Secularists fear that the study of religion, especially in religious schools, amounts to a kind of indoctrination. This will take us to the bad old days of Christendom, when people fought to the death over points of doctrine, and western empires swept the world forcing foreign peoples to submit to their uniform, arbitrary and indefensible notions of truth.
What they are either unwilling or unable to recognise is that the relativistic and scientistic worldview with which they have replaced religious teaching is itself an arbitrary notion of truth. Just as Christian Europe used to condescend the benighted natives for holding to their backward ways, so modern secular European and American liberalism dismisses as “regressive” anyone who denies that science is the only vehicle of truth.
What is rarely acknowledged is that this is a new manifestation of the same old Western imperialism by which the Christian faith was once spread. Non-western wisdom of Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic or African thought is ignored - or at best, reinterpreted and ‘demythologised’ along the lines of western secularist thought, reduced condescendingly to some scheme of self-help. So Buddhism yields to mindfulness, Islam to Sufi poetry or a strong sense of community spirit, Hinduism to purely physical reinterpretations of Yoga. In and of themselves, in comparison with the primacy of science, philosophies which rely on the notion of a spiritual reality beyond the quantifiable realm of the material world are accorded no value at all. They are all matters of opinion, entertained as long as they remain hobbies or harmless private fancies, but permitted no say at all in the public square.
Neither Christianity as the historic religious tradition of Europe nor those of the wider world are taken seriously by modern mandarins, whose knowledge of such things tends to go little beyond primary (for US/Japan readers, elementary) school level. Hence the advent in the UK of newfangled “British values,” dreamt up in a Whitehall office and imposed by authority of the State. Cardinal among these is the value of “tolerance.” But as Goethe opined, “to tolerate is to offend.” Our European Christian forebears would certainly have found the principle of tolerance insipid. This new commandment of the State to “tolerate” my neighbour goes nowhere near as far as Christ’s commandments: to love my neighbour, and harder still, to love my enemy.
Tolerance is well-intentioned, conceived to encourage diversity and mutual respect. But it is not enough. Just to “tolerate” my Bangladeshi neighbours because they cook a good curry, as long as they don’t start giving out copies of the Qur’an on the street; just to “tolerate” Polish Catholics or African Pentecostals just as long as they don’t express any views on human sexuality; or for that matter, just to “tolerate” that small minority of people who do not think they fit into the normative sexual binary – none of this is enough for anything that can reasonably be called a society. It might make it possible for large numbers of unconnected individuals to live reasonably near each other while minding their own business, perhaps. That said, early signs of this social experiment are not especially positive.
Worse, tolerance ends up crushing diversity through the systematic practice of indifference. If all I do is “tolerate” the differences of others, I condescend to them. I am in effect saying that their differences, their worldview, their ideas, their truth-claims, don’t really matter. They are outside the sphere of my interest or consideration, not worthy even of debate.
And this is the viewpoint which we are inculcating in our young. There is only one way of thinking about the world, and it’s the European secularist, progressive way. Anything else is to be tolerated, but only insofar as it does not dare to challenge this norm. And all this, while pretending to abolish normativity.
In the end, my thoughts or yours about this do not actually matter: British values are non-negotiable, not even debatable in schools. We’ve abandoned Moses’ stone tablets and replaced them with state dictat, to be enforced and inculcated without question: a new secular orthodoxy of tolerance above all things, so that anyone who dissents is not only wrong, but intolerant, bigoted: in a word, evil. The old orthodoxy is the new heresy, and religions are its despised teachers.
The secularists claim to be anti-authoritarian, ridding us of the social chains that have confined us. The reality is that one authority has been usurped by another, a cuckoo in the nest, and that it is there to stay, regardless of what teachers or parents may think of the relative value of the new against the old. As for school pupils, they aren’t encouraged to think about it at all. To question the prime virtue of tolerance would be seen as a direct highway to sectarian extremism: time to call in the Prevent team, as some teachers and clergy have found at the cost of their jobs.
But what’s the point of questioning, anyway? After all, everything is just a matter of opinion. And that’s a matter of fact.
I agree that modern Western "tolerance" is fine only if you stay as superficial as possible. Holi is a great Hindu holiday as long as it stays at the "flinging-paint-everywhere" level; there is not much any deeper than that. Christian holidays are stripped of any serious preparation of fasting or study, and are "tolerated" as long as they are a fat man in a red suit delivering presents, or a chocolate bunny. "You're just being so negative... Nooo funn!" is one way to react, another (which I heard a lot at university) is "You don't actually BELIEVE any of that, do you?".. Well, yes, I did then and I do now, and I have this insatiable morbid curiousity about what lies beneath the surface (which is curbed only by a lack of time and resources - but I am still curious).
I do believe that tolerance is a good thing. In building materials, tolerance is set as the amount of variation allowed. It's not unlimited, it's from here to their and not beyond. It can keep 2 different materials in close contact from ripping each other apart... much like "tolerance" in a community prevents fires being set on residential property as a warning, or targeted humans from being torched. The problem is that modern liberal Western tolerance does not have agreed-upon parameters, 'safe zones', or ability to tolerate anything not polarized black & white visions of the world. .. which makes it totally odd that the superficial version of Holi should be popular, with no black or white anywhere.
Thank you, Fr. Plant, for your courageous, acute, straightforward analysis of this troublesome situation
of the so called `western European` world. If only we could have an honest `dialogue` among us,
I mean if these problems could be honestly debated among people with different world views, we could have some hope of real cultural progress. But what causes more concern is the fact that the request of an honest dialogue is violently rejected by some (too many) of these people. Thank you very much for your articles. Fr. Franco Sottocornola (Shinmeizan)