Two Kinds of Tolerance

Joe Loconte

A visitor to Amsterdam, whatever his itinerary, will be greeted by a somewhat macabre mix of European Christianity and postmodern paganism. In the historic city center it is not majestic cathedrals that catch the eye. Rather, it is the ubiquitous storefront sex shops. They come in several varieties, offering merchandise, voyeurism, and intimate encounters. There are church buildings as well, to be sure, but they seem out of place. Despite the streams of tourists, they struggle to compete for attention. Some houses of worship have been converted into bars or other secular establishments. The “Old Church Coffee Shop,” for example, sits adjacent the “Sexyland Erotic Supermarket.” It is a city that seems thoroughly obsessed with sex.

It’s worth remembering that the modern, tolerant, secular Dutch owe a great debt to their tolerant religious forebears. The Netherlands can boast a record of religious pluralism and assimilation dating from the seventeenth century. While religious militarism bloodied much of Europe, Holland was something of an oasis of intellectual debate, publishing, and commerce. Thanks to a relaxed government approach to religious belief and practice, political and religious dissenters of nearly every stripe found a safe harbor.

English philosopher John Locke—whose theories of self-government and religious liberty inspired the American Founders—was among their number. Though a lifelong member of the Anglican Church, Locke was deeply sympathetic to Protestant Dissenters. Implicated in a failed plot against Charles II, he sought political exile in Holland in the 1680s. In 1685, the same year Locke wrote his Letter Concerning Toleration, Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had granted limited toleration to Protestant Huguenots. The French king launched a campaign of brutal repression in the name of religion, sending about 250,000 Protestants into exile, mostly into the Netherlands and Britain.

Locke formed friendships with many of them. He also lived for a time in the Rotterdam house of Benjamin Furly, a Quaker—one of the most severely persecuted groups of the century. Furly put into practice the principle of toleration, making his home an outpost for religious minorities. Locke marveled at how Arminians, Baptists, Lutherans, Quakers, and others “quietly permit one another to choose their way to heaven.”

Nevertheless, for these Protestant refugees, Locke included, religious toleration had nothing to do with social—or individual—anarchy. The “rights of conscience” always came attached to a set of moral obligations. Liberty could not be a cover for libertinism. “No Opinions contrary to human Society, or to those moral Rules which are necessary to the preservation of Civil Society,” wrote Locke, “are to be tolerated by the Magistrate.” (See the Trinity Forum curriculum The Great Experiment: Faith and Freedom in the American Republic.)

Modern democracies like Holland, however, have turned the principle of religious pluralism into a pretext for moral agnosticism—meaning virtually all judgments about ethics and morality are out of bounds. This hard-edged secularism treats people of faith as inherently suspect: religious belief and religious ideals are considered not a civic virtue but a social virus. There are many reasons the Netherlands and other European states are struggling to assimilate their growing Muslim populations. Yet surely one of them is a brittle and brooding secularism, which tends to alienate any religious group that takes its faith commitments seriously.

Thus, John Locke’s haven of toleration has become a hotbed of religious strife. It was in Amsterdam, after all, where director Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered for his film insulting Islam. Former Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali was forced to flee the country after receiving numerous death threats for her criticism of Islam. Some politicians are openly calling for the Koran to be banned. It all suggests that Dutch tolerance—despite its generous appetite for erotic supermarkets—has lost its way.  

Joe Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.

Columns, Joseph Loconte, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Tue 10 Jun 2008