religion tolerance essay

America’s True History of Religious Tolerance

The idea that the United States has always been a bastion of religious freedom is reassuring—and utterly at odds with the historical record

Kenneth C. Davis

Wading into the controversy surrounding an Islamic center planned for a site near New York City’s Ground Zero memorial this past August, President Obama declared: “This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are.” In doing so, he paid homage to a vision that politicians and preachers have extolled for more than two centuries—that America historically has been a place of religious tolerance. It was a sentiment George Washington voiced shortly after taking the oath of office just a few blocks from Ground Zero.

But is it so?

In the storybook version most of us learned in school, the Pilgrims came to America aboard the Mayflower in search of religious freedom in 1620. The Puritans soon followed, for the same reason. Ever since these religious dissidents arrived at their shining “city upon a hill,” as their governor John Winthrop called it, millions from around the world have done the same, coming to an America where they found a welcome melting pot in which everyone was free to practice his or her own faith.

The problem is that this tidy narrative is an American myth. The real story of religion in America’s past is an often awkward, frequently embarrassing and occasionally bloody tale that most civics books and high-school texts either paper over or shunt to the side. And much of the recent conversation about America’s ideal of religious freedom has paid lip service to this comforting tableau.

From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”

First, a little overlooked history: the initial encounter between Europeans in the future United States came with the establishment of a Huguenot (French Protestant) colony in 1564 at Fort Caroline (near modern Jacksonville, Florida). More than half a century before the Mayflower set sail, French pilgrims had come to America in search of religious freedom.

The Spanish had other ideas. In 1565, they established a forward operating base at St. Augustine and proceeded to wipe out the Fort Caroline colony. The Spanish commander, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, wrote to the Spanish King Philip II that he had “hanged all those we had found in [Fort Caroline] because...they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.” When hundreds of survivors of a shipwrecked French fleet washed up on the beaches of Florida, they were put to the sword, beside a river the Spanish called Matanzas (“slaughters”). In other words, the first encounter between European Christians in America ended in a blood bath.

The much-ballyhooed arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England in the early 1600s was indeed a response to persecution that these religious dissenters had experienced in England. But the Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not countenance tolerance of opposing religious views. Their “city upon a hill” was a theocracy that brooked no dissent, religious or political.

The most famous dissidents within the Puritan community, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, were banished following disagreements over theology and policy. From Puritan Boston’s earliest days, Catholics (“Papists”) were anathema and were banned from the colonies, along with other non-Puritans. Four Quakers were hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661 for persistently returning to the city to stand up for their beliefs.

Throughout the colonial era, Anglo-American antipathy toward Catholics—especially French and Spanish Catholics—was pronounced and often reflected in the sermons of such famous clerics as Cotton Mather and in statutes that discriminated against Catholics in matters of property and voting. Anti-Catholic feelings even contributed to the revolutionary mood in America after King George III extended an olive branch to French Catholics in Canada with the Quebec Act of 1774, which recognized their religion.

When George Washington dispatched Benedict Arnold on a mission to court French Canadians’ support for the American Revolution in 1775, he cautioned Arnold not to let their religion get in the way. “Prudence, policy and a true Christian Spirit,” Washington advised, “will lead us to look with compassion upon their errors, without insulting them.” (After Arnold betrayed the American cause, he publicly cited America’s alliance with Catholic France as one of his reasons for doing so.)

In newly independent America, there was a crazy quilt of state laws regarding religion. In Massachusetts, only Christians were allowed to hold public office, and Catholics were allowed to do so only after renouncing papal authority. In 1777, New York State’s constitution banned Catholics from public office (and would do so until 1806). In Maryland, Catholics had full civil rights, but Jews did not. Delaware required an oath affirming belief in the Trinity. Several states, including Massachusetts and South Carolina, had official, state-supported churches.

In 1779, as Virginia’s governor, Thomas Jefferson had drafted a bill that guaranteed legal equality for citizens of all religions—including those of no religion—in the state. It was around then that Jefferson famously wrote, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” But Jefferson’s plan did not advance—until after Patrick (“Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”) Henry introduced a bill in 1784 calling for state support for “teachers of the Christian religion.”

Future President James Madison stepped into the breach. In a carefully argued essay titled “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” the soon-to-be father of the Constitution eloquently laid out reasons why the state had no business supporting Christian instruction. Signed by some 2,000 Virginians, Madison’s argument became a fundamental piece of American political philosophy, a ringing endorsement of the secular state that “should be as familiar to students of American history as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” as Susan Jacoby has written in Freethinkers , her excellent history of American secularism.

Among Madison’s 15 points was his declaration that “the Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every...man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an inalienable right.”

Madison also made a point that any believer of any religion should understand: that the government sanction of a religion was, in essence, a threat to religion. “Who does not see,” he wrote, “that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” Madison was writing from his memory of Baptist ministers being arrested in his native Virginia.

As a Christian, Madison also noted that Christianity had spread in the face of persecution from worldly powers, not with their help. Christianity, he contended, “disavows a dependence on the powers of this world...for it is known that this Religion both existed and flourished, not only without the support of human laws, but in spite of every opposition from them.”

Recognizing the idea of America as a refuge for the protester or rebel, Madison also argued that Henry’s proposal was “a departure from that generous policy, which offering an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion, promised a lustre to our country.”

After long debate, Patrick Henry’s bill was defeated, with the opposition outnumbering supporters 12 to 1. Instead, the Virginia legislature took up Jefferson’s plan for the separation of church and state. In 1786, the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, modified somewhat from Jefferson’s original draft, became law. The act is one of three accomplishments Jefferson included on his tombstone, along with writing the Declaration and founding the University of Virginia. (He omitted his presidency of the United States.) After the bill was passed, Jefferson proudly wrote that the law “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew, the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.”

Madison wanted Jefferson’s view to become the law of the land when he went to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. And as framed in Philadelphia that year, the U.S. Constitution clearly stated in Article VI that federal elective and appointed officials “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution, but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

This passage—along with the facts that the Constitution does not mention God or a deity (except for a pro forma “year of our Lord” date) and that its very first amendment forbids Congress from making laws that would infringe of the free exercise of religion—attests to the founders’ resolve that America be a secular republic. The men who fought the Revolution may have thanked Providence and attended church regularly—or not. But they also fought a war against a country in which the head of state was the head of the church. Knowing well the history of religious warfare that led to America’s settlement, they clearly understood both the dangers of that system and of sectarian conflict.

It was the recognition of that divisive past by the founders—notably Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Madison—that secured America as a secular republic. As president, Washington wrote in 1790: “All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunity of citizenship. ...For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens.”

He was addressing the members of America’s oldest synagogue, the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island (where his letter is read aloud every August). In closing, he wrote specifically to the Jews a phrase that applies to Muslims as well: “May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

As for Adams and Jefferson, they would disagree vehemently over policy, but on the question of religious freedom they were united. “In their seventies,” Jacoby writes, “with a friendship that had survived serious political conflicts, Adams and Jefferson could look back with satisfaction on what they both considered their greatest achievement—their role in establishing a secular government whose legislators would never be required, or permitted, to rule on the legality of theological views.”

Late in his life, James Madison wrote a letter summarizing his views: “And I have no doubt that every new example, will succeed, as every past one has done, in shewing that religion & Govt. will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”

While some of America’s early leaders were models of virtuous tolerance, American attitudes were slow to change. The anti-Catholicism of America’s Calvinist past found new voice in the 19th century. The belief widely held and preached by some of the most prominent ministers in America was that Catholics would, if permitted, turn America over to the pope. Anti-Catholic venom was part of the typical American school day, along with Bible readings. In Massachusetts, a convent—coincidentally near the site of the Bunker Hill Monument—was burned to the ground in 1834 by an anti-Catholic mob incited by reports that young women were being abused in the convent school. In Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, anti-Catholic sentiment, combined with the country’s anti-immigrant mood, fueled the Bible Riots of 1844, in which houses were torched, two Catholic churches were destroyed and at least 20 people were killed.

At about the same time, Joseph Smith founded a new American religion—and soon met with the wrath of the mainstream Protestant majority. In 1832, a mob tarred and feathered him, marking the beginning of a long battle between Christian America and Smith’s Mormonism. In October 1838, after a series of conflicts over land and religious tension, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered that all Mormons be expelled from his state. Three days later, rogue militiamen massacred 17 church members, including children, at the Mormon settlement of Haun’s Mill. In 1844, a mob murdered Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum while they were jailed in Carthage, Illinois. No one was ever convicted of the crime.

Even as late as 1960, Catholic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy felt compelled to make a major speech declaring that his loyalty was to America, not the pope. (And as recently as the 2008 Republican primary campaign, Mormon candidate Mitt Romney felt compelled to address the suspicions still directed toward the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) Of course, America’s anti-Semitism was practiced institutionally as well as socially for decades. With the great threat of “godless” Communism looming in the 1950s, the country’s fear of atheism also reached new heights.

America can still be, as Madison perceived the nation in 1785, “an Asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every Nation and Religion.” But recognizing that deep religious discord has been part of America’s social DNA is a healthy and necessary step. When we acknowledge that dark past, perhaps the nation will return to that “promised...lustre” of which Madison so grandiloquently wrote.

Kenneth C. Davis is the author of Don’t Know Much About History and A Nation Rising , among other books.

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Religious Literacy Resource Guide: Defining and Measuring Religious Tolerance

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Journal Articles

Gibson, J. L., & Bingham, R. D. “ On the Conceptualization and Measurement of Political Tolerance ." The American Political Science Review 76.3 (1982): 603–620.

This article presents a new approach to measuring political tolerance, with scales measuring support for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of political association, in hopes that they will serve as better predictors of opinions and behaviors in actual disputes.

Gibson, J. L. “ Alternative Measures of Political Tolerance: Must Tolerance be "Least-Liked"? " American Journal of Political Science 36.2 (1992): 560–577.

This article considers how to measure political intolerance. The traditional Stouffer-based measure of intolerance is compared to the Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus "least-liked" measure using data from a national survey. The traditional predictors of intolerance perform very similarly irrespective of which of the tolerance measures is used. Future tolerance research can profitably utilize either measurement approach.

Newman, Jay. “ The Idea of Religious Tolerance .” American Philosophical Quarterly 15.3 (1978): 187-195.

There are many obstacles to religious tolerance, but we often overlook the most basic obstacle: few people have a clear idea of what religious tolerance is. This essay illuminates the nebulous concept of religious tolerance in depth in hopes that reason will inform the good will of people hoping to practice tolerance.

" Prospects for Inter-Religious Understanding ." Pew Research Center, 2006.

This analysis suggests that the tensions that once existed between Protestants and Catholics, and the hostility that Jews faced from both groups, have largely diminished in America. These findings strongly suggest that the United States has the capacity to overcome historical religious divisions and prejudices.

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> Essays on Religion and Human Rights
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Book contents

Essays on Religion and Human Rights
Copyright page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I In Defense of Rights
Part II Religion and Rights
3 Religion, Human Rights, and the Secular State
4 Religion, Human Rights, and Public Reason
5 Rethinking Religious Tolerance
6 A Bang or a Whimper? Assessing Some Recent Challenges to Special Protection for Religion in the United States*
7 Religion and Human Rights
Part III Religion and the History of Rights
Part IV Public Policy and the Restraint of Force
Appendix Ethics and Scholarship

5 - Rethinking Religious Tolerance

A Human Rights Approach

from Part II - Religion and Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2015

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Rethinking Religious Tolerance
David Little
Book: Essays on Religion and Human Rights
Online publication: 05 April 2015
Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139680516.009

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on religious diversity & tolerance

Philip L. Quinn, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2003, was John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University. An expert on the philosophy of religion, he wrote on the Augustinian legacy, the virtue of obedience, and the ethics of Søren Kierkegaard. He was the author of “Divine Commands and Moral Requirements” (1978) and coeditor of “A Companion to Philosophy of Religion” (1997). This is the last work Professor Quinn completed before his death on November 13, 2004.

Since September 11, 2001, the fragility of tolerance has become a source of acute anxiety in scholarly reflection on religion–as shown by some of the contributions to the Summer 2003 issue of Dædalus on secularism and religion. In that context, James Carroll asked how it was possible for people committed to democracy to embrace religious creeds that underwrite intolerance. Daniel C. Tosteson identified conflicting religious beliefs as a particularly serious cause of the plague of war.

Such anxieties are reasonable. After all, Osama bin Laden professes to fight in the name of Islam. And in the aftermath of 9/11, the United States has experienced a significant rise in reported incidents of intolerant behavior directed at Muslims.

Moreover, tolerance has long been under assault in more limited conflicts fueled in part by religious differences. Religious disagreement has been a cause of violence in Belfast, Beirut, and Bosnia during recent decades. The terrorism of Al Qaeda threatens to project the religious strife involved in such localized clashes onto a global stage. In short, early in the twenty-first century, the practice of tolerance is in peril, and religious diversity is a major source of the danger.

During the past two decades, diversity has also been a topic of lively discussion among philosophers and theologians. What philosophers have found especially challenging about religious diversity is an epistemological problem it poses. Here the philosophical debates have focused primarily on the so-called world religions–Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Though most of the philosophers involved in these debates have not addressed the topic of tolerance directly, there is a clear connection between the epistemological problems posed by religious belief and the political problems posed by religious diversity.

Take the case of Christianity. One way to justify a Christian’s belief in God is the arguments offered by natural theologians for the existence of God. Another source of justification is distinctively Christian religious experiences, including both the spectacular experiences reported by mystical virtuosi and the more mundane experiences that pervade the lives of many ordinary Christians. A third source is the divine revelation Christians purport to find in canonical scripture. And, for many Christians, a fourth source is the authoritative teaching of a church believed to be guided by the Holy Spirit. When combined, such sources constitute a cumulative case for the rationality of the belief in God professed by most Christians.

Let us suppose, if only for the sake of argument, that these sources provide sufficient justification to ensure the rational acceptability of the Christian belief system. But this will be so only if there are no countervailing considerations or sources that present conflicting evidence. Before we can render a final verdict on the rational acceptability of that belief system, challenges to the Christian worldview must be taken into account. One of the most famous challenges is, of course, the existence of evil. The sheer diversity of religions and religious beliefs presents an equally vexing challenge. And the growth of religiously pluralistic societies, global media, and transportation channels has rendered this challenge increasingly salient in recent times.

A Christian today who is sufficiently aware of religious diversity will realize that other world religions also have impressive sources of justification: They too can mobilize powerful philosophical arguments for the fundamental doctrines of their worldviews. They are supported by rich experiential traditions. They also contain both texts and authoritative individuals or institutions that profess to teach deep lessons about paths to salvation or liberation from the ills of the human condition.

Yet quite a few of the distinctive claims of the Christian belief system, understood in traditional ways, conflict with central doctrines of other world religions. Though each world religion derives justification from its own sources, at most one of them can be completely true. Each religion is therefore an unvanquished rival of all the rest.

To be sure, Christian sources yield reasons to believe that the Christian worldview is closer to the truth than its rivals. But many of these reasons are internal to the Christian perspective. Each of the other competitors can derive from its sources internal reasons for thinking it has the best access to truth. Adjudication of the competition without begging the question would require reasons independent of the rival perspectives. It seems that agreement on independent reasons sufficient to adjudicate the rivalry is currently well beyond our grasp.

It is clear that this unresolved conflict will have a negative impact on the level of justification Christian belief derives from its sources. In his magisterial book Perceiving God (1991), William Alston investigated the matter of justification for the Christian practice of forming beliefs about God’s manifestations to believers. He argued persuasively that the unresolved conflict does not drop the level of justification for beliefs resulting from this practice below the threshold minimally sufficient for rational acceptability. He acknowledged, however, that the level of justification for such Christian beliefs is considerably lowered by the conflict, and that similar conclusions hold, mutatis mutandis , for analogous experiential practices in other world religions.

A generalization from the special case seems to be in order. For those Christians who are sufficiently aware of religious diversity, the justification that the distinctively Christian worldview receives from all its sources is a good deal less than would be the case were there no such diversity, even if the level of justification for the Christian belief system were not on that account reduced below the threshold for rational acceptability. And, other things being equal, the same goes for other world religions. This reduction of justification across the board can contribute to a philosophical strategy for defending religious toleration.

The basic idea is not new. The strategy is implicitly at work in a famous example discussed by Immanuel Kant in his Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). Kant asks the reader to consider an inquisitor who must judge someone, otherwise a good citizen, charged with heresy. The inquisitor thinks a supernaturally revealed divine command permits him to extirpate “unbelief together with the unbelievers.” Kant suggests that the inquisitor might take such a command to be revealed in the parable of the great feast in Luke’s Gospel. According to the parable, when invited guests fail to show up for the feast and poor folk brought in from the neighborhood do not fill the empty places, the angry host orders a servant to go out into the roads and lanes and compel people to come in (Luke 14: 23). Kant wonders whether it is rationally acceptable for the inquisitor to conclude, on grounds such as this, that it is permissible for him to condemn the heretic to death.

Kant holds that it is not. As he sees it, it is certainly wrong to take a person’s life on account of her religious faith, unless the divine will, revealed in some extraordinary fashion, has decreed otherwise. But it cannot be certain that such a revelation has occurred. If the inquisitor relies on sources such as the parable, uncertainty arises from the possibility that error may have crept into the human transmission or interpretation of the story. Moreover, even if it were to seem that such a revelation came directly from God, as in the story told in Genesis 22 of God’s command to Abraham to kill Isaac, the inquisitor still could not be certain that the source of the command really was God.

For Kant, certainty is an epistemic concept. It is a matter of having a very high degree of justification, not a question of psychological strength of belief. Thus his argumentative strategy may be rendered explicit in the following way: All of us, even the inquisitor, have a very high degree of justification for the moral principle that it is generally wrong to kill people because of their religious beliefs. Our justification for this principle vastly exceeds the threshold for rational acceptability. It may be conceded to religious believers that there would be an exception to this general rule if there were divine command to the contrary. However, none of us, not even the inquisitor, can have enough justification for the claim that God has issued such a command to elevate that claim above the threshold for rational acceptability. Hence it is not rationally acceptable for the inquisitor to conclude that condemning a heretic to death is morally permissible.

No doubt, almost all of us will recoil with horror from the extreme form of persecution involved in Kant’s famous example. Other cases may not elicit the same kind of easy agreement.

Suppose the leaders of the established church of a certain nation insist that God wills that all children who reside within the nation’s borders are to receive education in that orthodox faith. No other form of public religious education is to be tolerated. These leaders are not so naive as to imagine that the policy of mandatory religious education they propose will completely eradicate heresy. But they argue that its enactment is likely to lower the numbers of those who fall away from orthodoxy and, hence, to reduce the risk of the faithful being seduced into heresy. And they go on to contend that the costs associated with their policy are worth paying, since what is at stake is nothing less than the eternal salvation of the nation’s people.

The claim that God has commanded mandatory education in orthodoxy might, it seems, derive a good deal of justification from sources recognized by members of the established church. It is the sort of thing a good God, deeply concerned about the salvation of human beings, might favor. Perhaps the parable about compelling people to come in could, with some plausibility, be interpreted as an expression of such a command. So if the challenge of religious diversity were not taken into consideration, the claim that God commands mandatory education in orthodoxy might derive enough justification from various sources to put it above the threshold for rational acceptability for members of the established church. But the factoring in of religious diversity may be enough to lower the claim’s justification below that threshold, thereby rendering it rationally unacceptable even for members of the church who are sufficiently aware of such diversity. And an appeal to the epistemological consequences of religious diversity may be the only factor capable of performing this function in numerous instances. Thus such an appeal may be an essential component of a successful strategy for arguing against forms of intolerance less atrocious than extirpating “unbelief together with the unbelievers.”

Of course, the strategy being suggested here is no panacea. It is not guaranteed to vindicate the full range of tolerant practices found in contemporary liberal democracies; it may fail to show that the religious claims on which citizens ground opposition to tolerant practices fall short of rational acceptability by their own best lights. This is because the strategy must be employed on a case-by-case basis. However, such a piecemeal strategy has some advantages. It does not impose on defenders of tolerance the apparently impossible task of showing that the whole belief system of any world religion falls short of rational acceptability according to standards to which the adherents of that religion are committed. It targets for criticism only individual claims made within particular religions, claims that are often sharply disputed in those religions by believers themselves.

Nor can this strategy be expected to convert all religious zealots to tolerant modes of behavior. All too often religious zealots turn out to be fanatics who will not be moved by any appeal to reason. But in any event, the strategy should not be faulted because it cannot do something that no philosophical argument for tolerance, or for any other practice, could possibly do.

Religious diversity must be counted among the causes of the great ills of intolerance. It also happily shows some promise of contributing to a remedy for the very malady it has helped to create.

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Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation

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1 1 Religion, Tolerance, and Intolerance: Views from Across the Disciplines

Published: May 2013
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This chapter examines the causal relationship between religion and tolerance. Is religion a cause of tolerance, is it a cause of intolerance, or do some aspects of religion cause tolerance while others cause intolerance? The chapter begins by looking briefly at the concept of tolerance, and at the historical emergence of the political ideal of religious tolerance. It then examines work in psychology where the causal relationship between religion and tolerance has long been a focal point of research efforts. It concludes by briefly discussing emerging work in the anthropology of religion that is relevant to the issue of religious tolerance.

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Religion, Tolerance and Intolerance: Views from Across the Disciplines

2013, Religion, Intolerance and Conflict: a Scientific and Conceptual Investigation, edited by Steve Clarke, Russell Powell and Julian Savulescu, Oxford University Press

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Religious Tolerance, Essay Example

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Religious tolerance is a complicated concept. It involves recognizing that people the right to choose a religion, change their religion, have religious believes, and to practice their religion (unless it causes harm to others or is unreasonable in some other way). Tolerance doesn’t mean believing in equality of religions, it only refers to the concept of acceptance. Of course, the term is not set in stone and some people may take it to mean more than is stated here, but for the sake of clarity this is the definition we will stick with.

The current state of religious tolerance is as complicated as its definition. The tension created by 9/11 and the subsequent changes in society led to harsh criticism of religion. Most of the blame has been placed on fundamental extremism, but the effect is felt throughout all levels of religious observation. In the Western world, Islam is the most scrutinized religion due to the perversion of the Koran’s message by would-be terrorists. But before the world put Muslims under a magnifying glass, the Catholic church of Christianity became embroiled in a pedophilia controversy that still exists today.

Christianity, in any of its forms, does not condone child abuse and/or sexual abuse. It is well known that sex is a “taboo” topic in Catholicism, which may be why this issue was not addressed earlier. While the church didn’t condone the actions, they certainly created an environment that facilitated the abuse. Denying priests of sex and then placing them in a position of power are actions that likely have an influence on the situation. However, as far as I am aware, there are no passages in the scripture of Catholicism that condone these actions in any way, shape, or form.

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Religious Tolerance Essay Examples

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