toleration, religious

toleration, religious. Christianity, which claims to be the only true religion, is in principle intolerant of other religions and heresy within its ranks has been repeatedly anathematized. In practice, however, Christian Churches and Christian rulers have often suffered or ‘tolerated’ a non-Christian Churches presence and Christian diversity, their power being insufficient to coerce infidels or dissenters into conformity.

Christians in the pagan world of late antiquity did not always suffer intolerance from non-Christians (see PERSECUTIONS, EARLY CHRISTIAN), but they almost always practised it among themselves. From the time of Constantine, with the close connection between ecclesiastical authority and the civil power, persistence in unorthodoxy became an offence against civil as well as canon law. Throughout the Middle Ages mainstream ecclesiastical opinion followed St Augustine's demand for the punishment of heretics and schismatics. The leading Protestant Reformers ( M. Luther, J. Calvin, T. Beza, and H. Bullinger) seem at first sight to argue for individual liberty of conscience, but they prove to be resolute defenders of the right and duty of the ecclesiastical and civil powers to co-operate in the extirpation of heresy; they demanded freedom to worship in their own way but pursued dissenters with relentless zeal.

In 17th cent. England, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Quakers insisted on their religious independence of Church and State. Experiments in practical toleration took place in North America: the founders of Maryland and Rhode Island saw no responsibility for religious coercion resting on the civil power. S. Castellio's assertion that belief in a merciful God entailed acceptance of the liberty of the individual Christian was developed further by J. Milton, while J. Locke argued that the Church was a voluntary organization having the right to expel dissenters but no right to hound them thereafter. Intellectuals of the Enlightenment used arguments in favour of toleration in attacks not only on ecclesiastical authority but on Christianity itself.

In the 19th cent. heterogeneous defenders of religious toleration by the State in many countries secured its embodiment in law. After much debate within the RC Church in the 20th cent., the Second Vatican Council's ‘Declaration on Religious Freedom’ (Dignitatis Humanae, 1965) declared that ‘in the sphere of religion no one’ should be ‘compelled to act against his conscience’ and that the right to religious freedom is founded on the dignity of the human person. The RC Church thus adopted a position similar to that long held elsewhere in the Christian world.

See also CONSCIENCE and THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS.