Intolerance​—From Past to Present

THUD . . . thud . . . thud. The iron bar struck heavily on the limbs and chest of Jean Calas. His broken body was then exposed on a horizontal cartwheel in a public square of Toulouse, southern France. Thereafter it was burned to ashes.

Calas died on the wheel as a convicted murderer. The previous day, March 9, 1762, this Huguenot (French Protestant) was found guilty of murdering his son so as to prevent his conversion to Catholicism. A solemn burial service honored Calas’ son as a Catholic martyr.

French philosopher Voltaire, however, suspected that Calas had been a victim of Catholic intolerance. After proving that Calas’ son was actually a suicide, he launched a three-year campaign to arouse public opinion throughout Europe. Voltaire’s strategy worked. He finally succeeded in getting the French authorities to review the case, and on March 9, 1765, Calas was declared innocent posthumously. This glaring case of anti-Huguenot prejudice became one of the world’s causes célèbres. It prompted Voltaire to write his famous Treatise on Toleration.

Intolerance​—Good or Bad?

Few would try to justify such bigotry, prejudice and murderous intolerance. Nevertheless, under certain circumstances intolerance has its place. Murder, stealing, rape and kidnapping are all things considered intolerable in most societies, and rightly so. And the same has been true in the past when it comes to religion. When giving the Ten Commandments to the nation of Israel, Jehovah God declared himself to be “a God exacting exclusive devotion.” (Exodus 20:5) As a result, God’s people ‘tolerated no rivalry’ of false gods. (Numbers 25:11-13; see also 2 Kings 10:16.) False worship was therefore a capital offense.

Bear in mind, however, that as Sovereign, God certainly has the right to decide what he will and will not tolerate in matters of religion. Humans do not have this prerogative. Thus when the Israelites executed the depraved, demon-worshiping Canaanites, they did so under a divine mandate. (Genesis 15:16; Exodus 23:23, 24) Nevertheless, God did not commission the Israelites to traverse land and sea to wipe out false worship in other lands. Nor was the Christian congregation given authority to execute nonbelievers.

The intolerance that led to the death of Jean Calas​—and countless millions of others—​is therefore not from God. ‘But surely the world has outgrown such intolerance,’ some might reason. What does history teach? How did intolerance start? Is there reason to believe it will rear its ugly head again?

The Persecuted Become the Persecutors

The notions of “freedom of religion” and “separation of Church and State” hardly existed in antiquity. Ancient rulers were often considered to be either priests of the main divinity or gods themselves. Conquered peoples either adopted the gods of their conqueror or were allowed to continue worshiping their own gods. In fact, often people worshiped the same deities under different names.

Not so with the conquered Jewish nation, however. After their nation’s fall in 607 B.C.E., dispersed Jews gave their host governments the problem of a religious minority that demanded freedom to worship God according to their own religious laws. The result? Often bitter persecution. Nevertheless, with the advent of Christianity, the Jews seemed to forget their own experiences and became avid persecutors of Christ’s followers.​—Acts 3:14, 15; 4:1-3; 8:1.

Christians, too, followed this sad pattern. At first, they were victims of Jewish intolerance. Soon they met up with opposition from other quarters. Their refusal to worship pagan gods or deified state rulers brought the early Christians in conflict with the central and local authorities of the Roman Empire.

In course of time it became a capital crime to bear the name of Christ, and large numbers of Christians were put to death. Waves of persecution continued until 313 C.E., when, for political reasons, joint Emperors Licinius and Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, establishing religious toleration within the Roman Empire. Constantine eventually made “Christianity” the privileged religion of the Roman Empire​—a bold attempt to consolidate a disintegrating empire by syncretizing paganism and Christianity.

“Christianity,” however, was split into rival sects. Two cities, Byzantium (later named Constantinople) and Rome, each claimed to be the home of the true church. Both were intolerant of those disagreeing on doctrinal points. The persecuted had again become the persecutors.

Catholic Intolerance

Catholic canon law states: “Most firmly hold and in no way doubt that every heretic or schismatic is to have part with the Devil and his angels in the flames of eternal fire, unless before the end of his life he be incorporated with, and restored to the Catholic Church.” And up to this day the oath of allegiance of Roman Catholic bishops states: “With all my power I will persecute and make war upon heretics.” Thus intolerance was built into Catholic thinking. But justifying this attitude, the authoritative French Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique states: “Being the guardian of revealed truth, faith and morals, the church cannot tolerate the spreading of any teaching that is harmful to the faith of the faithful.”

Thus the Catholic Church has often hounded down “heretics,” judged them and then handed them over to the secular authorities for punishment. The New Encyclopædia Britannica writes: “In the imperial church [after Constantine]​—especially after the emperor Theodosius in the late 4th century—​heresy became a criminal transgression punishable by the state. The enemy of the church was likewise viewed as the enemy of the empire. Thus, bishops at the imperial synods of the 4th to 8th centuries attempted to declare as heretics the minority of dissenters and to eliminate them as enemies of the state.”

The church also used the secular authorities to show its intolerance toward the Jews, the Muslims, the Cathari and the Albigenses (massacred in a “holy war” in southern France in the early 13th century), heretics and European Protestants. True, most of this blood was shed by the “secular sword.” But in his bull Unam Sanctam, issued in 1302, Pope Boniface VIII decreed that the “secular sword” must submit to the “spiritual sword” of the church and “be employed for the Church . . . under the direction of the spiritual power.” (The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 15, page 126) So the Catholic Church cannot escape responsibility for the blood shed as a result of its policy of religious intolerance.

Protestant Intolerance

The Catholic Church, however, did not hold the monopoly on religious intolerance. Led by theologian John Calvin, Protestants carried out their own reign of terror. Swiss-born Protestant historian Philip Schaff admitted: “To the great humiliation of the Protestant churches, religious intolerance and even persecution unto death were continued long after the Reformation. In Geneva the pernicious theory was put into practice by state and church, even to the use of torture and the admission of the testimony of children against their parents, and with the sanction of Calvin.” And when his theology on predestination and the Trinity was challenged by Jérôme Bolsec and Michael Servetus respectively, Calvin had the former banished from Geneva and the latter arrested and tried as a heretic. Servetus was burned at the stake. Other “heretics,” too, were burned in Calvinist Geneva, with the approval of such Protestant theologians as Theodore Beza.

Martin Luther, too, showed great intolerance. He not only became “notoriously anti-Semitic [anti-Jewish]” but even had four “witches” burned in Wittenburg.

Soon France and Germany would be torn asunder by ferocious religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries​—atrocities being committed by Catholics and Protestants alike.

The Rise of Secular Intolerance

‘But certainly man has learned from his past mistakes,’ you might say. And, indeed, the churches of late have demonstrated a more tolerant attitude than in the past. Nevertheless, as The New Encyclopædia Britannica says: “The legacy of Christian intolerance and the methods it developed (e.g., inquisition, or brainwashing) operates in the intolerance of the ideology and techniques of modern political revolutions.”

Yes, whereas in some respects there is a decline in religious intolerance within Christendom, our generation has seen an upsurge in political and racial intolerance. Such secular intolerance is indeed a “legacy of [apostate] Christian intolerance.” The Nazi Holocaust, or extermination of some six million Jews, is one example of this. And Hitler is quoted as justifying his intolerance of the Jews by saying: “I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic church had adopted for 1500 years.” Other dictators since Hitler have used brainwashing and mental and physical torture in their fight against ideological “heretics.” Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, have often taken the brunt of such intolerance because of their political neutrality. In Cuba one Witness was stripped naked, wrapped in barbed wire and placed on top of a roof as human bait for hungry mosquitoes. In yet another land, five Witnesses were arrested and subjected to severe threats and beatings over a period of days. One had to be hospitalized as a result of his injuries. In three countries in northeast Africa, Witnesses were subjected to arrest. (Up to 5 percent of them in one country!) Many were tortured, and three were even killed. Yes, fanatical political rulers have learned much from the churches about silencing dissidents.

But could it be, though, that the churches themselves will become the victims of secular intolerance? Just how deep rooted is the claimed tolerance of our day? And what about ecumenism? Is it a sign of greater tolerance or merely of greater indifference toward religion? Finally, how does all of this affect us as individuals? Is it possible to have strong religious convictions without being intolerant? These questions will be considered in the following article.

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‘The legacy of Christian intolerance operates in the techniques of modern political revolutions’

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Intolerance Knows No Boundaries

“Few Muslim nations . . . are models of toleration. But are they alone in this? The Inquisition and the wars of religion covered Christendom with blood, and the devout people who founded the United States viewed the Indians and the blacks as something less than human. The same is true today of their cousins in South Africa. As for the worshipers of Reason, unfortunately their reign coincided with the reign of the guillotine. ‘Scientific socialism’ [communism], when in power, has done no better.”​—French newspaper editor André Fontaine, writing in Le Monde.

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Title page of first edition of Voltaire’s Treatise on Toleration, Paris, 1763

Today’s World​—Tolerant or Indifferent?

SOME feel we live in an Age of Tolerance​—a world where in most lands killing or torturing people for their religious beliefs is unthinkable. Nevertheless, how deep do the roots of toleration really run? Could it be that the much-vaunted Age of Tolerance is merely an Age of Indifference?

The Fight for Toleration

Actually, tolerance is a relatively recent acquisition, even within Western civilization. According to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, the English word “tolerance” is of French origin. Says the French Vocabulaire de la Philosophie by André Lalande: “The [French] word tolerance was born in the XVI century as a result of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. The Catholics ended up tolerating the Protestants and vice versa.”

In France the Wars of Religion ended in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, a law by which King Henry IV granted limited freedom to Protestants. But freedom of religion was still not secure in France. In 1685 King Louis XIV revoked this edict and the Huguenots faced another century of being imprisoned, sent to the galleys or killed outright. It was only after the French Revolution got under way in 1789 that freedom of religion began to be legally guaranteed in France.

In Germany the wars between the Catholic and the Lutheran princes ended in 1555 with the Peace of Augsburg. This, however, granted them the right to impose their religion upon their respective subjects. There was no religious freedom for dissidents. The Thirty Years’ War between European Catholics and Protestants came to an end in 1648, and the Peace of Westphalia extended religious freedom to Calvinists. But it was not until 1781 that the German Edict of Toleration granted freedom of worship to all non-Catholics, and even that freedom was limited.

England, too, had a long and bitter fight for toleration. Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans took turns persecuting one another as they successively came to power. In 1689, under Protestant King William III, the British Toleration Act was published, but it forbade any preaching against the Trinity, and dissenters were barred from political office. In the 18th century various acts were passed that progressively granted religious freedom to those who were not members of the Church of England. But Catholics, Jews and dissenters were deprived of certain civil rights. It was not until the 1820’s that most of these restrictions were removed, and it was not until 1880​—only a century ago—​that religious dissenters in England were allowed to bury their dead according to their beliefs.

Ecumenism​—Tolerance or Indifference?

It can therefore be seen that today’s seeming toleration has very shallow roots in history. What, therefore, motivates the tolerant attitudes prevailing today? Sincere recognition of the rights of others, or religious indifference?

The Roman Catholic Church is of the latter opinion. The Catholic Encyclopedia states the matter bluntly: “Toleration came in only when faith went out.” Says this same work: “The Church would therefore seem to be strangely inconsistent, for while she claims toleration and liberty for herself she has been and still remains intolerant of all other religions.”

To illustrate this, at the Ecumenical Council Vatican II, which ended in 1965, the Roman Catholic Church for the first time in history recognized the need for religious freedom. But a careful reading of Paul VI’s official declaration on such freedom reveals that he was more concerned about freedom for the Catholic Church in countries where it is threatened than about freedom for non-Catholic religions. And the present pope’s insistence on Mary worship and clerical celibacy indicates that his concept of ecumenism is for Protestants to come back to the bosom of the Church of Rome.

As to the present-day ecumenism, in which the Protestant and Orthodox World Council of Churches is prominent, The New Encyclopædia Britannica states: “The ecumenical movement of the 20th century has been attempting to contribute to overcoming church division precisely through clarification of the nontheological factors.” (Italics ours.) In other words, the ecumenic movement is seeking to unite the churches on all matters except spiritual ones. It deals with social and political questions. The World Council of Churches allegedly provides funds for “liberation movements” in various countries. Recently the Salvation Army withdrew from the WCC, accusing it of being guided “by politics rather than the gospel” and of providing financial support to guerrilla movements. It is therefore quite evident that the doctrinal tolerance of the ecumenical movement is, in fact, a sign of doctrinal indifference. On the other hand, its political involvement is certainly not helping to endear it to certain political governments.

Strong Convictions Without Intolerance

In M’Clintock and Strong’s Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, we read: “The Church of Christ, in her purity, knows nothing of intolerance, and therefore can never be guilty of persecution.” (Italics theirs.) The Cyclopaedia quotes John Jortin, an 18th-century English Protestant, born of French Huguenot parents, who said: “Where persecution begins, Christianity ends.” It further states: “It was after Christianity had been established as the religion of the [Roman] empire, and after wealth and honor had been conferred on its ministers, that the monstrous evil of persecution acquired gigantic strength, and threw its blasting influence over the religion of the Gospel.”

Yes, it was only after the apostasy set in that “Christians” became intolerant persecutors. Foretelling this apostasy, the apostle Paul wrote: “The time is coming when men will not tolerate wholesome teaching . . . They will no longer listen to the truth, but will wander off after man-made myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3, 4, The New Testament in Modern English by J. B. Phillips) The creeds of Christendom’s churches contain many man-made myths, and it was precisely over such myths that apostate Christians became persecutors. For example, the myth of “three divine Persons in one God” gave rise to violent dissension and persecution among so-called Christians in the fourth century C.E. Anti-Trinitarians continued to be persecuted throughout the centuries.

True Christians, though, are not persecutors. This does not mean, however, that they do not have strong religious convictions, nor that they do not combat error. The apostle Paul stated the true Christian position: “For the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but powerful by God for overturning strongly entrenched things. For we are overturning reasonings and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God; and we are bringing every thought into captivity to make it obedient to the Christ.”​—2 Corinthians 10:4, 5.

Jehovah’s Witnesses likewise use the Bible truths as their only weapons for overturning strongly entrenched man-made religious myths. But they never use coercion, nor do they persecute those who disagree with them, although they themselves have been the victims of cruel persecution by religious and political powers. They follow Paul’s advice: “Return evil for evil to no one. Provide fine things in the sight of all men. If possible, as far as it depends upon you, be peaceable with all men. Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but yield place to the wrath; for it is written: ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says Jehovah.’”​—Romans 12:17-19.

Some would argue, however, that Jehovah’s Witnesses are, in fact, intolerant because they expel from the congregation wrongdoers and individuals who do not conform to their religious beliefs. However, this practice is not due to some human standard or personal prejudice. It is God who commands Christians to expel wrongdoers. (1 Corinthians 5:9-13) However, Jehovah’s Witnesses do not malign, slander or harass expelled ones in any way. They merely follow the Bible’s command to cease associating with such ones. In this way both the purity and the identity of the Christian congregation are maintained. How different is such action from that of the churches that have mercilessly hounded and persecuted dissenters!

Religion ‘Reaps What It Has Sown’

The apostle Paul once said: “Do not be misled: God is not one to be mocked. For whatever a man is sowing, this he will also reap.” (Galatians 6:7) This certainly applies to religious organizations that over the centuries have practiced intolerance toward others.

In the last book of the Bible, false religion is pictured as a harlot that commits “fornication” with “the kings of the earth.” (Revelation 17:1, 2; 18:9) This refers to religion’s selling herself to politics rather than remaining “no part of the world” in obedience to Jesus’ command. (John 17:16) The Bible foretells that antireligious political elements will tire of religion’s interference and will turn against her. By means of them, Jehovah God will ‘execute judgment upon the great harlot who corrupted the earth with her fornication’ and will ‘avenge the blood of his slaves at her hand.’​—Revelation 19:2; 17:16, 17.

With this unexpected turn against religion, intolerance will surface as never before in history. Even true Christians will not escape the wrath of the anti-God society that false religion’s destruction will usher in. But the ensuing attack on God’s faithful people will provoke God’s intervention. He simply will not tolerate such “kings,” “military commanders” and “strong men” who attack his people on earth!​—Revelation 19:17-21; 17:14.

All goatlike, intolerant persecutors “will depart into everlasting cutting-off.” But to his sheeplike disciples, many of whom have been victims of intolerant persecution, Christ will say: “Come, you who have been blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the founding of the world.” (Matthew 25:31-46) At long last, the prayer of true Christians will be answered, namely: “May your kingdom come, and your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.”​—Matthew 6:9, 10, Ph.

Where will you stand when intolerance toward religion reaches its climax? You cannot afford to remain indifferent. As the apostle Paul explained, at Romans 9:22, 23: “God, although having the will to demonstrate his wrath and to make his power known, tolerated with much long-suffering vessels of wrath made fit for destruction, in order that he might make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy.” Yes, God’s ‘toleration’ of wickedness has served a good purpose: It has given righteously inclined individuals time to take their stand for what is right. Yet, God has placed a time limit on this tolerance. (Acts 17:30, 31) All the evidence indicates that this period of toleration has about run out. The Bible therefore urges you to get out of false religion before it is too late!​—Revelation 18:4, 5.

Jehovah’s Witnesses will be happy to help you free yourself from false religion, which has shown so much intolerance over the centuries. Study the Bible with the Witnesses. They can help you discover therein a wonderful hope, that of living forever in a Paradise earth where man’s intolerance against his fellowman will be a thing of the past.

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Jehovah’s Witnesses use Bible truths, not violence, to combat error

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Secular powers will become intolerant of worldly religion, which is symbolized by a harlot in the book of Revelation