Tolerance and Hospitality: The Key to Religious Plurality

Tolerance and Hospitality: The Key to Religious Plurality

John Schimek

The basis for maintaining a peaceful and respectful multicultural society has evaded many nations throughout history. Its absence has led to great atrocities including, but not limited to, genocide and terrorism. Many people point to tolerance as the key for an appropriately accommodating plural society. After providing a definition for what tolerance is, this paper analyzes tolerance as a virtue and excluvism’s role in its execution. It then demonstrates that tolerance is a virtue that falls short of providing a sustainable peacefully plural society because its determinant lies only in action and goes on to expand on a more positive virtue that is required for a stable diverse society–hospitality. This virtue requires mutual recognition, respect and response rather than the simple indifference that tolerance suggests.Many view tolerance as a virtue and therefore by Aristotle’s definition, a mean between extremes (Irwin, 2009). It then follows that there are times to exercise intolerance (acting against injustice for example) and times to exercise tolerance.However, in the case of religion, exclusive beliefs complicate the execution of tolerance because their doctrine may dictate that individuals of a foreign religion may be excluded from some important spiritual benefits. The solution to this problem is that strong reactions constitute religious intolerance. “Strong reaction is when [the action] is based on seeing a man’s religion as relevant to something which it is not really relevant” (Newman, 1978). Evangelism may be seen as acting against another religion but it is in an area where religion is relevant and is, therefore, still religiously tolerant. Areas where religion is never relevant include but are not limited to the preservation of the other’s life and the pursuit of a more flourishing life because these are areas that people of any faith (or lack thereof) pursue – their faith is irrelevant. Any action against these areas based on religion are strong reactions and therefore intolerant. Tolerance is seen as a mean between extremes, but religious tolerance does not allow acting against people of other religions in matters that are not religious in nature. Exclusive beliefs need not conflict with this definition because a person may believe others are going to Hell 1 / 2

because of their beliefs and only act against them in matters where religion is applicable.There is little debate that virtuously tolerant people better a society. If an entire population were religiously tolerant, there would be less violence and injustice due to differences in beliefs, particularly theological beliefs. Religious tolerance is sufficient for a peaceful and respectful society but maintenance for the long term becomes difficult when relying solely on tolerance. While tolerance may prevent violence and injustice, it leaves undisturbed the underlying dynamic that makes violence possible—prejudice. While discrimination would end, the prejudices may still exist and this would leave a society very close to the violence that its prejudices call for but that its tolerance prevents. This is a notable deficiency of religious tolerance.Tolerance is simply the “acceptance or endurance of something which one has a negative attitude towards” (Newman, 1978). The word is derived from the verb “to tolerate” which implies a certain amount of distaste for the thing tolerated. When this definition of tolerance is applied to religion, it follows that tolerance is not the acceptance of another’s belief but an acceptance or endurance of their holding a belief. This distinction is important in order to maintain the integrity of one’s own beliefs. Because religious tolerance is simply inaction where religion is not important, it “does not foreclose the possibility of looking condescendingly, with loathing and disdain upon the other whom one tolerates” (Conway, 2009). John Doe may be a religiously tolerant man because he is not acting against people of other faiths, but he could very well look at every other religion with the idea that they are far inferior to his own. This idea of presumed superiority is the underlying dynamic that makes the possibility of discrimination and violence ever present. In order to achieve a peacefully plural society, one must “view that many different activities and forms of life which are incompatible are valuable,” – a much more demanding call (Raz, 2001). The virtue of tolerance does not require one to see any value in any other style of life, but that one does not act in accord with those prejudices. As such, it is not the key to a plural society; rather, we must find another more appropriate virtue to accommodate this need. The virtue that demands one to not simply tolerate another’s way of life but respect that way of life is hospitality.The need for hospitality seems to be recognized by Buddhists who call “for a different ethos… an abode of dwelling that describes a fundamental way of being in

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