Against Religious Tolerance

Kierkegaard and Hauerwas against slavish citizenship

Religious tolerance is, in some way or another, a key aspect of liberalism in the modern era. While this hasn’t always led to the kind of “secular society” that liberally-minded philosohers have sometimes dreamed of, it has meant that tolerance—both the giving and reception of tolerant behaviour—is a presupposition for those otherwise potentially society-upsetting religious sorts that do not always cleanly fit into the prepackaged biopolitical map that has been handed down from the transcendent position of governmental authority.

In this relation of the law-giver and the law-receiver, there is, by extension, a relation of authority and toleration that ties the two distinct parties together: one demands the other to follow its laws, the other assents that the laws handed down to them are appropriate (or appropriate enough) to their continued production and reproduction of whatever type of life they live. Here it is important to note that this governing—governed dialectic is not one that is properly distinct in the sense that philosophers usually mean: the governing emerge from the governed when we account for the temporal reality of the dual excitement and mundanity of the everyday.

As a part of this, and especially within the irrational flow of Western liberal history, this has meant that Christianity—or, rather, Christendom—has been given the whip hand. In this sense, it appeared that Christianity was taken from the position of a Christ Who handed Himself over to His soon-to-be murderers in the disavowal of all worldly authority to the figure of impositional power, the one who is known by his aesthetic display of power, over the feeble human subject. Regardless of how we feel about this historical development, it does leave us with an important series of cascading questions: is this the current relation of Christianity with the world today? Can we really say that Christians ought to tolerate their neighbours? Can we really say that was ever an appropriate relation that we could really call Christian?

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Hauerwas Against Tolerance

I won't waste time illustrating the “pro-tolerance” position here. Any given liberal theologian and a great many popular apologists will give a proper account of the reconciliatory, possibly even universalist aspect of the Christian faith that must stand alone and separated from the particularities of Christ’s message. These people will give a far stronger case of their position than I could bring myself to.

Instead, I turn to Stanley Hauerwas and his opposition to religious tolerance in the age of postmodernity:

“How would you like to be the one tolerated? Tolerance is always a position for those in power and Christianity is in the process of losing its power, so one of the things that Christians have to do is not ask “how are we going to understand other faiths?”, but “how are faiths going to understand us?

…

You probably are thinking more like an American and how do you deal with religious diversity in America, rather than thinking like a Christian. How a Christian thinks is “how do we witness to people our love of God in a way that they will want as a matter of fact to talk to us because have something interest to say?” This is extremely important because I fear that, in the name of religious diversity, Christians increasingly are learning to say things like “well, I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s my personal opinion.” What an odd grammar of speech that is that would derive from the presumption that I need to be tolerant. Christians don’t need to be tolerant, we need to be humble, and we need to be humble, that is, to have the virtue of humility, because we worshipped a crucified saviour.”

Exiting the Pagan’s Castle

For Hauerwas, a clear difficulty for the antiquated idea of “Christian tolerance” is that, even if we were to suggest that the idea is fundamentally un-Christian, we no longer exist in a world where it is possible for Christians to assume such high-minded positions prior to theological reflection. The world has changed in the challenges that it hands down to the faithful and, therefore, we must abandon the outdated schema of Christian tolerance of secularity and other faiths: in short, there is no position of authority these days for the church triumphant to enjoy¹.

The problem emerges when we take the identity “Christian” (and, for Hauerwas in particular, American Christianism) to be equivalent to the ontological fact of Christian justification—or, to conflate “the world” that cries out a name with the fact of “new creatures” becoming “born again”. Contra the generalized liberal theological position of Christianity qua “civilization mission,” where the world was not revealed to be necessarily in contradiction with eschatological mission (John 18:36) but rather an unmediated idea in need of Hegelian qualification², Hauerwas and S. K. before him remind us that these two notions are fracturously dissimilar. He notes that Christians might find themselves thinking “more like an American” than as a Christian, a bold claim in the apparent age of Christian nationalism. As our dear Dane would once note, the insanity of Christendom (and, in our case, post-Christendom) is that the tolerant (or, in our case, the intolerant) find themselves having understood the nature of the commandments, people live in a lax malaise of assuming everyone will be fine without having to do anything.³

S. K., in critical engagement with Luther, attempts to bring us back into the fold:

“There is always with us a worldliness which would have the name of being Christian, but would have it at a price as cheap as possible. This worldliness became observant of Luther. It listened, and it took the precaution to listen a second time for fear it might have heard amiss, and thereupon it said, ‘Capital! That suits us exactly.’ Luther says, ‘It is faith alone that matters’; the fact that his life expresses works he does not himself say, and now he is dead, so that this is no longer an actuality. Let us take then his word, his doctrine—and we are liberated from all works. Long live Luther!”⁴

Having been offered something at “a price as cheap as possible” for so long, there is a flabbiness, a laziness, an expected spiritual givenness that views the idea of a “second birth” as altogether unnecessary when the first occurred on Christian soil—a wonderful illustration, but an. Christian mothers, by the help of Christian doctors, bring Christian children into this Christian nation by way a Christian hospital built out of Christian bricks sourced from Christian soil that now only grows Christian grass for the Christian cows—how all these things become “new creatures” when some of them are not creatures at all whatsoever is beyond me, but I presume that the American theologians of neo-indulgence have already cooked up some particularly sophisticated reponse to that.

Worldliness pricks its ears at the idea of sola fide, sola Gratia becomes a tempting invitation to the world that seeks to do as it wills under the guise of God’s. Thanks to the unlimited freedom of perspective that the Lord grants us through His faithfulness that binds Him to us and us to Him, the adversary is always ready to turn the very good itself back onto itself and invert it into something new—he seizes the opportunity afforded by all commandments, produced in him every kind of coveting (Romans 7:8) whereby the law is turned into his law.

From the Castle, to the Desert

Where the call for mercy in “an eye for an eye”, the Lord calling His children to go to that limit and no further, might teach us great cares for our neighbour than the mere desire for revenge, it is inverted by the adversary into a bloodthirsty desire for this other person, abstracted from a neighbour into a mere other, to become the mode for desire to run rampant over our better judgement for how our lives ought to be—where once we might have acted mercifully and repaid for our mercy⁵, there is little more than presumption. This Vordenken⁶ rolls along from this point uncontested, prepared to invert any and all possibilities for our recognition of something from “the Wholly Other” into the impatient impertinence that God simply hasn’t kept up with the actually rather impressive march of human progress—from nowhere and to nowhere either. For this careless individual, lacking that higher desire, that higher madness of religious faith⁷, it is no great leap to take whatever happens to be his given desires at any given moment of his life to be equivalent to divine will. From this point, having uncritically decided that what one wants is what God desires, the movement to a position of tolerance is small. “Tolerance”, a product of Vordenken, realises itself in the casual self-assuredness and self-righteousness of “the church triumphant”.

Therefore, assuming this position of power seems off the table—as it has always been, but now we lack even the justifiable excuses for the misappropriation of faith in a world which congratulated itself on achieving a faith without risk. No longer can we justify from even a position of pragmatics that there is a role for “tolerance” in the critical thought of Christian life—indeed, such suggestions will collapse into absurdity or a bleating nihilism and, therefore, our task is to remind ourselves that Christ never offered us a way to subjugate the world to our will. Instead, our methods start with the methods that Christ showed us were possible. This, of course, isn’t a call to Christian quietism or the acceptance of evil to be evil uncontested, but, rather, turning to Barth, we might suggest that although Christ's mission is not of this world, God's grace “is in this world... for in this world God's will is to be done”⁸—while the church triumphant stands as a subversion of Christianity by way of its own language, you and I, my reader, now live in a world where the church militant may stand as a subversion of the language of Christendom against secular idealism: “…now truth is triumphant, as once it was militant”⁹ and in the twilight of the gods, it may be militant again.

The Church Militant Can Only Be Real

In a technical sense, “idealism” refers to the idea that the way we think about the world (or, at the very least, primarily the way we think about the world) is what shapes it. While this takes on a great many forms throughout the history of philosophy, an important theme that emerges from this roughly sketched “family resemblance” is the primacy of the idea prior to the realisation of the effect in reality—we can change the world merely by thinking about it in the correct way. Needless to say, there is a certain type of despair which proceeds when we think that thinking correctly about the world is the be-all-and-end-all of changing it.

For many Christians, especially in an age where the “iron cage of language” takes on an odd material reality where the “invisible church” is first invisible and a church later, this is the basic approach for understanding spirituality:

“In this era, martyrdom and persecution are just as unimaginable as they were in the church triumphant, since this would presuppose that faith is recognizable, that it might actually do something that mattered, and that anyone would care enough to persecute it. In the age of the church indifferent, the truest sign of one’s earnest Christianity is the ability to don the faith loosely, with an air of ironic detachment, and thereby blend into the rest of the (nominally) Christian crowd.”¹⁰

In an age defined by idealism, where our entire being is tied up in the declaration—especially a public declaration, for the viewing pleasure of the faceless, thoughtless crowd and replicate—that one is some way or other, regardless of whether one is some way or other. This is the underlying presumption of the “church triumphant”, a fantastical image that inspires wayward youths to traditional churches in search of “muscular” theology and right-facing “chatterers” to bleat about this or that statistical oddity or victory concerning some Christian triviality—as if God Himself would be so foolish as to be convinced of anything by the way of mere statistics, as if capturing “the numerical” is a biblical theme at all:

“But, for example, it has become a very common witticism... If Christ came again to the world now, he would be crucified again, unless the death penalty had been abolished by this time. People drop this remark as casually as they say "Good day," only with greater pretentiousness; and people find it said so aptly and strikingly, and it does not occur at all, not in the remotest way, to the person who says it to question whether he himself is a Christian; it does not occur to the person who says it to become aware of this whole mirage of Christendom. Truly this is inexplicable to me. It has become almost a saying in Christendom that if Christ came again he would meet the same fate as before, when he came to non-Christians - and yet Christendom is supposed to be the Church triumphant, which presumably, when all is said and done, would add to its triumphs the new one of crucifying Christ.”¹¹

In the “mass object” of Christendom—or, more properly for our own age, post-Christendom, where the church is considered to be more like a failingly ill child who has managed to take three or four steps forward and is now only five or six steps behind his classmates (how surprised we are to see him do anything at all!) than an actual physical and spiritual presence of Christ, the God-Man (how surprised we are to not see Him do anything at all!)—the danger is idealism, where the church was merely a culture of triumphalism and not an engagement with “the world” in any real, meaningful sense. By placing the image of the church, as the place where coffee mornings and handshakes occur, as the church proper, we are led to this theological illusion of the church triumphant and, with that, the confused idea that the church not only does congratulate itself for conquering the world by Pelagian humanism but also should conquer the world—whether with God or against Him, but always with a slogan on His behalf.

In order for the church militant to discover itself in the actions of those expediti that march to its drum, Christianity is first and foremost concerned with creating individuals who have, in their lives, both are and are becoming a “concrete existence”, an expression of the Body of Christ in the material. This “concrete existence” is the basic belief in the possibility for and the realisation of that possibility that to love God is to be filled with a love that loves the neighbour, not merely a conception of love for the other qua object that is created by the lover.¹² More than merely learning to become a Christian in the right way—an odious, paternalist attitude that makes God the brow-beating “no!”-issuer to the scrupulous figure doomed to existence—this anti-idealist notion of love is what gives the Christians in the world existence against the world itself. At once, the “invisible church” is, apparently, visible to the one who has eyes to see and ears to hear and, yet, is invisible to the one who doesn’t¹³—like salt in water and dissolves into unrecognisable anonymity, Christians operate under the watchful eye of the state as low-flying aircraft avoids radar detection; and like low-flying aircraft, the Christian operates by unveiling the bomb that had gone off in history¹⁴ to the offence of the world.

“…a manifest, hidden church would follow Christ in siding and hiding with and among the poor and oppressed. For all of the structural symmetry between Anti-Climacus’s high Christology and low Christology, clearly Kierkegaard considers God’s kenotic self-emptying into a poor and suffering human being to be determinative for occasioning the possibility of offense and for providing the prototype for Christian emulation.”¹⁵

On Post-Christendom

It appears, then, my reader, that some notions need to be rearranged, some wounded conception that needs to be opened up once again so that the bones can be realigned, so that healing can properly come about instead of a mere end to some temporary pain. The aesthetic indulgence of the red-bearded faux-Viking or the Byzantine Knight is little more than “playing Christianity”, an elaborate game of dress-up that lacks even the practical import of realisation of the child at play—a virtual alienation that longs for the alienation of sin, that longs for the despair of becoming a self, that longs for Christendom in a world which has decided it desires new toys and that God has decided no longer needs the repugnant, violent form of His love.

Here, in “the culture of the city” where the meaning of the city is once again obscured to us, a repetition of the same babelic tendency that lies in the heart of the one who would don the Lord’s clothes if only he could prove that he could do a better job, is where post-Christendom has already unfolded in its infancy—and the infantile disorder of postmodernity, plagued by its parody of the ones who would genuinely “play Christianity”, is found in these would-be radicals that are little more than journalists, than balconeers—than would-be toleraters, who have nothing to tolerate and no audience to tolerate before. This world no longer exists and is no longer possible—even without mentioning whether it would be desirable.

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To see Hauerwas in his own words, see the video below:

1. "The Exposition" in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 90, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard; Concepts of Power in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, p. 123 J. K. Hyde

2. “They are embarrassed by obeying God because he is God; and so they obey him—because he is a very great genius, perhaps almost the greatest, greater even than Hegel.”—JP I 1847

3. Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 114, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

4. For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourselves! and Three Discourses (1851), p. 41, S. Kierkegaard

5. Works of Love, p. 376, S. Kierkegaard

6. “Presumption”, see: Beyond Immanence: The Theological Vision of Kierkegaard and Barth, Kindle location 2955, A. J. Torrance & A. B. Torrance; “Transcendence in Kierkegaard and Barth”, p. 17, A. Myrick

7. “There is only one possible way of being madder than a madman: it is the higher madness of attaching oneself in all seriousness to a madman, regarding him as a wise man.” “The Inviter” in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which 'Accompanied' It, p. 55, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

8. “Jesus Christ and the Movement for Social Justice (1911)”, p. 36, K. Barth, from Karl Barth and Radical Politics, ed. G. Hunsinger

9. “The Exposition“ in Training in Christianity and the Edifying Discourse which ‘Accompanied’ It, p. 90, [Anti-Climacus], ed. S. Kierkegaard

10. “Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 269, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

11. “Thoughts That Wound From Behind - For Upbuilding: Christian Addresses” in Christian Discourses, p. 229, S. Kierkegaard

12. Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age: Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and the Question of “Religionless Christianity, p. 9-10, M. D. Kirkpatrick

13. “Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 266, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan

14. Karl Barth’s iconic illustration of the Incarnation, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 29, K. Barth

15. “Politics of the Church, Hidden and Revealed, in Søren Kierkegaard and John Howard Yoder”, J. A. Mahn, from Kierkegaard and Political Theology, p. 270, ed. R. Sirvent and S. Morgan