Justus For All

Religious Tolerance and the Common Good, a speech delivered by Archbishop Chaput of Colorado is well worth reading in full.  (via the Anchoress).   I want to highlight one small part however.

Here’s my point. People who take the question of human truth, freedom and meaning seriously will never remain silent about it. They can’t. They’ll always act on what they believe, even at the cost of their reputations and lives. That’s the way it should be. Religious faith is always personal, but it’s never private. It always has social consequences, or it isn’t real. And this is why any definition of “tolerance” that tries to turn religious faith into a private idiosyncrasy, or a set of personal opinions that we can have at home but that we need to be quiet about in public, is doomed to fail.

I believe this is true.  That is not of course to say that just because someone believes something they are correct, I have issues with various Christian groups about a whole range of issues, but I welcome the concept that their values spur them to action, just as I welcome those whose secular values spur them to action, even when I disagree with their policies.

I am not very much concered with radicals or fanatics of any stripe hijacking our systems to impose their own values.  That is not because these groups don’t try to do so, they do and often I disagree with them.  But passionate advocay and involvement seems to me to be far less troubling then general apathy and malaise.  We have a pretty good system for sorting out competing views and controling the more radical elements of all stripes, our system is probably less well suited for delivering good results to an apathetic populous though.

I’d much rather see 50 religious fundamentists and 50 marxist collectivists debating vigourously then 100 people who can’t bother to consider anything beyond their own immediate material desires.