Stanley Fish (I won’t bother with the link to the Times, y’all can find it) has recently raised the issue of whether a commitment to tolerance of religion “really” means is that one must be prepared to tolerate even a religious regime doctrinally committed to killing off nonbelievers.
From a classical liberal (morphed into modern libertarian) standpoint, this seems pretty silly. The concept of religious toleration got inspired by people getting tired of killing one another off in the name of religion. Whatever it is in theory, it has this practical goal of preserving civil society as a “reality check.” It *doesn’t* mean that one must tolerate a religious regime doctrinally committed to killing off nonbelievers.
One might save the “really means” argument by limiting it to the uninteresting: One must tolerate even a religious regime doctrinally committed to killing off nonbelievers, in the sense that one ought to leave them alone or confine yourself to arguing with them, so long as they just talk and don’t set about actually killing anyone. But if such a regime based on such a religion were democratically elected, and began to take action through the political process… does toleration require that? Certainly not in the historic classical liberal sense. It is a republican concept based on rights, not a democratic concept that requires that one go along with the majority.
One might save the Fish argument by limiting its application to a concept of tolerance based on moral relativism–indeed, I think this is what he must have intended. And there the argument does seem like a good fit. If you think that one ought to tolerate different religions because no one doctrine of how one ought to live is morally superior to any other, well, then, you do have something of a problem. Of course, you have pretty much insulated yourself from criticism, as well–but on the other hand no one need take you particularly seriously when you criticize them, since you have no foundation from which to do so.
On the whole, though, I think if someone wants to criticize variants of modern liberalism and not the classical concepts he had better make clear which he is talking about.
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