On Beyond Tolerance
A friend recently posted a short video on social media, showing herself interacting with a cat that had recently joined her household. In it Bridget can be heard to exclaim, “that’s unauthorized behavior!” When I laughed and commented on it, Bridget told me that she’d been so distracted by the cat’s nipping and batting that she misspoke.
That unlikely adjective, to my non-cat-person ears, got me to thinking about the words of judgement we use to describe behavior and, unfortunately, often people as well: authorized/unauthorized, appropriate/inappropriate, acceptable/unacceptable, legal/illegal, good/bad, welcome/unwelcome, on target/out of bounds, tolerable/intolerable.
When I was learning about Unitarian Universalism back in Sunday school I was taught, as many of you were, about the so-called Unitarian trinity of freedom, reason, and tolerance. That Unitarian Universalists value freedom of religious thought, as long as reason is brought to bear upon our religious beliefs and ideas. And we value tolerance, within our congregations of other religious beliefs and ideas, and indeed seek as individuals to be tolerant of religious beliefs and ideas that are different from our own.
Several decades, a theological education, and many years of ministry later, I take issue with this formulation of what Unitarian Universalism is about for several reasons. For one thing, though I understand that the originators of the freedom/reason/tolerance trinity of UUism, deliberately chose the word trinity as a way of turning Christian terminology back on itself while, I don’t think the clever word play is worth the confusion and, further, it might even border on the disrespectful. While trinity can mean any group of three related things, in a religious context it most often means the Christian Trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. For hundreds of years Unitarians and then Unitarian Universalists have made a disavowal of that trinity central to our theology. I don’t think we’re well served by using the word to signify some other set of theological concepts. But beyond that, my problem with that formulation is, of course, that tolerance is no longer a sufficient aspiration, though the term is of significance in our history.
Nearly 460 years ago King John Zigismond of Transylvania, a Unitarian, issued the Edict of Torda, also called the Edict of Religious Tolerance. The edict came at the end of the Diet of Torda, a decade of theological discussions during which the king came under increasing influence of progressive theologians of his day, including George Biandrata and Francis David. The Edict stated:
"In every place the preachers shall preach and explain the Gospel each according to his (sic) understanding of it, and if the congregation like it, well. If not, no one shall compel them for their souls would not be satisfied, but they shall be permitted to keep a preacher whose teaching they approve . . . no one shall be reviled for his (sic) religion by anyone . . . and it is not permitted that anyone should threaten anyone else by imprisonment. . . . For faith is the gift of God. . . . "
It was a startlingly radical statement for the day. It would be inaccurate to say the Edict granted religious freedom to the people of Transylvania, because it applied only to Christian ministers and Christian congregations. Nevertheless, it marked an important shift toward religious tolerance.The preachers weren't expected to preach something that went against their beliefs. And the congregations weren't expected to stomach, to put up with, to tolerate a preacher preaching things that were abhorrent to their beliefs. And, I think in that setting, in that era, civil government and religious authority were almost completely fused, and almost every aspect of personal life was either prescribed or proscribed by the church, “tolerate” was probably both apt and sufficient.
But in the United States of America, in the 21st century, as Omid Safi said in this morning's reading, who wants to be tolerated? Especially if one is aware that at its root ‘tolerance’ means the ability to withstand pain or hardship, or to not die from the presence of a parasite or pathogen. Even if we weren’t previously aware of the physical biological definitions of tolerance, we all probably have had experiences of when our presence or our beliefs or our identity has been tolerated but nothing more. That is to say, we haven't been kicked out. And maybe we haven't been denied services or hospitality, so to speak. But neither have we been welcomed, neither have our presence, our beliefs, our culture or our identity been embraced with curiosity and wonder and gratitude–or even simple welcome.
If we return to those judgement words I mentioned earlier, I set them up as pairs of opposites, more or less, but when it comes to religious community, or a neighborhood, or a society, to be considered ‘tolerable’ is scarcely better than to be considered ‘intolerable.’ And the fact that tolerance is so often viewed as a virtue, as Dr. Safi points out, only makes it worse. How can we complain about being merely tolerated, when so many respected leaders call for tolerance, and even boast of the ways in which our society has been a model of tolerance?
The Soul Matters themes for this church year were chosen and published months ago, long before the current president was elected to office, long before the current spate of executive orders demanding the erasure of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and initiatives in the military and in other federally funded programs. Undertaking a month’s long examination of the meaning and implications of inclusion seems urgent and timely, whatever the reasons the creators of Soul Matters might have had in mind when they set it forth as this month’s theme. And to me, at least, it seems urgent not simply or even primarily because of the people in our country who think that eliminating DEI programs will eliminate diversity or return our country to some lost state of imagined purity.
Studying, discussing, experimenting with the meaning and implications of inclusion feels urgent to me because I know that the current, very blatant and dangerous attack on diversity and inclusion in society at large can distract us from our own tendencies to slip back into tolerance, rather stretching ourselves in the ways of acceptance, welcome, celebration, and gratitude toward the diversity that exists within our congregations, and the diversity that could exist if we moved deliberately and repeatedly on beyond tolerance.
I’ve known Unitarian Universalist congregations, for example, in which UU humanists and/or atheists and UU pagans, each tolerated the presence of the other within the congregation–as long as the rituals/music/theology of the other group were never centered in worship and never visible to the wider community who “might get the wrong idea about our church if they know we have pagans/atheists.”
I’ve known Unitarian Universalist Christians to be similarly tolerated but neither welcomed nor celebrated within some UU congregations.
Over the years and still today, an often subconscious emphasis on tolerance has meant that BIPOC UUs and LGBTIA+ UUs have been tolerated and perhaps offered a superficial welcome but not truly included. That is to say, as one example, members of their identity group have not been lifted up in worship as guest speakers or sources of readings or children’s stories or composers/performers of music – or worse, perhaps, those identity groups have been lifted up in worship, only for there to be murmuring after the fact, about what harm might have been to children or to the reputation or security of the congregation by such public embrace of groups that are far from even tolerated in mainstream society.
It is a reality of all human institutions, including UU congregations, that they each fail in some way to live up to their highest ideals and stated values, because human beings are inherently imperfect. Still, as well as being inherently imperfect, human institutions carry within them an inherent possibility of transformation–because they are made of humans, who carry within us the seeds of possibility.
Wherever we witness resistance to inclusion, wherever we notice its absence, we have a choice about how we will respond, just as we heard in the words Dorothy shared this morning. We can deliberately ignore the situation because confronting it feels dangerous or futile. We can engage in an unending lament of the powers and habits and circumstances that have conspired to suppress attempts at inclusion. Or we can stretch beyond tolerating difference in our midst, to authorizing difference, to accepting difference, to celebrating the depth and nuance, the nourishment and resilience that spring from a deliberate, rigorous, and prayerful practice of inclusion. May we be so bold. And may we be so blessed. Amen.
