Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

2. What’s Wrong with Tolerance?

2 What’s Wrong with Tolerance? “Love the sinner and hate the sin” is an inadequate formulation for dealing with the politics of sexuality. The line between whom we are supposed to love (the sinner ) and what we are supposed to hate (the sin) is impossibly movable and contradictory . Just as problematic, this love-hate relation produces tolerance, rather than freedom and justice, as the major way of understanding a range of differences in the United States. This is not just a question of sexuality. Tolerance is supposed to be a sign of openness and a wedge against hate; but in practice it is exclusionary , hierarchical, and ultimately nondemocratic. Tolerance is certainly an improvement over hate, but it is not the same thing as freedom. Paradoxically, tolerance is at once un-American and the most American thing of all. The history of tolerance in the United States, like the history of sexual regulation , is inseparable from the history of religion. Concepts of religious tolerance —or toleration—were developed in Europe in response to the “wars of religion ” that were sparked by the Protestant Reformation. European Christianity was 45 no longer dominated by one “holy, catholic, and apostolic” church, but by several different religions laying claim, sometimes violently, to the title of “true religion.” This was also the period of state formation, in which various forms of social amalgamation —fiefdoms, princely estates, and commonweals—gradually became what we know of today as nation-states. The shifts in social configuration from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries that made modern nation-states were themselves often violent. Most conventional histories of the Reformation and its aftermath understand the “wars of religion” to have been resolved through the development of religious tolerance. But this tolerance, from its inception, was quite limited. For example, in England, the Established Church was (and remains) a Protestant church, the Church of England. The “Toleration Act” of 1689 removed certain legal penalties against those Protestants who dissented from the Church of England, and it ended the requirement that all British subjects subscribe to the articles of faith of the Church of England. Crucially, however, the Act did not protect non-Protestant dissenters from persecution. Catholics and Jews, Muslims and atheists, were all outside the bounds of official tolerance. Although the boundaries of toleration have been expanded over time, the Church of England remains the established and official faith of England. The limits of the Toleration Act were not just its narrow boundaries, but the social hierarchy it established and reaffirmed. As historian Justin Champion points out, “[the Toleration Act] did not break the link between civic liberties and religious identity. So, for example, while Quakers were no longer in danger of eradication by persecution (as long as they registered as non-conformists), they were still exempt from holding local, civic or national offices which were still protected by statutory tests of conscience.”1 In other words, the civic peace that religious tolerance was supposed to achieve institutes a hierarchy. After all, being allowed to live in peace (being “no longer in danger of eradication”), and being a free and equal member of society are two different things. The Toleration Act allowed peoWHAT ’S WRONG WITH TOLERANCE? 46 ple who practiced other faiths (or no faith at all) to “exist,” but they could not claim the same rights and privileges as members of the Church of England. Toleration , then, falls well short of democratic equality. The American principles of religious freedom were supposed to overcome these limits of toleration. In principle, religious freedom provides for the equal treatment of different faiths—there is no established church, and all religions are free to practice as they please. But this ideal of religious freedom has never really been enacted in the United States. On matters of religion, the United States has two conflicting self-understandings: that this is a nation of religious freedom and equality, and that this is a basically Christian nation. Thus, in practice, life in the United States has proven to be much more like the situation in Britain than our national mythology implies. If tolerance marks a space of well-defined hierarchy like that between the Church of England and other religious faiths in Britain, what is the place of tolerance in a society that is supposedly based on the free and equal participation of all citizens? These tensions between religious difference and the claims of...