In Our Time - Toleration

Episode Date: May 20, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas and politics behind the idea of religious toleration. In 1763 Voltaire remarked that "of all religions, the Christian is undoubtedly that which should instil the greatest toleration, although so far the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men". Christian intolerance was brutally enforced across Western Europe in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, with inquisitions, executions, church courts and brandings with hot irons. But during the English Civil War a variety of Christian sects sprang up which challenged the imposition of state religion and opened the floodgates to religious diversity.What were the politics and philosophy behind the idea of toleration in England? Did the rise of toleration go hand in hand with the rise of the secular, or were tolerationists – in fact – deeply religious? And how does toleration differ from tolerance?With Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London; David Wootton, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London; Sarah Barber, Senior Lecturer in History at Lancaster University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1763, Voltaire remarked that, quote, of all religions, the Christian is undoubtedly that which should instill the greatest toleration, although so far the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men. Christian intolerance was brutally enforced across Western Europe in the Middle Ages and the Reformation, with inquisitions, executions, church courts, and brandings with hot irons. But during the English Civil War, a variety of Christian sect sprang up

which challenged the imposition of state religion and opened the floodgates to religious diversity. What were the politics and philosophy behind the idea of toleration in England? Did the rise of toleration go hand in hand with the rise of the secular, or were the tolerationists, in fact, deeply religious? And how does toleration differ from tolerance? With me to discuss the development of toleration a David Wooten, Professor of Intellectual History at Queen Mary, University of London.

Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Sarah Barber, Senior Lecturer in History at Lancaster University. Justin Champion, what is toleration and how does it differ from tolerance, and why must we keep that distinction in mind throughout this discussion? I think probably the easiest way to think about the distinction is to think of the language of tolerance as an individual disposition. It's about forbearance. It's an individual putting up with something they don't really like,

but restraining themselves from being hostile or coercive. Toleration, I would argue, is probably more social policy. It's something a state does. It's an attitude towards minorities. It's the withdrawal of coercion against that minority. So there's a distinction between individual and social policy, I think. For individual and state and almost private and public. Yeah.

And we're talking about toleration, how the state has moved into a minority. a position of tolerating more and more and tolerating less and less at different times, as we'll see. I think the difficulty has been that it's a weasel word. Toleration and tolerance get sort of combined together. It's difficult for the state to advance the policy of toleration if there's no tolerance in the community. You can, you say it's bad to beat up Quakers and pass all sorts of laws, but in the localities people will beat up Quakers if they don't like them. So the state not only has to establish a sort of civic policy, it's got to persuade people that it's not really a good thing

to beat other people up for religious diversity. Okay, the idea of a controlling state hit a new peak in medieval, high medieval Europe, where the Holy Roman Catholic Church controlled so much when you start to account for it, it's quite extraordinary what it controlled. That uniformity and power of control, as it were, was a starting point. for toleration paradoxically, wasn't it? Can you develop that?

Yeah, I think the key thing to establish is that after Constantine becomes a Christian emperor, religious policy and state policies are combined. So it's in the interest of the state to have a uniform religious sort of community. And from the 11th, 12th century, the Holy Roman Catholic Church is very good at trying to impose that uniformity around Europe.

If we put it very crudely, pre-early modern society is a persecuting society. It's absolutely critical both for political order and for religious truth to ensure that everybody believes, practices and worships in the same way. Who are the Catholics persecuting in the Middle Ages? They're persecuting heretics, aren't they, basically? And these are very often other Catholics who think that they are purer Catholics than the Catholics in charge.

Absolutely. I think the medieval society in one sense has a little element of tolerance, because it'll sort of put up with pagans, Muslims. It doesn't like them, but they're marginal and minorities. The worst sort of nightmare is somebody who wants to be you, the heretic who claims that they are better than you. So groups like the Cathars and the Valdensians, marginal. And the Lollards? The Lollards, Wiclifites, Hussites,

all of these sort of sectarian groups who pursue their own vision of orthodoxy. And I think the key thing to underscore there is, all these groups claim they're right. and almost certainly if they'd gained power, they would have been just as keen to persecute heretics in their eyes. So by and large, we're talking about a monolithic persecuting, intolerant society, David Wooden. Now, the Reformation was supposed to break that up and change it a lot, did it?

Well, the Reformation breaks up the unity, but it doesn't change the ideal. What it does is result in different political communities with different religious commitments, but each of those political communities is seeking to establish uniformity and each of those political communities believes that its form of religion is the true form of religion and that all the others should come to accept it.

Taking Justin's point about the church and state coming together with the emperor Constantine, when Henry VIII decides to be a Protestant, he still keeps the church and state locked together, in fact, as they still are in our constitution. Indeed, he brings them closer together because he becomes directly the head of the church, and insofar as there had been some scope

for tension between church and state before, to a large degree that disappears within Protestant communities where the state and the church become welded together. And persecution continues. And persecution continues. Henry is burning people who have unitarian beliefs and other false beliefs as he sees them and imposing religious uniformity without any problem whatsoever.

And Henry, before he became Protestant, Henry as a Catholic, was burning Protestants, and then we succeeded by Mary, she goes back to burning Protestants. That's right. And she burned some very famous Protestant indeed, the martyrs. That's right. And she burns about that. 300 Protestants, and that's the most sustained persecution in England in a period of very few years, four or five years.

Is there some sort of serious change with the rule of Elizabeth? Do we have a shift here? If we're still keeping the idea of toleration around, there's a shift going on here. Because we have a fragmentation, but the idea of state and church together being one thing, and the idea of the Christian who's in charge being right, and the idea of the rightness is all, we still pertains. There's just several different rightnesses instead of one. Does anything change in Elizabeth's time that matters for this?

Well, I think what changes in Elizabeth time is that when Elizabeth comes to the throne, a very large part of the church establishment under Mary refused to change their religion with her, including all the bishops. So that what she's got now is a significant religious minority. Of Roman Catholics. And she's very nearly been in serious trouble under Merton. Mary herself. She sees the costs of persecution and so for what you might call practical political

reasons, she doesn't want to engage in large-scale persecution. And what she's waiting for is time to bring about the Protestantization of the country. So the goal is still uniformity, but the notion is that the best way to get there is by waiting. She does make grand statements like I do not want to put windows into men's soul. That's right. She does. And so she has a sense of, you might say, people having private opinions that aren't of interest to her. It's public behaviour that matters to you. Because we are getting the idea developing of thinking in private between consenting adults being allowed. Sarah Barber, the change here that I'm looking for is, crudely put, the Spanish Armada,

the political threat from a very, very powerful, much bigger than us, Roman Catholic country, which, as it were gathered forces against the Spanish because they were on Congress and the religion they represented and the forces they could. gather together in the rest of Europe. Does this have a change on the way that toleration is viewed inside this country? It has a change in the sense of a way in which Catholics were or were not tolerated within the English state. I think there's another change going on in the late Elizabethan period, and that's the further fragmentation of Protestantism within England.

To go back to Justin's definition, I think importantly about toleration, is it actually a negative liberty, and it involves elements of judgment. about who we consider and what ideas we consider acceptable within a spectrum. And throughout the medieval period, you've got that debate within Christianity. Then you get the debate in England between Protestantism and Catholicism with the Reformation. And then in the 1580s, you start to get that debate within the dialectic within the Protestant church. So in the 1580s, groups of Puritans who are alarmed at the slowness with which the Reformation is, taking place within the Church of England, are prepared to succeed from that church

and to establish a rival Protestant orthodoxy, which we now know as Presbyterianism. And so you get to characters like Richard Hooker in the 1590s in his laws of ecclesiastical polity, who is trying to counter both the spectrum widening on the Catholic side on one hand and widening on the Protestant side on the other to try and claim that there should be a new unity in the church, that everyone in the Commonwealth is a member of the Church of England, and everyone in the Church of England is a member of the Commonwealth. Yes, he said everyone in England is a member of the Church of England.

Is that a sort of, it's almost a cry for help? Look, it's all fragmenting. This is the way to hold it together. Historians disagree quite considerably about what Hooker was saying and why he was saying it. They're not really sure whether he was part of a conventional policy that he was airing or whether or not he was a lone figure. changing the way in which toleration was seen in England.

I think what he was doing was doing something very particularly English, in that he was both stating the situation in England as it was, narrating his own situation, but also lacing that almost symbiotically with a utopian vision of how he thought things should be. So it clearly wasn't the case in Hooker's England. There's everyone in the Commonwealth as a member of the Church of England. But as the 17th century gets underway, as you say Protestantism itself begins a fragment

and people are prepared that they feel they've got to go to the Netherlands for Freedom of Speeds and they go to America to establish their own particular form of Protestantism. So you have really deep rifts growing here. You have deep rifts but you don't necessarily get an increased sense of toleration. The great thing about America is that it's just so big. So all of those conflicts that were confined in an English situation can now be played out on a very grand scale. Let's keep to this country, because that's enough to be going on with.

In the 1630s we have Archbishop Lord who is cropping people's ears, with Charles I, who has a Roman Catholic tendency, is getting more and more severe. Is that in reaction, is that a fearful thing, Justin Champion? because he fears that Protestantism is just beginning to fragment dangerously. Protestantism is not just a language of conscience, it's also a language of order. And somebody like Archbishop Lord very powerfully articulates the notion that we are a community. The nation is organic.

He has this fantastic sermon in the late 20s that talks about Jerusalem is built it at a city at unity with itself. Any sort of descent. It's not only religiously heterodox, it's political sedition. And breaking that bracket, if you're a dissenter, you're a dissident, you're politically subversive, is something that's very problematic for the Protestant mind. Well, let's go into that sort of civil war furnace at the moment, those 18, if I include the Commonwealth, let's sort of 1640, there's 1660, we've given take a year or two at either end. There does seem to be a turning point here.

What's our entry point here, David? or how are we going to tackle how toleration changes its nature, become something that has to be in that period? 1642 a good time. There are several crucial things that happen. The first thing that happens is that state control breaks down. Censorship of the press breaks down. The church courts cease to operate.

People begin to be free to meet and talk about religion and to pray and to preach as they wish. And the result of taking control off is an extraordinary spread of new opinions. And so it's that that happens first of all. a practice, control breaks down. Most of the members of the parliamentary leadership want to establish a Presbyterian Church in England.

They want to establish new controls and new unity, but they fail to do it in time. Along with that comes a political necessity to have a unity across what you might call a Puritan anti-apalian position. And so people like Cromwell forge an army around the basis that they're going to accept anyone who'll fight against the king. And they're not going to protest against differences of opinion or persecute people or Cromwell's asked to get rid of Anabaptist officers. He says, I'm not going to do it. As long as they'll fight for me, that's all I'm interested in. So there's a very strong sense that you need to accept people of differing opinions within a common cause. Would you like to develop, Anne?

I'd like to sort of play down the difference of Cromwell, to begin with. There are a number of parliamentarian officers who have a similar position. And some of them are more. radical in terms of toleration than Cromwell's, I think. I think the other thing that happens in the later 1640s is that there's a growing sense in which people feel at ease to discuss the whole nature of the relationship between the civil magistrate and people's religious conscience. And so, for example, at the end of the 1640s

when the victorious parliamentarians are discussing the sort of constitution, the sort of state that they would like to create after the reign of Charles I. What they're also talking about is how far a civil magistrate can interfere in the individual lives of people. And the parliamentarian officers sit together at Whitehall. They bring in a number of independent divines. They bring in leveller leaders. They bring in MPs.

And they have one of the most free and open debates about how far a person's conscience could or could not be coerced and what the role of the state might be in religion. And I think the important thing is the degree to which they feel completely free to say whatever it is is in their own conscience without any fear of censure. Were these Whitehall debates just in, would you regard these as seminally important? I think we need to distinguish between two different things that are going on. In one sense, the Whitehall debates and the Putney debates and the later sort of political theory that comes out in the 40s and 50s.

Mark ought to have this public device. I mean, it doesn't happen today. No, any experts go into the House of Commons to talk about politics. These are moments when English men and women are starting to imagine that you can have a political theory, you can describe what politics is for, without immediate recourse to religion. So the whole notion that politics is about salvation and establishing godly rule is still there, but it's being challenged. At the same time, I'm slightly skeptical that a lot of the languages

of toleration are sort of forward-looking convictions that pluralist religious diversity is a good thing. Most of the people who argue for toleration during the 40s and 50s, there are some exceptions, believe that still their way is right. And they have an instrumental view for toleration. Let's see what God wants. Let's wait for providence to unfold. We better not persecute ranters or Quakers or whoever, because they might be the godly men or women. So I think there's a lot of pragmatic thinking going on in this period. In 1656, an extraordinary thing happened, a puritan leader called James Nailer went into Bristol

riding on the back of a donkey. His followers proceeded him on Palm Sunday with Hosanna and the palms on the ground. And he was arrested. Then what, and what did it signify? I think that the episode of Nailer, who is a sort of leading Quaker, a good friend of George Foxes at the time,

but it's been rather tragically written out of Quaker history since then because he was so remarkable. He's essentially tried by the House of Commons. Many of the Presbyterian Protestants in the country... What were they trying him for? Blasphemy. This man mimicked the entry of Christ into Jerusalem. He said he was displaying the inner Jesus in him.

F filthy pamphlets sort of complaining about the Quaker Jesus. And condemning what contemporaries call wicked toleration. It's wicked toleration that's prompted this. Cromwell intervenes in a very tall. tolerant way and essentially argues that Nader shouldn't die. But I think we ought to underscore that he's whipped, his tongue is bored, he has B branded on his forehead, he's pilloried. Somebody does stick up a note saying this is the new kingdom of Christ here beforehand. But I think it's a good emblem of the absolute limits of toleration in that period.

Sarah, those who spoke up in favour of religious freedom were frequently charged with seditionary. which is a political government. How is toleration pushing its way through in this period and this time? We've heard that thinkers are, and we know that there are major religious radicals, there's Roger Williams and Henry Martin and William Walwin and so on, but what's a progress is it making when we've had the incident in 1656, which has described biographically by Justin?

I don't think it's made very much progress at all in the late 17th century. I think the crucial thing about the discussion on toleration is that it has to be, that link between an individual act of conscience turning into an action which becomes political sedition. I think that's the sort of dynamic that's set up at the Reformation, and I think that continues right the way through the 17th century. And well into the 18th, even in the 18th century, people are talking about the limit of our toleration are those who operate as a threat to the state. And yet in the 40s and 50s, I mean, you know a great deal more about this narrative.

In the 14 and 50s, you have many diverse opinions. We've heard about the Whitehall debates, the Putney debates and so on. Many, many diverse opinions coming out that weren't coming out before. And Naylor was horribly mutilated in his own, but he was not killed. Not very long ago people would have been burnt at the stake and were burnt at the stake and so on. And so something is going on. I think the key word here is conscience. There's no question that in the late 1640s and 1650s people are arguing for freedom for conscientious believers.

And they're talking in a new way about liberty of conscience. They're talking the key phrase, I think, is tender consciences. They don't want to impose uniformity on tender consciences. But what they're not prepared to accept is that someone like Nela could be acting out of his conscience. There's a limit to the sort of conscience that you can recognize in someone else. If you're another sort of Protestant, you might be a conscientious believer. But if you're a Catholic, if you're someone like Nailer,

the assumption is that you're acting idolatrously or blasphemously, and you enter a new category. So the notion of conscience is actually restricted to fellow Protestants who differ on limited matters. We must forget that we're talking almost about squabbling within the same sort of, not squabbling, great anger, enmities within the same party, almost the same spectrum. Jews and Muslims are not tolerated at all. And how, well, do, how does toleration touch on them at all, Justin, what are we talking about?

I think, if we're thinking about the Cromwellian period, one of the points we ought to make is that in the written constitutions of both, the Republic and the protectorate, the instrument of government and the humble petition of vice, toleration is a political right. And it's the first and only written constitutions we've had, and it's there, it's preserved, it's important as a political right. Overwhelmingly, though, the providential and a millionaire is what's driving people's attitude. So there is an attempt in the mid-1650s to reintroduce Jewish communities into the UK.

this isn't an act of sort of Victorian liberty. This is so terological. They want to save themselves. You can't have Christ returning to earth until the Jews are converted. You can't convert them unless you talk to them. There's a perception that Islam is a sort of virtually tolerable religion as long as it's not in Europe.

Certainly from the 1650s, there's a sense that other religions actually work. and that's a huge shock, I think, to the Protestant Christian mind, that in many ways Islam is more godly. And from the 1650s and 1660s, there are a series of pamphlets that say, well, we ought to look at Islam, we can learn from it. You know, they're charitable, they respect their priests.

Perhaps we should become more Turkish. Now, I think that's a departure that, you know, perhaps in the 21st century, we've forgotten about. There is much more permeability. after the 1650s between religions. There's still people who, of course, regard Islam as the infidel.

David, can we go on to the act of toleration, 1689, which is almost, could be the centre of what we're talking about. This is after the so-called glorious revolution and quiet, a peaceful revolution, and William and Mary are on the throne. And does this herald

the arrival of toleration in any way as we would understand? When William comes to the throne, he promises toleration for Catholics before he arrives in England. Significantly from the Netherlands. From the Netherlands, that's right, and come from a tolerant society. But what the act of toleration provides in 1689 is no legal toleration for Catholicism. It provides toleration for different sorts of Protestant.

It doesn't provide toleration either for Unitarians. It provides toleration for Trinitarian Protestants. Now, the coincidence here is that philosophers sing will... come in, Locke's published his letter concerning toleration. How far does he advance the argument, Sarah? He advances it by stating very clearly, I think, the relationship between political authority and religious conscience. He advances it in the sense that he is an advocate of toleration.

He's, in a sense, someone who's codifying the sorts of debates that have been taking place over the previous 20, 30 years and producing a statement of the degree to which the British, and has established a tolerational society. But again, he also sees toleration in terms of the state being unable to coerce somebody's conscience. And therefore, we should allow free conscience up to the point at which that conscience starts to impinge in the state. Unabling the system not able to get there. Like Hobbes was talking about the idea that's in my head, it's a private secret place.

Yes, the state doesn't have either the power or the will or the ability to do that. That idea beginning to move now, partly because of the decline of religion, Justin Champion, the decline of the force of religious ideas at the end of the 17th, beginning of the 18th century. I think it's probably the exact opposite in the sense that there's a lot more religion around. It's just not as centrally directed. I'm slightly sceptical about this enormously optimistic sort of treatment, both of the so-called Toleration Act of 1689, which is actually only the taking away of penalties for religious diversity.

It's not a positive act. And John Locke's theories of toleration are really only a Christian set of arguments about the sincerity of belief. He says that the state, nobody can think for you. It's only you who will die or be saved. So you have to understand what you believe. Nobody else can understand for you. Locke puts forward two crucial principles. The first claim is that any genuine form of Christianity will be tolerant.

Now that's a new idea of what it is to be a Christian. go back over the previous thousand years and Christians would not accept that at all. We take it for granted that fundamental to Christianity is a love of your neighbor and a willingness to turn the other cheek and things like that. That image of Christianity has become central to our culture

but when people like Locke are advocating it, it's a new view of what Christianity is. The second thing that Locke claims, which is fundamentally new, coming from a philosopher, coming from someone in his position, is the claim that religion is fundamentally a voluntary choice

and therefore that it can't be imposed upon people and that people should have freedom of choice in religion. And the view up to that was the religion was something you inculcated into children and required them to have. You beat them into religion. You beat them into it, that's correct. And the notion that it's voluntary is it destroys the whole notion of a state church and of uniformity.

It's a ridiculous thing to ask Justin. We've gone, was it when Mill published on Liberty, much, much later that we get the real clarification of toleration. I think the later Victorian belief that it is somebody's right,

it's a natural right, as part of what it is to be human, to develop and articulate your own beliefs, is a departure. And I think we perhaps need to draw the distinction between the earlier mode of toleration that says we want to have liberty to be religious and

a later mode of toleration which says essentially we want liberty from all religious expectations, and I think that's quite a shift. I think the key thing that Mill introduces is the sort of definition of toleration that perhaps we would understand in the modern era, which is the idea that the limit to what you will tolerate is the point at which it will do another harm, that we will accept any form of thinking,

provided that that's a purely individual decision and it doesn't harm in some way another person. David? Well, I think we need to go back to the original distinction between tolerance and toleration. Mill is arguing for tolerance as well as for toleration. He's saying that it's important that there should be a diversity of forms of life,

of ways of behavior, of attitudes, of practice, that cultural diversity is in itself a good thing and that we benefit from cultural diversity. That's a quite new sort of argument. Had the Enlightenment dend, maybe, obviously, when I said slackening of religion at the end of the 17th century, Justin came in and said quite the opposite. So had the Enlightenment then in the 18th century,

had that, as it were, taken intellectual power away from religious conscription. Well, the Enlightenment had partly presented a new idea of society as something that could be held together by secular interests, by worldly preoccupations, and had insisted that there needed to be a clear distinction between one side of life, intellectual life, conscientious life, religious life, and public activity. And fundamental to all the argument

I mean, going back to Elizabeth, looking windows into men's souls, is the opening up of a distinction between a private area and a public area, and that's certainly at the heart of the 19th century argument that Miller's producing, the notion that people should have a private zone over which they are sovereign, and that they're entitled to defend against the state. Right, thank you very much, Justin Chapman, Sarabababab and David Wooden. Next week we'll be discussing the planets from Galileo onwards, and thank you very much for listening.

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