Tolerance and toleration

Tolerance and toleration are not the same thing.  Coleridge once elaborated upon the idea in The Friend, pointing out that simply accepting someone else's point of view without wrestling with it or daring to disagree poses as tolerance but in fact simply fails to take the other party seriously, and thus is an act of disrespect.

Marilyn McCord Adams gave the University Sermon earlier this term, and Saturday's article in the Guardian is a little taste of what she had to say. Here it is:

The Guardian, Saturday March 25, 2006
Face to faith 
Liberal Anglicans should not sacrifice their beliefs in order to hold on to church unity at all costs, says Marilyn McCord Adams 
 
Liberal tolerance is easy even for liberals to misunderstand. Liberal societies do and should respect the right of citizens to hold whatever beliefs they like and to organise groups around them, so long as they do nothing to jeopardise the life, liberty, health or property of outsiders. Typically, however, liberal tolerance does not extend any entitlement to set public or institutional policy. In the US for example, the Ku Klux Klan is still a legal organisation, whose members meet to reinforce one another's racist beliefs. But the government's respect for their conscience does not grant them any right that schools be segregated.

In recent Church of England controversies over women priests and bishops, the notion of conscientious objection looms large. Conservatives insist that they could not, in conscience, stay in the C of E, if it makes them accept the offices of women priests and bishops, or even of male bishops who ordain women. Knowing that liberals have a soft spot for tolerance, conservatives demand respect for their conscientious convictions in the form of institutional accommodation. Knowing that liberals have a penchant for inclusivity, conservatives confront advocates of women bishops with a forced choice: either stop pressing your convictions, or split the church.

Even liberal bishops are congratulating themselves after February's general synod, on their steering "a via media between clarity and charity". They boast that the endorsed scheme for transferred episcopal arrangements will forward the process of ordaining women bishops, while changing ecclesial polity to guarantee parishes in dioceses with female bishops or male bishops who have participated in the ordination of women the option of working instead with male bishops whose hands are clean. Inclusivity has been secured, albeit by a move that will compromise the symbolic authority of liberal and women (but not of conservative male) bishops.

Certainly, conservatives have been "wise as serpents" in setting up the dilemma. But in trying for the "innocence of doves", liberal leaders have betrayed their own cause. Liberal beliefs - that conservative positions on gender and sexuality evidence the grip of oppressive taboos - are also conscientious. Sacrificing such beliefs in order to hang on to already impaired communion with those who will remain only if you do what they tell you sends the message that dividing the church is more sinful than misogyny and homophobia, and more important than first-class ecclesial citizenship for women and for homosexual Christians. Conservatives thereby win a double victory: not only do they co-opt the church's institutional structures; they confirm the widespread suspicion that liberals do not have enough backbone to be conscientious at all.

There is no health in this, because "going along to get along" is not the gospel. The synoptics virtually guarantee: because the reign of God stands in judgment over any and every human social system, its coming by successive approximations is sure to violate our socially constructed identities repeatedly. Our part is to discern for all we're worth and to live up to the light that is in us. Because we are fallible, we are not entitled to make undermining other people's lifestyles our ends or chosen means, but we have to accept that it may be a known but unintended side-effect of putting our conscientious convictions into effect. Refusing to do so shows no charity to the oppressed whose cause we feel called to sponsor. Nor can we consistently believe that it shows charity to those who are dug in against us, because our considered opinion is that they are imprisoned by illogic and taboos.

Finally, liberals must not make an idol of unity. In institutions, as in biology, differentiation and division may be in service of richer and more mature integration. John's Jesus prays for unity, but the Jesus-movement precipitated a schism within Judaism. It was not his first choice, but it is how the gospel spread. 

The Rev Marilyn McCord Adams is Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford

Comments

[tortoise]

I do agree that the TEA solution offers only a rather one-sided vision of tolerance. By trying to effect a "conscientious objectors' zone" (which will no doubt be portrayed by its insiders as a "faithful remnant" within the CofE), it inevitably makes the "liberals" (McCord Adams' term - but I think the situation is more complex) do all the conciliatory running.

That said, I'm reluctant to endorse her somewhat dim view of "institutional accommodation". Perhaps it's a matter of semantics, but when tackling church disputes I find accommodation infinitely preferable to compromise. The latter, it seems to me, necessarily entails me abandoning something I still believe to be true; whereas the former, rightly understood, honours genuine difference but does not make an idol of it.

A practical example from my own tradition would be the URC's dual-track policy on baptism. It's not perfect, it's far from intellectually watertight, but in general terms it has enabled those with differing convictions about paedobaptism to continue together in good conscience. And I'd gently suggest that the sacrament of Christian initiation is no less a potential ecclesial "make or break" issue than is apostolic succession within Anglicanism.

There's one other aspect of the quoted article by which I'm very slightly troubled. In using the language of "oppression", "imprisonment", and the converse "first-class ecclesial citizenship", the author allows the impression to persist that ordination is a rights issue. Clearly, it's not: it's a call issue. I certainly recognise that the lived experience of those battling a "stained glass ceiling" will closely mirror that of the socially or politically marginalised who is arbitrarily prevented from full civic participation. But I reckon to portray this simply as a 'liberation' issue does an apologetical disservice to those on both sides of the argument.

[Beth]

Thanks so much for this, Maggi. The Revd. M McC A has put into words here something that has been bothering me for a long while. Why should we accept that a ficiton of church unity is worth the price of marginalizing already marginalized people, and making them feel that the Church has no mission to protect them?