Religious Tolerance in America

The NY Times reports that we are a quite religiously tolerant nation, thank you. I'm proud of that. I am a religious man. I'll talk about it to anyone who asks, but I don't see any reason to be obnoxious about it. Three points in the article caught my attention and serve to highlight the anti-religious bigotry that thrives at that intolerant leftist flagship known as the New York Times:

"The findings seem to undercut the conventional wisdom that the more religiously committed people are, the more intolerant they are, scholars who reviewed the survey said."

Hmmm... those smug religious nuts aren't so intolerant after all!

“It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists or dogmatists.”

He's taking aggregate data gathered on a population sample and applying it to each person in the population, a big logic error. It doesn't follow that each individual has many beliefs because the aggregate group expresses many beliefs.

“It could be that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view,” said Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Slam! You religious nuts don't even know what you believe!

Here's my two cents: Like most Americans, I interact with a religiously diverse community in my daily dealings, and have done so all my adult life. I'm too busy working out my own salvation to worry over the salvation of others. Besides, I'm not God: It would be very presumptuous of me to wield the Lord's winnowing fan. I know what I believe, and I believe it to be true, otherwise I would be looking for a new house of worship. This survey shows that other Americans share my attitude.

We Americans have learned to be tolerant because we are religiously diverse. The alternative would be chaos. We've learned how to disagree with one another without cutting off heads or blowing things up. We also know that our God is bigger than some buffoon who mocks him by crafting religious icons of elephant dung or submersing a crucifix in a jar of urine. I am not the flaming sword of God. Yes, I should defend my religious beliefs, and even share them when appropriate. But no, I don't need to kill anyone to make my point.

It's no surprise the NY Times just doesn't get it. They still think terrorism is all President Bush's fault. And after all, he's a religious nut.

Link: NY Times Article on Religious Tolerance