It does seem to me that both the secular liberals and the religious
conservatives in America need to learn more tolerance.
The secular liberals need to come to grips with the reality
that (a) there are more religious believers in the world as a whole, and in
America in particular, than non-believers, though their beliefs differ widely, and
(b) religion isn’t going away, in fact in many places it is growing. Liberals
cannot gain and hold political power by denigrating and ridiculing those who
are religious (“clinging to guns and religion” – Obama, “basket of deplorables”
– Clinton) – it just isn’t a workable strategy. Liberals
will have to learn to be tolerant and accepting, and even understanding, of
those who are religious. And they will need to tailor their social strategies
to encompass tolerance for differing points of view on some social issues.
Religious conservatives need to come to grips with the
reality that not everyone believes as they do, and in America, with its historical
foundation of religious freedom, they cannot expect to impose their particular beliefs
on everyone. Those who find abortion unacceptable are free never to have
abortions, but not to insist that no one else can have abortions. Those who
find homosexuality unacceptable are free to avoid homosexual relationships themselves,
but not to deny, or even castigate or persecute, those who find such
relationships acceptable.
The problem, of course, is that both the more dogmatic secular
liberals and the more dogmatic religious believers are bound into rigid unthinking,
intolerant ideologies, and in that respect the more dogmatic and activist
liberals are being just as unreasonable and intolerant as they accuse the more
religious of being. In that sense dogmatic liberalism is as much a religion as
any other religion.
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