Which is more tolerant, polytheism or monotheism?
This question was asked in my Crusades class last semester. It was intended to begin a conversation about why Islam was involved in conflict in its early years. Of course, the “correct” or at least intended answer is that polytheism is more tolerant for obvious reasons. That answer was given by the majority of the class but acting on my newly developed “subversive impulse” I somewhat involuntarily, challenged the easy answer — arguing that polytheism was unable to accept monotheism without simply co-opting it into the pantheon: dissolving its claims of singularity and thus, monotheism itself is intolerable internally to polytheism. Needless to say it didn’t exactly advance the conversation in a productive manner…
***Flash forward five months***
Today I was reminded of this today in a class on modern theology during a discussion of Douglas Harink’s book Paul among the Postliberals. The conversation was on the chapter on Stanley Hauerwas. The dialogue moved to the place of truth-claims in a pluralist society (although not set up exlicitly as). A few in the class were unsettled by Hauerwas’s approach to education:
As a way to challenge such a view of freedom [i.e., the view that freedom is always to do what we want to do], I start my classes by telling my students that I do not teach in a manner that is meant to help them make up their own minds. Instead, I tell them I do not believe they have minds worth making up until they have been trained by me. (77)
What was unsettling to them was not the seeming arrogance of Hauerwas in the statement, but the implications of such an education. It was the sense of “indoctrination” implicit in the statement they had issue with. The worry was that it would produce people who were only versed in their own tradition and not exposed to anything else. This, they argued would lead to a kind of “I’m right, you’re wrong” mentality.
In defense of Hauerwas, Petrick and I argued that the other option was a kind of pluralistic-relativism. The discussion itself was not resolved in the class because of time constraints.
(From here on I am addressing arguments a general culture, not of specific classmates)
What usually underlies a prohibition of truth-claims is a postmodern relativism combined with liberalism (not the Democrats). Truth-claims, at least those that can’t be privatized, are cast as intolerant in this system. Tolerance then, is accepting other people’s beliefs as “right” as yours. Your beliefs are right for you, mine are right for me.
This is where the beginning discussion on polytheism comes back. This form of relativism is in fact intolerant in precisely this sense: it refuses to accept truth-claims as truth-claims. It contextualizes, historicizes, or phenomenologically explains these claims. There is a certain condescension and deception to this. This “tolerance” dissolves these “totalizing” claims back into the system of liberalism. But of course, this mechanism makes liberalism itself as “totalizing” and “intolerant” as the systems it is rejecting, for nothing escapes its reach!
So we are left with a choice: to accept liberal “tolerance” and refuse to accept any “totalizing” truth-claim which means this tolerance, is in fact intolerance in disguise. Or to accept competing truth-claims to our own and validate them by affirming them as wrong. The latter option however cannot simply be an us-vs-them mentality but must engage other claims, as well as our own critically through either “consistency” (MacIntyre) or “narrative” (Milbank).
How about just being intolerant of unjustified claims in the classroom?
Side note: Many liberal Christians think that everyone secretly worships the same “god.” This is demeaning to me in the sense that it says, “You are really worshiping my god, but you don’t realize it.”