Religious Tolerance: America's Final Frontier

This semester, in my rhetoric and civilization course, I decided to focus on the value and practice of religious tolerance. With tensions ebbing and flowing between America and ISIS, and with day-to-day tensions between Americans who share different beliefs, who wouldn't benefit from taking a moment to evaluate themselves? I decided it was time to explore an alternative view toward religion in America. Throughout my research, my personal views on religious tolerance evolved--often prompted by questions raised from my peers in the class.


During my first blog post about tolerance, I chose to identify historical issues that come from not being religiously tolerant. I called for a general change. I called for my audience to reminisce on the good and bad that religion had brought into the world. While it was great to reflect on the fact that everyone has been impacted by religious discrimination in the past, I realized that I didn't suggest any feasible solutions to this problem. The feedback I received was, basically, "yeah, all of that sounds great, but how can you change this issue?"


Taking that feedback to heart, I set out to pin-point one area that specifically could be changed and ended up on the topic of America's Public Education. I a blog post on educating about tolerance, I explored how we have become jaded by the phrase "a separation of church and state," and how we have used it to remove all religious presence from our schools--an action that harms the application of religious tolerance. I read a quote from Helen Keller that said "the result of education is tolerance." This quote deeply impacted my thoughts about the education system of America; it made me realize that we are crippling the peaceable wisdom of future generations by removing America's options to teach and explore various religions.

Then, in a short video presentation on tolerance, I presented examples of where we've lost sight of educational tolerance. I shared my opinion that, because our government leaders typically still have a religion, we still need to learn what motivates them to make the policies they do. We need to understand the religions of the world so we can ensure fairness and equity as our nation forms its policies.

Then, in my most recent blog post, I discussed the examples of tolerance throughout several key historical periods (e.g. Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc.). I shared how the American view of tolerance was shaped, influenced by several watershed court-cases (like the Wisconsin Supreme Court case where a SC Justice banned religions from schools in any form).

As I shared and learned and re-shared and re-learned, it was a tremendous experience to see how much we take our personal religions for granted. For me, the biggest discovery was this: by taking the time to humbly learn about various religions in the world, not only did I walk away with a deeper love and appreciation for their beliefs, but I also walked away with a deeper love and appreciation for my own religion. It made me wonder why we have been so conservative with our religions in the past. It made me wonder how we don't see the value in sharing our views with one another. If Helen Keller could see that the highest result of education is tolerance, then why can't we. It's high time we began to set aside time each week to explore the religions of the world, so America can remain influential (in any capacity) in the world's politics.

Update:

Based on additional feedback from my peers, It's come to my attention how important it is to emphasize that American's need to re-define what a "separation of church and state" means in our political practices and policies. We are damaging ourselves by including educational efforts in that "separation." As I quoted in my presentation, Helen Keller once said that "the highest result of education is tolerance." If we want to pioneer a new application of religious education in the United States, then we need to see, and understand, what that "highest result" is.

Furthermore, I'd like to share a personal experience on the subject. When I read the entire Quran for an Eastern Literature class at my university, I felt an incredible sense of appreciation, appreciation not only for precious tenets of the Islamic faith, but an appreciation of my own Christian faith as well. I became much more sensitive when people would make brash stereotypes of Muslim people. I want everyone to know what that kind of respect and wisdom feels like.