Posted on 12/17/2002 12:59:49 AM PST by lockeliberty
Proselytism is a topic enjoying renewed attention in recent years. This is largely because it is increasingly obvious that religious commitments and conflicts are and will remain central to the reconfiguration of global politics that began in 1989. Understanding the proselytizing impulse is an important element in understanding the part that religion is playing in this reconfiguration, and there has recently been significant scholarly attention to it, most notably by Emory University’s project on the problem and promise of proselytism in the new democratic world order. The events stemming from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon will likely further focus attention upon the proselytizing aspects of religion.
But the desire better to understand the place of a resurgent Islam in global politics is not the only reason for closer attention to the grammar of proselytism in the U.S. Another is the parlous state of Supreme Court rulings on religion cases, a good part of which is brought about by confusion about the conditions under which proselytizing speech and activity are protected by the First Amendment, and, concomitantly, about whether there is any difference between religious and nonreligious proselytism.
We can begin with the now-archaic English noun “proselyte,” a calque (rather than a translation) of the Greek prosêlutos and the Latin proselytus. The Greek noun is derived from the verb “to come” with a prefix meaning “over” or “towards,” and so a literal etymological rendering of “proselyte” might be “one who comes over (from one location to another).” The term has a biblical use: there it always designates a Gentile convert to Judaism, or, more precisely, a Gentile who has begun to observe the Jewish law. In this case the “coming over” is from life as a Gentile to (or towards) life as a Jew.
The proselyte leaves an old community, whether of belief or practice, and enters a new one: in becoming one of Uncle Sam’s proselytes you leave the community of non-U.S. citizens and enter that of American citizens; in becoming one of Christ’s proselytes you leave the pagan community and enter that of the baptized; and in becoming one of David Hume’s proselytes you leave the community of those who think the argument from design valid and enter the community of those who judge it invalid. These examples are meant to underscore that the new community, the one entered by the proselyte, may be one of thought as well as of practice—one ordered principally to the acceptance of theoretical commitments as well as one ordered principally to direct action in the world.
The proselytizer acts in such a way as to help create proselytes. Usually, he will do this in favor of a community to which he already belongs: proselytizers for the community of those who oppose smoking will likely be ex-smokers and almost certainly nonsmokers; proselytizers for the community of those who think that George W. Bush ought not be regarded as the legitimate forty-third President of the United States will ordinarily already belong to that community—and so on. Proselytizers usually, that is to say, want to turn the alien into kin.
Often, proselytizers will be motivated by the thought that it would be good for those still alien to become kin. Those wandering in the foreign lands of nicotine-addiction would be better off if they became kin to the righteous ex-smokers—or so it may be thought. But this proselytism of benevolence, undertaken for the perceived good of the potential proselyte, is often also mixed with a proselytism of fear and even hatred, one that wants to make the alien into kin not only (and perhaps not even primarily) for the alien’s perceived good, but also for the protection of the home community. Thus, perhaps, those who proselytize the aliens who think that gay sex is an improper use of human sexuality on behalf of their kin who think it a good thing may be motivated by fear of what the aliens may do to their kin if they are permitted to remain alien. Proselytizing so motivated may usefully be called protective proselytism.
Particular proselytisms may also be further analyzed according to scope: Do they want to make proselytes out of everyone, or only out of a select few? I, for example, am likely to proselytize on behalf of the Chicago White Sox, but I’m interested principally in Cubs fans as potential proselytes. I won’t waste my time on English relatives who know nothing about baseball. That’s a limited proselytism. By contrast, I would like everyone to join the community of those who renounce the torture of children, and insofar as I proselytize on behalf of that community, my proselytism is universal.
Proselytisms may, finally, be analyzed according to the methods they prefer. Some coerce by use or threat of force, compelling the alien to come in as Augustine eventually decided was the only thing to do with the Donatists, or as the U.S. courts have decided it is constitutionally proper to do with Native American peyote-users; some attempt persuasion by argument; and some prefer to attract proselytes, if they can, simply by presenting to the world the life of the preferred community without persuasion or compulsion.
So much then, in brief, for the grammar and syntax of proselytism. It is important to see that the concepts informing particular proselytisms belong to the moral order. To engage in proselytizing implies a moral judgment of error (in assent) or impropriety (in action) on the part of the aliens being proselytized, and the consequent adoption of a course of action designed to bring the mistaken aliens into the fold of those who think rightly or behave properly. Particular proselytisms, then, imply (and are sometimes explicit about) the rightness or propriety of what they proselytize on behalf of, and, concomitantly, the wrongness or impropriety of what they proselytize against.
Proselytism, understood in this way, is virtually unavoidable: almost everyone is a proselytizer on behalf of something. Parents proselytize their children: indeed, parenthood is probably best understood as one long and usually unsuccessful attempt to create proselytes. Those with political or ethical or theoretical commitments almost always proselytize on behalf of them: every academic dispute is an instance of proselytism at work. And, of course, religious people often (but not always) find proselytism deeply inscribed into the grammar of their religious commitments. It may be possible for those almost or entirely without connection to others (hermits, those at the far end of autism or Alzheimer’s, long-term coma patients, and so on) to avoid proselytism completely; but otherwise we are all proselytizers. Being such is inseparable from having a social existence.
The grammar and syntax of toleration is in many ways the obverse of that of proselytism, and this is no accident because the modern understanding of the term developed in large part in self-conscious opposition to and rejection of particular religious proselytisms. By the late seventeenth century, certainly, it is common in English political and philosophical writing to find toleration opposed to proselytism, and to the detriment of the latter. But before turning to the attempt to reject proselytism in favor of toleration, a few words about the history and root meaning of the verb (transitive and intransitive) “to tolerate” and the substantive “toleration” will be helpful.
The transitive form of the verb has as its root meaning (as also is true of the Latin tolerare) “putting up with” or “enduring” or “bearing something unpleasant.” This meaning survives when we say that some trees tolerate drought better than others, or that some people can tolerate a surprising amount of suffering. A minor extension of this fundamental sense makes it possible to use the verb to denote the action of permitting or letting be something unpleasant or undesirable. I can, in this sense, tolerate your pipe-smoking so long as you don’t do it in my car. Or, I tolerate my allergies because I find that attempting to medicate them away is worse than allowing them free rein. In all these cases, what is tolerated is something unpleasant or incorrect or improper or otherwise difficult.
The substantive “toleration” then denotes the action (and the theoretical commitments that inform such an action) of putting up with or permitting or letting be some pattern of action or belief found by those practicing toleration to be false (if a belief) or improper (if an action). Like proselytism, toleration in this sense has no special relation to religious matters. But in the seventeenth century, in both England and America, “toleration” became a term of art in legislation designed to ensure that the state and its citizens would indeed put up with—let be—religious practices and beliefs they found objectionable. And while the broader senses of the term are certainly still in play, this special sense of application to religion is probably dominant in legal circles, and to some extent in philosophical ones as well. And even when restricted to religious belief and action (however such a restriction is understood), the root sense of enduring or putting up with something undesirable is clear. John Locke, for example, in whose writings on toleration may be found the classic defense of the topic as applied to religious questions, is abundantly clear that this is what it means to tolerate religion.
Those who tolerate and advocate toleration, like those who proselytize and advocate proselytism, do so for a variety of motives and with a variety of goals, but it would detain us too long to sort them through. I’ll note only, as a point to return to, that it is impossible coherently to advocate toleration of universal scope, and in this respect toleration is unlike proselytism, since the latter can coherently be advocated as an attitude of universal scope.
Toleration is like proselytism in being a concept of the moral order. Both imply the same judgment about the alien: that the alien’s beliefs are false, and/or that the alien’s practices are improper. But where the proselytizer wants to transform the alien into kin by making a proselyte of him, the practitioner of tolerance wants to let him alone in his error, to permit him to continue to do or think what he does or thinks.
“Toleration” generally denotes a good for early twenty-first-century speakers of American English. To say of someone that he’s tolerant is to praise him; to say of him that he’s intolerant is, generally, to attribute to him a moral fault of a deep and significant kind. “Proselytism” is no longer a lively word in current spoken English, but if it were there can be little doubt that it would have a negative connotation, and one that would be given to it in large part because it would seem that to advocate proselytism is precisely to be intolerant, to reject toleration. Proselytism and toleration have come to be approximate antonyms for us. This negative judgment about proselytism is evident, too, in our legal discourse, where proselytism still is a lively term. When the legislature or the judiciary is called upon to decide which activities cannot be supported by public funds, those that include proselytism are high on the list, usually because it is thought that supporting (religious) proselytism would offend against the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Activities that advocate or promote toleration, by contrast, are proper candidates for public funding.
There are historical reasons for the negative connotations borne by proselytism and the positive ones borne by toleration. Chief among them is the understanding of the European conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that had come to be widely held by European and American intellectuals in the eighteenth century. These conflicts were understood to have been caused in large part by an intransigence about particular religious commitments and a concomitant deeply rooted desire to make proselytes out of those with different particular religious commitments. It was such an understanding that in part motivated Locke to write in defense of religious toleration as the answer to such difficulties toward the end of the seventeenth century; such an understanding was present to the minds of many of the framers of the U.S. Constitution a century later, and it undoubtedly played its part in Jefferson’s advocacy of a wall of separation between church and state and in Madison’s objections to such things as the appointment of a chaplain to Congress. Religious toleration was seen as the principal answer to religious strife, the bringer of peace where there had been endless war; and proselytism was seen as one among—perhaps the chief among—the causes of religious violence. This is still the grammar of the thought of most Americans about toleration as opposed to proselytism.
Essential to the long-term rhetorical success of the project of religious toleration was its self-presentation as a view elevated above and related identically to all particular religious commitments and their accompanying proselytisms. This was important because if religious toleration appeared to favor some particular religious proselytisms over others, or, worse, appeared itself to be a form of religious proselytism, its professed goal of undergirding a political order in which rival religious proselytisms would no longer be destructive would be made more difficult to achieve. And on the whole, the presentation of toleration as a position above the fray of religious conflict has been successful, at least rhetorically. The form this rhetoric took in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has been widely imitated, and the idea that the law should occupy a position neutral to all particular religious proselytisms is there especially clear, rhetorically speaking.
But this attempt to occupy a moral and cognitive high ground above the play of conflicting religious proselytisms fails conceptually. On closer examination, toleration reveals itself as just another proselytism, and the decision for or against it is therefore not different in kind from the decision for or against any other particular proselytism, religious or otherwise. The grammar and syntax of toleration propose as destination a place that cannot be arrived at, that no-place from which all particular religious proselytisms can be tolerated (endured, put up with, let be). The rhetorical advantage still enjoyed by advocates of toleration over advocates of particular proselytisms turns out, upon examination, to be without conceptual support.
The most obvious difficulty is that the grammar of toleration itself shows that it is not possible to maintain an evenhanded attitude of letting-be to every particular proselytism. Recall that it is intrinsic to that grammar that the alien should be permitted to continue in his error; this requires that he seem to the tolerationist precisely to be in error.
To illustrate the chief difficulty with advocacy of universal toleration, suppose that two clashing proselytisms are in the field. One wants to make proselytes for the community of those who think that a public education may not require religious believers to read any works that call into question in a radical way the teachings of their own religion. The other wants to make proselytes for the community of those who think that a public education may require religious believers to read just such works. (I draw upon Mozert v. Hawkins County Board of Education [1987], a classic and much-discussed Sixth Circuit Court decision for this example.) These are incompatible positions, based as they are upon strictly contradictory claims about what a public education may require. Short, then, of some deep psychological problems, active membership in both communities is impossible.
Can both proselytisms be tolerated? They cannot. It is not possible for the advocate of toleration coherently to maintain the judgment of error with respect to both proselytisms, for the judgments implied by the two are contradictory, and one cannot judge that two contradictories are identically erroneous. And since the judgment of error is intrinsic to the grammar of toleration, it is not possible to be tolerant of both.
It is possible (though difficult and unlikely) to act identically toward both: to refuse engagement with both, perhaps, and so to preserve this aspect of toleration for each. But even this limited toleration will not be possible for any community that has to decide which proselytism will be permitted to continue to have a voice, since not only are the claims made by each contradictory, but the courses of action proposed by each cannot be actualized. And in the Mozert case itself, the U.S. judicial system decided directly and unambiguously for the second view—that a public education may require religious believers under its care to read works that call into question in a radical way the teachings of their religion. In so deciding, of course, the U.S. judicial system became itself a particular proselytism, in this case for the so-called tolerant position that a child may be required by the state to read (though not to endorse) a radically critical alien work.
It is, then, not possible for the tolerationist coherently to commend toleration for every particular proselytism. Advocates of toleration will inevitably, like it or not, become proselytizers for (and against) some particular proselytisms. The reasons that make it virtually impossible for anyone with a social existence consistently and completely to avoid proselytism are just the same reasons that make it virtually impossible for anyone consistently and completely to be identically tolerant toward all particular proselytisms.
Toleration’s own grammar thus reveals it as a species or kind of proselytism. It is one more player in the field, one more competing proselytism among many. Toleration, we might say, is the proselytism that dare not speak its name.
The reverse, however, is not true. While the grammar of toleration makes of it a species of proselytism, the grammar of proselytism does not make of it a species of toleration. One can consistently be an advocate of a proselytism of universal scope—one can, that is to say, coherently want evenhandedly to make proselytes of all aliens, while one cannot coherently want evenhandedly to tolerate all aliens. This is at least a tactical disadvantage for advocates of toleration. It means that the rhetorical advantage gained by an attempt to occupy the cognitive high ground must be relinquished, and the particular proselytism that is toleration argued for on its merits, without sleight of hand.
If the Sixth Circuit in Mozert had taken the line I recommend, it would not have rejected the plaintiff’s claim that her religious freedom was being infringed by being made to read works in radical opposition to the teachings of her religion. The claim that her religious freedom was left intact by asking her only to read and not to agree with such works disingenuously (or blindly) attempts to occupy a high ground that isn’t there. It carries the implication that being asked to read something in radical opposition to what you believe can’t by itself conflict with what you believe. But of course it can conflict if among the things you believe is that I shouldn’t read things that radically question what I believe. The court should have simply acknowledged that the plaintiff’s free exercise was indeed being infringed, and that this was the result of a substantive and particular understanding of what good education is, an understanding held and proselytized on behalf of by the school board. Such a ruling would have acknowledged that American public education, shot through though it is with the rhetoric of toleration, is in fact a set of particular proselytisms, as it must be. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of all the practices of American public life, from the legislative acts of Congress to the judicial rulings of the Supreme Court to the regulations and syllabus decisions of the lowliest school board.
If this is correct, the grammar and syntax of proselytism are conceptually superior to those of toleration. This is principally because advocacy of toleration is itself a particular proselytism. It would be good for American public life if this were openly acknowledged. Among the causes of our present difficulties, both at home and abroad, is a deep sense (usually inchoate but not the less deep for that) on the part of religious people that the rhetoric of toleration is being deployed in a duplicitous and underhanded way to bring about legislative and social goals that are every bit as particular and every bit as contestable as those commended by any religion while simultaneously obscuring these facts.
It would also be good, I suspect, for America’s place in the world—where deep commitments to particular religious proselytisms are increasingly a public force—if those who speak publicly for the country were clearly to acknowledge the following. First, that the U.S. in its foreign policy does in fact act as an agency proselytizing for a particular understanding of what constitutes human flourishing, and for a particular understanding of the institutional forms that will foster such flourishing. Second, that the U.S. has in the past, is now, and likely will again use force or the threat of force to make proselytes, willing or unwilling, for the community of those who live under the arrangements it prefers. Third, that what the U.S. proselytizes for in these areas is no less particular and no less disputable than what, to take an important contemporary example in this time of trouble, conservative Wahhabi Muslims proselytize for. The decision for the former over the latter cannot be justified by using the rhetoric of toleration. If you prefer one over the other it will be because you judge the claims and practices of the one to be true and those of the other to be false. Anyone who thinks such judgments easy to make or easy to justify has failed to give them serious thought.
The grammar and syntax of toleration propose as destination a place that cannot be arrived at, that no-place from which all particular religious proselytisms can be tolerated (endured, put up with, let be). The rhetorical advantage still enjoyed by advocates of toleration over advocates of particular proselytisms turns out, upon examination, to be without conceptual support.
I think the author did a good job of laying out the false dichotomy of the "proselytization of tolerance".
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