How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West

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Summary: An Exploration of an Important Topic...Especially Now
Review: Today, Catholics and Protestants are overwhelmingly tolerant of people of other religious faiths and non-believers. They may advocate their values - as the secularists do as well - in the liberal marketplace of ideas and criticize those who oppose them, but in the western democracies and republics, religious differences are usually settled in a courthouse. This religious tolerance, enshrined in the American founding, was won at a tremendous price and in the era of the Reformation, both Catholics and Protestants persecuted those whose views they saw as heretical.
Today, the current battle between the liberal west and the forces of Islamic fanaticism has brought the issue of religious intolerance to the front pages of the worlds newspapers and the top of news broadcasts. So, it is a timely subject for a book like the one Perez Zagorn has written. Historically, Islam had a tradition of tolerance for Christians and Jews who were known as "people of the book" because of their shared biblical heritage, but Sayyid Qutb and other radical Islamic thinkers have turned this idea on its head and now seek to convert or exterminate them.
Zagorin takes readers back to a time when the churches of the west dedicated themselves to crushing all dissent and then introduces the reader to early advocates of tolerance who found the seeds of a more tolerant and pluralistic philosophy in the great religious texts and tradition. It was these deep philosophical thinkers -Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, John Locke - who advanced the notion that challenge and pluralism was actually good for their religions, not simply an effective political policy than enhanced trade and diplomacy. The most important single figure in the book is Sebastian Castellio, an early advocate of pluralism and tolerance who dueled with the Protestant reformer John Calvin, the man who was largely responsible for the burning of Michael Servetus, the controversial doctor and theologian. Zagorin writes about the origins of religious tolerance in the Netherlands, which played a vital role in the founding of some of America's colonies and the growth of tolerance here. He concludes his book with chapters on religious tolerance in England and the figures of John Locke and Pierre Bayle. Much of the history that Zagorin writes of here has not been widely disseminated and his very readable account of the men and ideas that advanced tolerance and pluralism should be widely read


Rating:
Summary: Questionable Thesis
Review: Zagorin's thesis is that the key to the West's religious tolerance is the large body of theoretical/political/philosophical writings supporting tolerance -- writings that give the idea more heft, cultural significance, and endurance than it could have had without them. True enough, but in order to suggest this body of writings as the key to our heritage of tolerance, Zagorin explicitly downplays the significance of two other keys: 1) the spread of disbelief/skepticism, and 2) the fears, the political and economic instability, and the human tragedies created by religious wars. But the evidence he presents shows that these two were precisely what inspired the body of writings! Even Sebastian Castellio, Zagorin's "hero" in this book, speaks again and again about the obscurity and difficulty of the doctrines of baptism, predestination, and trinity, and how the difficulty leads to disbelief and therefore controversy and therefore pain and suffering. A pleasant but unimportant book.