Thanksgiving for Diversity

In a piece for Huffington Post last year, Rajiv Malhotra wrote on the need for replacing the frequent use of the word “tolerance” with “mutual respect” in interreligious settings. Malhotra is the founder of the Infinity Foundation, which seeks to foster better understanding of Buddhism and Hinduism, traditions that he says are generally more comfortable with the “mutual respect” language than are the Abrahamic Religions.

From my perspective as a gay man, I have long felt the barbed loathing of tolerance. I know that the person who tolerates me has arrogated to him or herself the right to decide the relative worth of others and, too, whether or not to afford us essential human dignity. The person who tolerates me hates me, wishes I didn’t exist but has decided it is better not to risk prison time by wiping me off the face of the earth. The tolerant person is not my friend and will feel no constraints on political action aimed at restricting, eliminating, or preventing my exercise of the same rights s/he takes for granted.

So I find it easy to like Malhotra’s argument for mutual respect between the religious traditions. He described an occasion in the late 1990s when he made the call for the language of mutual respect at Claremont Graduate University and was told that his doing so ruffled a lot of feathers. He told of the current Roman Catholic pope, before becoming pope, strongly objecting to the use of the language of respect at the United Nation's Millennium Religion Summit in 2000. As Malhotra explained, if the Vatican accepted the language of mutual respect it would have no grounds for efforts to proselytize the "heathen." But eventually the Vatican caved on the document from this summit but covered itself by quickly issuing its own statement to the effect that other religions are “in a gravely deficient situation.” In other words, the Vatican signed onto the language of mutual respect for one document only and then violated that “respect” at the earliest possible opportunity.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. The traditions of Christians destroying the sacred groves in Europe and then the indigenous holy sites in the worldwide colonies of European nations in order to destroy the spiritual underpinnings of psychosocial life of the established populations, rendering them more susceptible to proselytizing efforts – these traditions are still celebrated in global European Christianity. This demand for religious uniformity, though never fully realized, is at the core of Western national and denominational identities. It is not going to be relinquished easily by traditions that still revere the legends around that history.

The more distant from the Christian majorities’ sense of history a group finds itself, the more difficult it is for various Christian positions to accommodate a group as worthy of respect. The non-Abrahamic, non-monotheistic, and non-Western religions might sometimes find “tolerance” is all they can hope for. But even farther than any of those traditions is from normative Christian bases for respect or even tolerance is atheism, which has been described, with a lot of evidence to support the phrase, as the most despised minority in America. It is true that books by the so-called “New Atheists” have been best sellers, and a lot more people are openly declaring themselves to be atheists than at any previous time in our history. But when George W. Bush was still governor of the little state of Texas and campaigning for the White House, he said in published interviews that he did not consider atheists to be citizens of the United States. And while that did not dominate his campaign, he did not renounce it and was elected to two terms.

The need for mutual respect expands broadly to include non-Western religions and philosophies, certainly, but only when “we” include among those worthy of respect those who are farthest from “us” can we be worthy of a tradition that sees humanity as bearer of something special. Christianity may lose sight of it in doctrines of Original Sin and in the Nicene Creed, but, from Judaism, it still holds humanity to be made in the likeness and image of God. My tradition, Unitarian Universalism holds as its first-stated principle the inherent worth and dignity of every individual. If we take these foundational claims seriously, we are enjoined to see every individual as reflecting and shaped on the pattern of the divine. The despised atheist is divine if God is. The Buddhist, Hindu, Pagan, pantheist too. If any person’s tradition is worthy of respect, all are. For God to be divine we all must be. For Christianity to be a holy tradition, so too must atheism be. For the churches and traditions of the West to be worthy of respect, the institutions and traditions of the rest of the world must be afforded mutual respect.

If humanity is made in the image and likeness of God, or every human individual has inherent worth and dignity, then “mutual respect” is the only approach to the Other that can be afforded our respect.