Toleration carries a connotation of putting up with something that smells, something unattractive. Russell Moore in Onward and John Piper on his blog point out that toleration or mere civility is not enough, that it is kindness that is the objective in how to treat others of differing conscience (faith, morality values). Both of these authors are speaking to followers of Jesus. Kindness in fact is at the heart of many religions that have some form of the golden rule, and sets a high but voluntary bar for our behavior.
When Roger Williams spoke of toleration, however, he was not trying to set the highest good for individual behavior, but rather trying to specify what is unacceptable: persecution for cause of conscience. It is the difference between legislating sobriety vs. deciding driving while intoxicated must be illegal. His proposition goes more as follows. Kindness is best. Some types of unkindness are legal. Intolerance due to cause of conscience should be illegal in civil law. He was championing the separation of church and state to prevent the real and present persecution for cause of conscience in his day. He recognized that human groups operating in the collective can quickly become cruel to those that do not succumb to the group’s thinking pattern. He sought to provide protection that would allow exclusion from a church or other similar gathering but not from civil society. He would have required that the tolerated be able to have their civil needs met.
Toleration can often be often accomplished by accommodation. In a diverse work environment, if one person needs to leave on Friday afternoon to observe Sabbath, others of a different conscience can be scheduled to work. Corporations have achieved practical accommodation in civil society for years, sometimes at significant expense, to keep the peace and provide respect for individual employees. Small businesses have less leeway to provide accomodation — but could be encouraged to band together to provide a similar level of civil function. The challenge comes when it costs money to accommodate–when someone of a different conscience is not available at the same skill level, in the same location, or at the frequency the market demands.
Does toleration include freedom of association? Some freedom of association does not disrupt civil peace as it could be accommodated–as when if one baker does not agree to serve you due to conscience there are others close by that can. When it cannot be accommodated (there is no one willing in good conscience to serve the need at hand) then society has a choice to require freedom of association be sacrificed to meeting civil needs or to expect otherwise legal behavior to be forfeited. Often we’ve chosen the former, and in modern language we would call that civil rights. However, we have not found a solid boundary where an individual’s rights are worth sacrificing freedom of association, but rather an expanding moving target. Reliance on accommodation of conscience vs. exercising rights enables minimization of sacrifice and maximizes freedom of association. However, in our constitution freedom of association is never made absolute. That is not one of the freedoms in the first amendment. The first amendment includes the freedom to have your conscience, to gather with others that have that conscience, to exercise that conscience in public, to talk about it, be talked about in the press, and to complain when your civil peace has been violated because of conscience, but you are not protected once you disrupt other’s civil peace and therefore are not guaranteed freedom of association. Civil peace is not however deemed harmed merely by hearing words you disagree with (speech is protected).
Roger Williams’s contention was that the state could never be tolerant if one form of conscience was sanctioned over another. He limited the function of the state to keeping a civil peace. The issue becomes most difficult when the definition of civil peace is muddled–as in the abortion issue. The pro-life side includes the unborn people and pregnant women in the set of people to be protected by civil peace, while prochoice based law does not recognize unborn people to have human rights and only recognizes pregnant women.
Tolerance is not sufficient to create or demonstrate the highest good, but it is preferable to persecution, in a diverse and fallen world. I’ll close with the words of Roger Williams himself deriving that tolerance is not itself evil, as God does it and God is not evil.
Roger Williams on toleration:
Sufferance of evil is not for its own sake but for the sake of Good
For God’s own glory he suffers [i.e., permits or endures] the Vessels of Wrath Romans 9
Though He be of pure eyes and he can behold no iniquity
Yet his pure eyes
patiently and quietly
behold and permit
all the idolatry and prophanity
all thefts and rapes
all the whoredom and abominations
all the murders and poisonings
yet for his glory’s sake he is patient and long permits.
For his people’s sake
The next good in his Son
He is oftentimes pleased to permit and suffer the wicked to enjoy a longer reprieve
He gave Paul all the lives that were in the ship
He would have granted Sodom a longer permission had there been 10 righteous
Had he found some to stand in the gap he would have spared others
He gave Jezebel a time or space
For his Glory sake he permitted longer great sinners, who afterward have perished in their season
Ahab, Ninevites, Amorites and more
It pleased the Lord to permit
the many evils against his own honorable ordinance of Marriage in the world
to suffer that sin of many wives of Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon
with an expression that seems to give approbation
Though we find Him sometimes dispensing with his law
We never find him denying Himself
Or uttering a falsehood
Therefore it crosseth not an absolute rule
To permit and tolerate
Toleration will not hinder our being Holy as He is Holy in all manner of conservation
Even the permission of the souls and consciences of all men in the world
God suffers men like fishes to devour each other
The wicked to flourish
Sends the tyrants of the world to destroy the Nations and plunder them of their riches
Two sorts of commands
Moses gave positive rules both spiritual and civil
He also gave some not positive but permissive for the common good
(e.g. Bills of Divorcement)
So the Lord Jesus expoundeth on it
Moses for the hardness of your hearts suffered or permitted, a toleration.
Williams, Roger. The Complete Writing of Roger Williams, Volume 3, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell, “The Bloudy Tenant,” (Paris, Arkansas: The Baptist Standard Bearer Inc., reprinted in 2005, originally printed in 1867), p. 166.
Originally published on Medium in the publication About Rekindled. Order historical fiction novel Rekindled with the button below.
