Beyond Tolerance

Gustav Niebuhr, a former a religion reporter for The New York Times and now an associate professor of religion and the media at Syracuse University, has written a new book that explores how interfaith understanding can move beyond mere tolerance. The New York Times reviewed the book this week:

Religious tolerance is a necessary but overrated virtue. Its practice comes easiest to the religiously indifferent and to the condescending: “You know this is a Protestant country,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt reminded two non-Protestant members of his administration, “and the Catholics and the Jews are here on sufferance.”

What lies beyond tolerance? Respect and recognition — not just for individuals but also, as Gustav Niebuhr argues, for the faiths to which they are committed. Formerly a religion reporter for The New York Times and now an associate professor of religion and the media at Syracuse University, Niebuhr here gathers tales of interfaith dialogue and good will; he estimates they are representative of the practices of thousands of American believers. He claims these efforts are “largely untold.” If that is so, it’s only because such dialogues are no longer news. American Protestants, Catholics and Jews have been talking interfaithfully for more than 50 years.

What’s different, what gives Niebuhr’s book, “Beyond Tolerance,” its few bursts of energy, is the addition of Muslims to the conversation. Indeed, my guess is his search for interfaith understanding could not have found a publisher before 9/11. Since then, inviting Muslims to talk has become an act of mutual protection as much as one of respect for all parties to the conversation.

. . .

My main quarrel is with Niebuhr’s emphasis on proc­ess over substance. The point of interfaith dialogue is to learn something. As any veteran of these conversations can attest, you never really understand your own religion until you develop a deep and sympathetic understanding of at least one other. But Niebuhr hardly ever tells us what insights participants have gained from listening to one another, not even how their attitudes might have changed as a result.

We don’t hear about these things, the reader has to assume, because Niebuhr does not consider them important. “The world’s major religions,” he writes, “are essentially neutral systems in the way they affect human temperaments.” To the contrary: religion, for those who take it seriously, has enormous power to shape not only who we are and how we relate to others but also which virtues we privilege, which course of action in any situation we find right and worthy. Compassion, to cite one common inter­faith topic, has a very different meaning for Buddhists than it does for Christians. Were differences like this not important, the interfaithful would have nothing much to discuss, nothing to learn from one another.

Read it all here.

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