by Eric Angevine

Created on: December 13, 2006   Last Updated: April 30, 2007

Can a society be deeply religious and at the same time tolerant of other viewpoints? The Constitution of the United States encodes the essential notions that Americans live by: that all ideas are welcome, and that we are free to hold any religious or social philosophy we choose. It is equally dedicated to the necessity that none of these ideologies should ever gain tyranny over all. The role of the Constitution as a guard against institutionalized intolerance is cited in Andrew Sullivan's essay "This Is A Religious War", which argues that our founding fathers created the perfect document to guard us against oppression and intolerance. As those luminaries intended, the principle of separation of church and state has not been weakened by any attempt to break through the wall from either side. Continued adherence to the principle of separation will allow religious and civil society to coexist peacefully, and Americans will continue to enjoy freedoms that no other nation can take for granted.

Recent events in the United States have brought the relationship between religion, the state, and tolerance into the foreground of the national debate. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, organized and executed by Islamic fundamentalists, pointed out the danger that intolerant theocracies can present to other nations who do not share their beliefs. This rise of fundamentalism in the Middle East has been mirrored by an increase in visibility for American religious conservatives. Writer Andrew Sullivan posits that Christian Fundamentalists are every bit as intolerant as their Islamic opponents while they would seem to be polar opposites, they are, in fact, united in their hatred for those who deviate from any doctrine they hold to be the absolute truth. He describes the appeal of fundamentalist doctrine: "The blind recourse to texts embraced as literal truth, the injunction to follow the commandments of God before anything else, the subjugation of reason and judgment and even conscience to the dictates of dogma: these can be exhilarating and transformative. They have led human beings to perform extraordinary acts of both good and evil." Citizens of traditionally Islamic countries feel increasingly marginalized and mocked by the secular society of the modern world, and for many, this extreme adherence to orthodoxy is the only thing that makes them feel powerful enough to resist.

American religious conservatives rarely resort to the kind of violence we have seen from radical Islamists.

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