[This began as an intended post to the “Religious Tolerance” Facebook group and ran long.]

I’ve been thinking some about this, somewhat due to any of the times that someone tries to claim that limited tolerance isn’t tolerant at all. If the ideal being pursued is a sufficient tolerance, that’s something which we not only expect from others but require ourselves to extend to them. And I say that not because I imagine anyone here doesn’t understand that, but because it’s something that can easily be lost to sight if one has or acquires a relatively high level of comfort with — even preference for — diversity. That comfort or preference can itself become an inflexibility, an intolerance that provides an excuse for friction where it’s not necessary.

I don’t know why (other than it’s concrete and universal) but my mind always runs to food analogies when it comes to this. But, imagine a group of people gathered for a potluck. It’s been advertised that everyone is welcome, you don’t even need to bring a dish — or eat anything, for that matter — but bring whatever, eat whatever, as long as you don’t start any food fights.

So, imagine your diet is somehow limited. It doesn’t matter how or why, there are foods and preparations and combinations that you’re comfortable eating and enjoy, and others that you aren’t and don’t. You decide for whatever reason to give the potluck a try, and you make up a batch of some favorite dish. You know you’ll have that at least to eat, but you make enough to share with everyone else.

Now… if you showed up at the potluck and advocated that all the other food be thrown out in favor of yours; or if you spent the dinner asserting that all the other food was terrible because it wasn’t just like yours; or if you only let people sample your dish on an otherwise empty plate and then called them ungrateful barbarians if they ate anything else after yours… I think we might mostly agree these are intolerant behaviors. These are the kind that it seems to me those of us most comfortable with an ideal of tolerance find obvious.

But imagine instead that when you arrive, after initial warm welcome, you discover that everything everyone else has brought to eat has been dumped into a giant bowl and stirred together. And when you try to offer people an unmixed portion of what you brought, others of the people there demand that you mix it with the big bowl first, and try to take your dish away from you before you can even serve yourself an unmixed portion.

Imagine, further, that when you offer around some of what you brought, you’re the one being told it must be thrown out.

This is the kind of intolerance that it seems to me those of us most comfortable with an ideal of tolerance may find easiest to miss — at those very times when we’re guilty of it. We stand up for an existing package of things that we’re already comfortable sampling, even mixing, because we’re attached to an ideal of sampling and mixing — and in some cases we’ve screened the existing package because of that similarity. (I’m cool with X-ive Y-ism because I’m an X-ive Z-ist, and X-ives are tolerant regardless of their ism. But don’t get me started about those W-ists. Oh, there are X-ive W-ists? I guess they’re ok then — but why don’t they speak up? And I’ve read their book, there’s no way they can be X-ive.) But only being tolerant of those who are similarly tolerant is another kind of the same failure against which we advocate tolerance.

As I alluded at the start, I don’t advocate an ideal of unlimited or perfect tolerance. (I don’t know that anyone does.) I advocate sufficient tolerance. Sufficient for what? For peace, for cooperation, for the minimization of harm. But those of us who hold such an ideal, and who are either predisposed to or practiced at handling the diversity aspect of it, can’t be complacent and neglect the distinctiveness aspect. Our challenge is to tolerate with as much grace those attached to only doing things certain ways, as we hope they will tolerate others doing things every which way.