There is a presumed virtue of exclusivity in American culture. I have likely been plagued by this worse than others. To elaborate a little bit, we tend to treat the ability to discriminate as supreme. As the Catholic Fascist has put it, the pursuit of truth is the only good. Tolerance is the virtue often posited as opposing this tendency, although tolerance has gotten a bad name for itself. In as much as people have used tolerance to mean that corporate values are incompatible with authentic community, I think the criticism has been just. Tolerance should not be just another code word for celebrating our individuality.
There are numerous people out there who ask only to know when and where to show up. Tell them, and they will be there. These are the people who move to a new community, look for the closest parish, and join. Once they join, they don’t look to recreate the parish in their own image. I typically haven’t been that person. My wife is one of those people. She is the type of person who looks to assimilate herself to her surroundings rather than assimilating her surroundings to her. She is the type who will find a way to be happy in 95% of the parishes out there. I’m afraid for those online, finding a parish one can grow and thrive is a needle in the haystack venture. To keep the dichotomy clean, these are folks that would find themselves happy in fewer than 5% of the parishes around. While I’m not near as bad as I used to be, I still find myself nitpicking at mass and thinking my way would be superior. For whatever reason, my wife (who isn’t Catholic by the way) can find a way to be gracious for what she receives at most any parish, and I manage to be ungrateful so much of the time. Of course, I could air my grievances here and find so much support for them, which just goes to show the deficit of blogs and online dialog in general.
If we were to contrive a more practical definition of tolerance, we might say it is the ability to be faithful in the world as it is. Certainly the world can be and often is wrong. There is simply no question on that matter. However, the world as a practical matter is real and must be addressed. The way to address this which seems privileged in American society – quite possibly beyond our borders – is to form a cult and define it as the world. At that point it is not me who is the problem, but the bloody heretics. However they be converted we’ll leave to details, but once they are converted we experience nirvana and utopia. Where this gets fun is if there is disagreement within the cult, we simply need to further refine our definition of cult and thereby free ourselves of the heretics. The multiplicity of cults is not a defect, but a feature. For at one time our understanding of truth was vague but now our understanding is more concrete and with greater specificity comes greater ease at convincing the unwashed of the truth.
Except of course it doesn’t. Rather the refining of cult is a way to delude ourselves of how the world actually is. But isn’t the alternative a path to relativism? As I have spoken of tolerance, I do not believe that to be the case. The truth doesn’t change whether one pretends the rest of the world is there or not. Perhaps the greatest change is the recognition that evils in the world are not simply a matter of the absence of individual virtue. Perhaps our corporate choices lead men to sin. Perhaps we in fact do save each other, and it is not a mere matter of my personal relationship with Jesus. Perhaps the infusion of Christ is not merely the sum total of the individual faith in a given community but has a character within the community that is distinct from its individual members. Perhaps it is toleration that provides the window into our corporate relationship with Christ.
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