.

However, he gives a more secular argument as well. He believed that all the powers of a government come from the consent of the governed, obviously. But people can never rationally consent to give up their own judgment about how to save their own souls, which implies that the civil authorities can never claim this power for themselves. 'Nor can any such power [i.e. to persecute heretics] be vested in the magistrate by the consent of the people, because no man can so far abandon the care of his own salvation as blindly to leave the choice of any other....'

This contractualist argument for religious toleration might be useful to you. It has a much narrower scope than the standard rights-based and utilitarian arguments.

[Avery Plank]

Interesting question... Someone a bit off the radar that you might look at is Roger Williams the 17th century clergyman. I have heard that Martha Nussbaum has written on Williams which might be worth looking at as well. I'm not really going to go into what exactly Williams argument is but you might want to examine it as an argument for religious toleration qua religion.

[Mark]

How is the argument that people cannot rationally consent to giving up judgment about saving their own souls secular?

This argument relies on a number of assumptions:
1.) There is such a thing as a "soul," and people have them.
2.) There is a God.
3.) God provides for the salvation of people's sols.
4.) That a certain kind of voluntarism is necessary for salvation, an informed and willing consent.
An atheist will reject all of these assumptions, because of their views about reality.
But you don't have to be an atheist to reject this argument. All that you need to believe is that salvation (regardless of how important it is to your faith) is not *politically* more important than other concerns. I doubt many of such faith hold this view, but consider this set of beiefs:
1.) Salvation is the greatest good.
2.) While salvation is the greatest good, it is not the end or good that has the greatest political priority.
These 2 beliefs are not inconsistent. It might be a bit strange to hold them and draw the consequences of these beliefs, but I can cite examples: many Reform Jews agree with the official position of the faith that physician-assisted suicide is morally impermissible. But they still favor legalizing it, because they believe that individual rights/autonomy are prior (think Rawlsian sense) to the goods of faith in the political arena.

[Matt]

I said above that Locke's contractualist argument for religious toleration has a more secular foundation than his argument based on the nature and efficacy of faith. Mark disagrees, saying that the contractualist argument makes religious assumptions of its own, about the existence of the human soul etc. I see what he means, but I think it misses the point.

Locke says that if you believe you have an eternal soul, then it is irrational for you to give a civil government the power to decide how to be saved in the next life. Fair enough. But what if you don't believe you have an eternal soul? In that case, it would be doubly irrational for you to grant that power to a government. It would be akin to granting the civil authorities the power to decide how to cure hoof rot in unicorns, when unicorns don't exist.

Thus, whether you believe in an eternal soul or not, it would make no sense to give political leaders the power to decide what to do with that soul. This is the point of his contractualist argument in favor of specifically religious toleration. Of course, Locke himself thought it was permissible to persecute atheists, but this was for the purely secular (and presumably false) reason that atheism erodes civil society by rendering oaths meaningless.

[Mark]

If one has no soul, and granting political authorities the right to control would akin to giving them the power to decide how to cure hoof root in unicorns, what is the objection to letting them have such power? There are many odd, unenforceable and unenforced laws on the books - I'm sure some are urban legends of the "ducks may not wear pants" type. But if a jurisdiction did actually have a law prohibiting pants on ducks, I don't see why anyone would care, as ducks never wear pants. I'm concerned about government causing harm or violating individual rights. If souls do not exist, the government can't harm you, qua salvation, by legislating in that area. A regime that enforces a faith would be a bad one, but we can explain why its bad without having to talk about souls, or even about religion. The presumption of liberty found in nearly all of the political theories (that are taken seriously as normative theories, not just as historical curiosities) draws limits on the state which would make this impermissible, but those limits wouldn't be unique to be religious belief. I'm a bit of a pragmatist here: I don't care if there are 10,000 pages of bizarre but unenforceable laws, and I don't see why I should, aside from the waste of time spent writing them. You cannot harm or wrong a third twin, so one really ought not to care about any such law at all. Thus it goes with souls, if they don't exist.

[Brian Leiter]

A somewhat belated reply to David Killoren's helpful question (several comments up): anyone of your b1-4 would answer the question. However, I didn't take Gary Kemp's example to be a case of b2, because I assumed that many different kinds of belief actually have the feature of "meaningfulness" (or "super meaningfulness" or however one wants to define it). But your typology is useful, thanks.

[david]

Thanks, that does clarify things. Gary Kemp's version of the argument does assert that religious beliefs are alone in being super-meaningful, which would make his argument a case of (b2). But I agree that this assertion is not very plausible, which should mean that any compelling version of GK's argument couldn't be a case (b2).

[Tengku Ahmad Hazri]

[Note to Brian: Apologies for posting this comment for the second time. I left out a significant part of it earlier. Please disregard my earlier comment. Thank you]

It's because we think within the secular framework that we cannot find any arguments on a system that accords special treatment to religious toleration. The ideal Islamic state that Muslims advocate for is one such system.

The Islamic state, as understood from the time of the Prophet (peace be upon him), the four Rightly Guided Caliphs to modern thinkers in the likes of Abul A'la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb, is essentially an ideological state and threfore special treatment is accorded to those who share that ideology, namely the religion of Islam. However even within this system, two further groups are given special status: the People of the Book (i.e. Christians and Jews) and the People of the Covenant (non-Muslims living in the Islamic state). The former, however, have more privileges than the latter in some respects. For example, while the State does not recognize a marriage between a Muslim and non-Muslim unless the latter converts into Islam, marriage between a Muslim and a Christian or a Jew is permissible. In addition, places of worship have a central place in Islam and even in a state of war, Muslims soldiers are refrained from causing destruction to such places. Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) reportedly even helped in the reconstruction of churches after a disastrous flood destroyed them.

The basis of this is the Islamic reply to the question: "Why does the State come into existence?". Social contract theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau emphasized on the individual need, namely survival (Hobbes) or protection of property (Locke). Thus according to this view, I want the State to exist to protect me from you while you want it to exist to protect yourself from me for otherwise it would be a situation of "war of all against all" in a life that is "solitary, poor, brutish, nasty and short."

By contrast, writers such as Maududi emphasized that the State in Islam exists as a direct emanation from the human belief and spirit and accordingly it is natural that it be reflected in its laws. Thus I want the State to exist to serve Islamic goals, you want it to serve Islamic goals and the rulers too would want the same objective. In Social Justice in Islam, Sayyid Qutb writes, "No true social justice can be achieved without the inner convictions of the spirit."

The defining feature of religion, as distinguished from any other idea or belief, is that it internalizes the law within the individual - it serves as the inbuilt mechanism by which the individual measures the rightfulness of his conduct. This is done by indoctrinating imaginary rewards and punishments, the classic case being sins, Paradise and Hell. Although this might be dismissed as too trivial for the secular mind, for the believer it applies with equal weight and force as with any coercion imposed by law. The Scandinavian realist Karl Olivecrona had pointed out that what is "law" is ultimately a figment of imagination - its authority lies not in its force as law but in the Pavlovian conditioning of the human mind to believe that the law has authority by means of associating wrongs with punishments which we are taught to believe since childhood. I think this has the same species of inner psychological experience with religion. Since we obey the law not because of the fear of legal punishment but because of our belief of the existence of legal punishments, the belief in the existence of Divine punishments would equally compel the believer to act what is morally right.

To that extent, it is necessary that religion is given special treatment and toleration insofar as it facilitates the task of the law. Other ideologies, such as Marxism, do not govern the lives of individuals in their private sphere. One of the feminists' objection to the private-public dichotomy is that 'private' provides the room for the State to avoid responsibility by not extending the application of the law into this mythically constructed entity called "private". Accordingly if I am the ruler of a powerful state and I know that I can avoid the law, nothing would stop me from committing cruelties, say, genocide since I am left with no criteria to measure good and evil - I am authority unto myself. Stanley Milgram's shocking experiment in the 1960s reveals more than just human propensity to inflict torture or unquestioning obedience to authority, it shows that individuals, when left in an environment where the standards of what is right and wrong are freely transgressed, when the originator of legal rules that sets the standard (the State) would not encroach, would eventually succumb to their own self-formulation of standard - in the case of Milgram's experiment, the person in authority becomes the standard. Religion, on the other hand, fixes the standard within the human mind that is operational everywhere, even in a remote island or Antartica.

Tengku Ahmad Hazri
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

[Charles Hooker]

John Witte, Jr., in his book "Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment" constructs an argument for the special toleration and treatment of religion qua religion in the United States. Although his argument is mostly historical, his accounts cite and tap into its philosophical bases.

Additionally, Robert Bellah argues that secular society should value/tolerate religion qua religion in his jeremiad "Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic" found in his book "The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial." Martin Marty may also be helpful on this score--particularly his volume, "Religion and Republic."

Finally, H. Richard Niebuhr (e.g., "Radical Monotheism and Western Culture" and "The Kingdom of God in America") and Paul Tillich (e.g., in his "Systematic Theology") each make arguments of mixed theology and philosophy for tolerating religion qua religion as special. Tillich, in particular, views religion as "special" for its ability to tap into Being-Itself to answer questions posed by philosophy which are un-answerable by human reason alone by virtue humanity's existential characteristic of finitude.

[Mr. T]

No one has mentioned the most applicable book here:

The Right to be Wrong, by Seamus Hasson.

The book singularly addresses the topic above but simultaneously undercuts its very focus: i.e. there IS no valid argument for religous "toleration" per se that doesn't shortchange natural humanity (regardless of how one defines Natural law or natural humanity, and on what theory).

Instead, there is a universal and self-evident proposition that all life depends upon a healthy and uncoerced conscience. And it is precisely this necessary freedom that requires a right (if only because there is no moral de jure reason for limiting it), including, as the namesake says, the right to be wrong.

The book is short and very entertaining, but nonetheless groundbreaking and intellectual.