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The Samaritan grudge is such that tolerance and diversity may become weapons wielded against Christians. For example, university officials at Harvard, Rutgers, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Wisconsin at Superior all withdrew official recognition of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship groups in recent years. University officials claimed that by insisting student leaders be Christians, InterVarsity wielded religious prejudice. (In each case, the university finally relented, but only in the face of strenuous protests and, in two cases, lawsuits.)

Similar thinking appears in many less newsworthy conflicts. Christians are said to be intolerant (of gays, of women, of atheists, of evolutionists, of other religions, of abortionists). Christians believe that there is only one way to God; they believe in absolute truth and an infallible Bible. The logical implication is that anybody who doesn't agree is wrong.

Some secularists cannot tolerate such intolerance. They favor diversity, but only the right kind of diversity.

When Christians talk about their faith to others or say they believe in strict moral standards, their "intolerance" disturbs and offends people. Tolerance has come to mean more than living at peace with those who are different. It now means affirming those differences as equally valuable—and abiding by the radical moral relativism that pervades our society. And if we don't pretend to accept that, we experience the depth of the grudge against us.

Since tolerance is so significant in our Samaria, it would help to understand where the idea came from. One flavor of tolerance in New Testament times was Roman. Like most empires, Rome tolerated religious, ethnic, and cultural differences up to a point—the point at which differences got in the way of Roman rule. Romans insisted that residents of the empire tolerate their neighbors, because the rulers wouldn't tolerate fighting. The Roman Empire was peaceful for the same reason Sunni and Shia Muslims were peaceful under Saddam Hussein.

The earliest Christians were also tolerant, but they embraced tolerance for different reasons: Tolerance was a form of neighbor love. Some persecuted minorities responded by fighting back, attacking their neighbors. The early Christians didn't.

This changed when Rome adopted Christianity as the state religion. Christians in power soon learned to see paganism or heresy as threats to the God-ordained order. They adopted the empire's love of control and became intolerant, persecuting those with whom they disagreed.

Enforced orthodoxy lasted until the Reformation broke apart the somewhat unified Christian order. Then Christendom began war with itself. European wars of religion were not, of course, purely religious, but religious intolerance fed fuel to the fire. Catholics tried to suppress Protestants in the name of God, and vice versa. Lutherans tried to suppress Anabaptists. And since no one party gained dominance, it seemed as though there would be no end to war. To say the least, this gave religious intolerance a bad name. It did not preserve a God-ordained order; instead, it fed chaos and violence.

The Enlightenment saved us from that. In the United States particularly, the state was severed from the church. Henceforth, the state could not go to war for religion, because it had no religion. Nor could it persecute a religious minority, no matter how heretical or repulsive. The state was de-religionized, and the church was disempowered. The goal was peace.

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February 2008, Vol. 52, No. 2