The processes of Democracy are rarely ends in themselves. They
procedures or groups work out their relationships in the public space which
they occupy for at least part of their lives. Most people, however, find the
deepest meaning of their lives shaped by other values defining the "good" life
which their holders regard as having transcendent grounding and ultimate force.
These values are often lived out in and through one or more intentional
communities (existing within a larger democratic society) which explicitly
share them. A supreme example is the religious community. Its ultimate values
(the ones by which its members believe they can live the most fulfilling and
authentic lives in relation to what they believe to be the ground of reality)
go beyond the values attached to democratic forms per se. The religious
community exists for what it regards as a higher purpose (namely, to embody the
virtues of the "good") than simply living together with diverse groups and
individuals under democratic government.1
There is one obvious exception, however, to the claim that
democracy is not an end in itself and that is found in the ideology of liberal
individualism.2 Under liberalism, the right
of the individual to choose without restraint all his or her values and
associations, including those definitive of what the individual deems to be
"the good," implicitly demands that no conception of the good, other than the
right to choose freely, determine the nature or substance of the society as
such. When democracy and liberalism are virtually identical, as has been
theoretically true in America, democratic freedom does become an end in itself
precisely because it and it alone constitutes the only "good." Any other
conception of the good (such as that found within semi-autonomous groups, and
especially those comprising religious communities) is both a threat to and is
threatened by the absolute right of choice.
My
thesis is that the tension between the processes of democracy (understood as
coterminous with liberal individualism) and the demands of transcendent values
as they inform the life of a religious community can, in principle, never be
entirely dissolved short of the democratic society as a whole adopting
completely the values of the religious community (thus eliminating any rival
religious communities), exterminating it, secularizing it beyond recognition,
or forcing it to adopt, in defiance of its own theology, a pluralist view of
truth and morality. Religious communities confront democratic societies, at
least in principle though often not in practice,3 with concrete instantiations of ultimate claims
about the good, many of which are not compatible with democratic liberalism's
implicit claim that the only good which requires universal allegiance is
freedom of choice. Many religious claims necessarily subordinate and thus limit
freedom of choice to and by a higher value, such as, for example, imposing the
will of God on all persons.
Democracies must insist that the sub-groups follow democratic
procedure in their relations with one another. But this does not require that
the relationships within each subgroup will adhere to democratic form or
that the sub-group regards a democratic form of secular government as the ideal
reflection of divine will for all time. In the United States, there are many
religious groups which practice an internal form of autocracy, with power and
authority centralized, for example, in a hierarchical structure or charismatic
leader (either of which may, in turn, be the authoritative interpreters of an
even more basic sacred text or tradition), with little freedom or power
allocated to persons at one or more removes from the center of authority. The
community is allowed to practice forms of racial and gender discrimination, for
example, which would not be permitted in the public space of the democratic
society as a whole. But the freedom of the religious group to engage in
non-democratic forms of discrimination and exclusion is what it means for a
democracy to permit persons to choose to enter such autonomous communities
provided only that they follow democratic forms in their relationships with
other groups in the public arena.
But a major problem arises for a democratic society when some
included communities hold to a belief that non-democratic forms of
extra-ecclesiastical relationship are morally superior to democratic ones and
are in a position (through skillful exercise of democratic procedures)
eventually to overthrow the very forms of democracy which put them in this
position in the first place. These groups challenge the implied irrelevance of
the creedal dimension of the democratic faith which has insisted on tolerance
to everyone regardless of race, color, or creed. Creeds, they insist, do
matter because they reflect basic values which determine the meaning of human
life. Unless the "right" basic values are appropriated by a society, it will
fail to embody the divine imperative and the religious community responsible
for implementing that imperative will itself fall under divine judgment. For
religious groups holding values they regard as absolutely binding on all
people, democratic pluralism is always morally suspect and, at best, a
provisional evil not to be perpetuated except for temporary strategic purposes.
Liberal individualism encourages a diversity of religious groups precisely.
because each represents an
13
option for freely-choosing individuals. Their
diversity embodies the democratic claim that the good cannot be monopolized by
one person, group, or choice. Thus, from democracy's point of view, the more
religious groups there are, the more the democratic liberal ideology is
justified. The reason why America has not faced the philosophical problem that
lies just below the surface of this ideology, (namely that each one of these
diverse religious groups may hold an ultimate conception of the good which is
radically incompatible with other conceptions and with liberalism's conception
that only free choice is good) is that historically, American democracy has
existed in a symbiotic relationship with religious polities that have adopted
democratic processes for themselves and have, as a result, been sympathetic to
democratic forms in the larger society. It has also been true because the
dominant religious groups in America (primarily Protestant Christian) have
decisively influenced the prevailing political, cultural, and economic
structures of America. But when religious groups appear which neither practice
democracy internally, nor accept the underlying cultural values of American
society, nor are willing to play in the political field in absolute conformity
to the rules of democracy, those rules and the tacit consent they presuppose,
are in real trouble. This is especially true when there emerges in the larger
society a distrust of appeals to the common good as that which should override
the special interests of the diverse communities that constitute the liberal
society. When that happens, many people seek commonality not in the nation as a
whole but in smaller, intentional often religiously-based groups whose
transcendent values challenge the underlying values of the liberal, and
increasingly alienating, society which they believe America has become. At that
point, the practices of democracy come under suspicion and are even accused by
some for the loss of a commitment to the common good (inasmuch as individualism
and the common good are a notoriously unstable mixture).
Churches, the primary example of autonomous communities, have had a
complex and ambiguous relationship to the prevailing forms of democracy in
America, especially since the emergence of the liberalism enshrined in the
Federalist philosophy of the late 18th century which shaped the constitutional
understanding of government. In Puritan New England the tension between church
polity and the forms of civil government had been, in theory, negligible
since4 the laws of the civil society were
intended to be direct reflections of Biblical injunctions for community. At the
heart of the congruence between (but never complete identification of) Church
and State were the common theological convictions that sin pervaded all human
affairs and that the divine will should be instantiated throughout the whole
society. If all human beings were sinfully self-aggrandizing then it was better
to keep their power as widely distributed as possible so as to avoid the
despotism of power accumulating in one or a few hands. The Puritans believed
that the converted "saints" understood this fact better than the unconverted
and therefore should be trusted with the greatest degree of power in the
imposition of the divine will not just in private life but throughout all
public space as well since God's imperatives knew no bounds. This led the
Puritans to be extremely suspicious of sub-groups, especially, religious ones,
dissenting from the prevailing orthodoxy, Religious pluralism would be evidence
of the failure to maintain truth and an affront to the unity and scope of God's
will and revelation.
Democracies permit the fullest possible expression of contrary and
competing views provided only that those who seek to implement practices based
on those views do so according to democratic procedures (for example, by
securing majority support for legislation and without direct harm to others).
But a religious community may (and usually does) believe that it alone
possesses the one and only truth about reality. If a religious community
believes that it has found or had revealed to it the only true claims about
reality, then it follows that all rival claims are false. And a false belief
should have no moral or legal standing if the religious community, also is
convinced (as the Puritans were) that actually believing what is false with
respect to ultimate things will doom the misguided believer to eternal
damnation. This community may feel an imperative to "save" unbelievers for
their own sakes and, consequently, in the name of compassion it may seek to
forbid the heretical expression of any beliefs which run counter to the only
ones which can guarantee salvation. Even though the latter-day Puritans
eventually accepted the separation of Church and State; many of their
descendents did not abandon a commitment to enacting laws which would reflect
what they took to be the ultimate values God intends for human society until
the Kingdom comes. Unable to impose orthodox belief per se through
legislation, most nineteenth century Christians felt that they could use the
fires of revivalism to infuse an evangelical spirit non-coercively throughout
the American populace which would produce public law reflective of the
religious communities' deepest moral convictions about how social life should
be lived.
By
the beginning of the nineteenth century, America had given dissenting religious
groups a much greater degree of freedom than they had experienced under
Puritanism. But it could be argued that this flowering of democracy was due to
at least two discordant streams in the American consciousness. First there was
the Madisonian liberal ideology that out of factionalism would come the
minimally necessary consensus for doing the public's business and a sufficient
restraint on despotic accumulation of power by any one person or interest.5 But there was also the belief that the Christian
evangelical consensus would spread so widely that democracy in America simply
would not produce the kind of dissent that would challenge the religious
consensus from which the moral glue (or ‘habits of the heart’)
holding the nation together would flow. Democracy and Christian communities
were able to co-exist because the latter provided the values to which almost
all or the members of the democratic society were tacitly committed. Freedom of
choice did not threaten the religious community's conception of the good
because virtually no one would be expected to choose wrongly, provided they
could all be properly evangelized.
The harmony between democracy and freedom of
14
religious expression (built not on the
logical connection between religious and social values, but rather on their
historical convergence in this particular era) was only challenged
occasionally, by such groups as the Roman Catholic Church and the Latter-Day
Saints. As long as the essential values of social life remained anchored to and
encouraged by a Protestant religious moral theology, American democracy did not
need to protect itself from the smaller religious sub-groups within its midst.
Unless they challenged the hegemony which an essentially Protestant mentality
had over American society, they could be accommodated within (and ultimately
assimilated into) the prevailing American value consensus.6
As
many scholars have pointed out, of course, the price America extracted to
maintain the moral consensus undergirding the alliance between religious groups
and American democracy was the secularization of those groups. Democratic
liberalism did not need to exterminate its religious sub-groups but it did have
to liberalize or secularize them. It had to bring them to the point where their
values were subordinated to the values of the democratic faith. Religious
belief, especially among mainstream Protestant communities, has now become one
uncoerced option among many and usually has as much effect upon the social,
political, and economic decisions one makes as does one's choice of toothpaste.
In a secularized society, religious belief does little more than legitimate the
secular values by which one's life is actually lived and which are given to one
in and through the dominant social structures, institutions, and traditions,
virtually none of which think of themselves as carrying forward explicitly
religious views.
But, as an equal or greater number of scholars are now pointing
out, there is a kind of emptiness that seems to characterize life lived only in
accordance with secular values. This is especially true, for example, of the
value of freedom which, in a liberal context, has come to mean essentially
freedom from any constraints, or freedom to be left alone. In the name
of individualism, people pursue the goal of self -sufficiency, self-reliance,
and independence of others.7 But as the goal
is approached, it looks to many people more and more alienating. Having gained
their freedom from others, they have nothing with which to fill the void which
the absence of others has left. They have no guidance for determining how to
use their freedom for something once they have achieved their liberation
from everything else. It is no wonder, therefore, that so many people
are turning to various more closely knit, intentional, and smaller autonomous
communities to find substance for their lives. It is only in these communities
that they find the promise of affirmation, support, belonging, mutuality, and
shared values which reach fulfilling depths of authenticity. Here they find an
opportunity to use their freedom for relationships more fulfilling than the
cold, impersonal, abstract, and functional forms of association that
characterize liberal society's social interactions. These communities fulfill
the desire to serve others which is usually suppressed or ridiculed as naive
and self-defeating in liberal society.
The problem, of course, is that today, in what many are calling the
post-modern, post-Christian era, the return to community no longer can assume a
tacit consensus that all smaller communities, as well as the larger society
that encompasses them, share a common set of values about how to live together
under one public government. The return to community has not reversed
secularization in society at large though it has done so within some of the
more explicitly religious communities.8 The
public square is still naked even though many of the dwellings on the side of
streets are filled with passionate religious believers who see little need to
wander out into the open since all they want and need is provided within their
dwellings alone.
The question is whether the public square can still function
democratically on those occasions when the inhabitants of the separate homes
must come together to do the minimal public business necessary for social
order. As each dwelling becomes more and more a place in which one's life is
defined and fulfilled, the public square becomes less and less relevant. The
functions of government, to which democracy makes its essential contribution,
seem to touch less and less of the life lived within the walls of each
dwelling. Many people, shouting "get the government off my back," are turning
to smaller communities in which there is a rigid, authoritarian structure based
on the application of an absolutist morality to all segments of human life. The
minimal secular state becomes more and more attractive while the notion of
government as the servant which expedites the delivery of morally imperative
social services to those in need becomes suspect, even while people seem
willing to give more and more of themselves to those within their own tightly
circumscribed and self-defined communities.
Some autonomous groups, of course, want to become so
self-sufficient that they neither need the government for themselves nor need
to use it to carry out missions of mercy to others. Such groups can simply opt
out of democracy all together, provided only that the government does not seek
to suppress their very existence. The Amish remain a case in point. Other
groups, while having no need of democracy or the government for themselves,
feel called to use government in order to carry out what they take to be God's
will for the rest of society. The recent moral majority is an example. It sees
national communalism as a way of protecting economic privileges enjoyed by the
religious group provided that the secular democratic process can be used to
pass legislation that would bind the freedom of other citizens on crucial moral
issues (e.g., anti-abortion laws). The moral urgency of many issues is seen by
some groups as so great that it should not be undercut by appeals to
traditional democratic procedures which, if followed, might produce a majority
opinion permitting the continued practice of what the religious group feels is
morally repugnant.9
One of the difficulties a democracy has in dealing with these
latter religious groups is that they believe, as an indispensable part of their
theology, that they are under a divine command to influence the political
process because God demands that His moral will be implemented throughout the
whole world over which God has dominion. The religious group simply cannot
refrain from political
15
activity without incurring divine wrath. Nor
can it refrain from attacking views, groups, and practices which conflict with
its vision of moral truth. Secularization made such attacks and claims of moral
truth seem highly suspect. Many people believe that the separation of Church
and State means (or should mean) that religious groups stay out of politics.
But as the bitter fruits of secularization have driven many people today back
into religious communities that view of Church/State separation is being
challenged.10
Even the distinction between the "secular" and the "religious" is
.being challenged by some theologies which proclaim that God endorses the
secular order for the time being and that religious groups have a divine
imperative to take it seriously by infusing it with moral values.11 Among Biblically based religious groups the
traditional prophetic dimension is being resurrected. Crucial social problems
are being made. the subject of political concern. Many are focussing on what
are called "single-issues." But, ironically, there is no consensus among the
autonomous religious groups themselves (even those claiming the same ultimate
Biblical authority) as to the content of the divine imperative for the
social order. And yet passion and prophetic outrage characterize each group.
Many of these groups are out in the public square using democratic forms to
slug it out for control of the American value, and eventually legal, system.
The consensus which American democracy has historically assumed regarding the
basic values of American society no longer exists and each of these religious
groups is trying to make its moral vision be the one which ultimately prevails.
Against this background, then, what factors need to be recognized
if we want to negotiate the rocky terrain between the politics of democracy and
the passion of religious communities? Is there anything in the return to
intentional community which can be fruitful for a democracy or does it pose
only dangers which threaten to undermine the precious tolerance and consensus
of moral views which a democracy must presume? If the tension between democracy
and the claims of religious groups is never entirely to be dissolved, are there
any factors which might mitigate it?
First, democracies need to acknowledge the failures of the liberal
individualistic model of human relationships that many religious groups are
trying to go beyond. These groups provide a vision of a greater common good
than that found in the competitive free-for-all of political atomism.
Democratic liberalism must acknowledge that it does represent an alternative
conception of the good (thin and abstract, to be sure), namely that free choice
is the greatest good of all. Religious communities are persuasive to many
people precisely because they offer a concrete instantiation of an alternative
conception of the good which is thick and personal. They remind democracies
that there is a human need for mutuality, caring, compassion, intimacy, and
support which only a smaller community of shared values can provide.
Democracies impoverish themselves if they seek to minimize the difference
between life lived within intentional communities and life lived solely in
accord with the principle of freedom of choice. Unless democracies foster the
more fulfilling but smaller intentional communities within their midst, they
will lose much of their moral appeal. By recognizing that democracies cannot be
for those who live in them what smaller communities can be, democracies might
trim their own absolutist claim that freedom from others is the highest moral
good and find ways to downplay the friction which liberalism promotes, perhaps
by recapturing something of the older notion of republican virtue and the
common good.12 But as long as democracy is
wedded to liberal individualism it can never eliminate the tension between its
notion of the good as freedom and some religious communities' notions of the
good as the carrying out of divine will in a way that sometimes overrides human
freedom.
Second, many religious groups preach a doctrine of sin which leads
to the theological justification of countervailing power, democratically
structured.13 While the notion of sin has
often become little more than a theological justification for naked
self-interest among some libertarians and neo-conservatives, it is an important
part of the underlying philosophy of democracy in America. It justifies more
realistically the need to protect individual freedoms than does the more naive
belief, common in popular defenses of democracy, that persons are fundamentally
well-intentioned toward each other and can be trusted to act benevolently
toward them.
Third, because of the doctrine of sin, a pluralist society working
by consensus reminds religious groups that claims to posses absolute truth (and
morality) are always theologically suspect because they manifest pride and
arrogance. Only religions with no sense of sin and lots of power are truly
dangerous. Those which believe themselves to be infallible not just on matters
that pertain to spiritual or ecclesiastical concerns, but on issues of social
morality, do pose a special problem for democracies. We simply need to
recognize that this problem is endemic to democracies given certain principled
claims of religious groups. There is no way in which some of their positions on
social matters can avoid clashing with democratic procedures at some points and
times. (The issues of abortion today and anti-slavery 150 years ago are
compelling reminders of the limits of democratic tolerance).
Fourth, the prophetic dimension of Jewish and Christian religious
traditions reminds secularists that part of the democratic tradition is a
refusal to forbid one from having particular, and especially religious, reasons
for actions. Only the actions themselves may be curtailed by law. A politics
which is strictly neutral on conceptions of the good is neither possible nor
desirable.14 The tension between religious
groups and the larger society cannot be overcome by vainly seeking to forbid
people with religious convictions (and the support of religious institutions)
from trying to use the democratic process to bring about social change and to
implement, through law or custom, their particular vision of a moral social
order.
Fifth, Biblically grounded religions have a divine imperative for
respecting conscience and a well-justified belief that coerced actions are
least likely in the long run to be effective or to provide the basis for a
moral social life. By recalling that part of their heritage, Biblically based
communities may
16
be less tempted to seek imposition of
coercive law while the nation is still deeply divided over the moral issue at
stake. The respect for conscience also justifies an individual's right to
withdraw from a religious community should she choose to do so. Existing within
a democratic society enables that right to be effectively exercised.
Sixth, even in traditionally hierarchical religious communities,
such as the Roman Catholic, there is a growing dissatisfaction with autocratic
leadership and a burgeoning interest in the development of the laity's
participation in crucial ecclessial decisions. It was not insignificant that
the experience of American democracy helped make this development possible. As
the trend toward lay ownership of authority continues, the religious
communities' respect for democratic processes in the larger society should also
increase.
Seventh, somewhere in the history of most religious communities is
the experience of being a dissenting, excluded group. When that happened these
communities survived in large part due to the tolerance which the excluding
society exercised toward them.15 The
historical memory may well temper the inclination of such groups to exclude
others when they themselves achieve legal and political dominance.
Eighth, the Biblically based religions have a strong theological
commitment to support the secular order, precisely because it is the created
field on which God expects God's people to build structures of justice. While
what constitutes justice is in dispute even among Biblically based religions,
that it must occur politically and economically in the world (and not just in a
spiritual way) seems beyond dispute.
Finally, while no ultimate solution to the tension between rival
truth (and salvation) claims can be found within democratic structures, there
are middle level moral axioms regarding life in the society at large which can
secure the allegiance of a wide variety of religious and secular sub-groups.
These intermediate values (neither absolute nor arbitrary) include commitments
to such things as justice as fairness, compassion for the poor, and protection
for individual pursuits which do not undercut the first two values. While each
sub-group may feel compelled to go far beyond these minimal values in the
treatment of its own. members, it can support their application throughout the
public square with little hesitation because they do not fatally conflict with
their other, more basic values.
It
is extremely dangerous to expect that democracies can ever smooth away the
rough edges between different religious groups or between itself and the claim
of each group. Religious groups differ from many other interest groups in that
they represent the deepest felt and most powerful values for people's lives.
These values cannot be bargained away in the political process. In extreme
cases, there can be no reconciliation between a religious group's demand that
its values be imposed on everyone and the democratic society's demand that only
values which achieve majority support and which protect the greatest degree of
individual freedom can be imposed. But unless a democracy understands the
theological bases of a sub-community's values it will not have reached the very
foundation on which the actions of the religious group are based. Without that
understanding, the battles within democracy for control of the public square
will be the struggles of armies that clash by night and that kill the owl of
Minerva before it can rise to wisdom.
Notes
1. In referring to
religious communities, I mean not only traditional religious groups but those
communities that Tonnies called gemeinschaft and Robert Paul Wolff
recently termed "affective." See Ferdinand Tonnies, Communities and
Society (Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft), trans. and ed. Charles P.
Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957); and Robert Paul
Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
2. By liberal
individualism, I mean what other writers have variously called liberalism,
individualism, and/or atomism. It means essentially any philosophy of human
association which assumes the primacy of the individual to the group, and of
individual rights to the common good. It holds no view of the good for all
people, preferring to let each individual determine that for him or herself. It
assumes that the best social order emerges from the clash of competing
interests in the public square.
3. In practice, of course
religious communities, at least in America, rarely push their theologically
grounded ultimate claims to their logical conclusion. They usually find a way
to reconcile themselves to the prevailing social norms and values. This is the
process of secularization, which itself is then either theologically justified
(e.g., as consistent with God's "affirmation" of the world) or repudiated
(e.g., in the rise of many conservative or fundamentalist groups that claim
that secularization has "sold out" the true faith).
4. This was true at least
for a short period of time. It was never entirely absent and no community ever
fully exemplified the Puritan ideal of a "community of saints" in which all
members were both citizens and full members of the ecclesiastical body. The
Puritan "declension" began the moment they tried to instantiate their vision of
a pure community of saints in a new world composed of sinners who always do
evil.
5. Though even Madison
admitted that there had to be a minimal form of public virtue if the democratic
experiment was to succeed.
6. The Church of the
Latter-Day-Saints provides an excellent example of a sect which began by
challenging the authority structure through which the Protestant majority
claimed to derive its values (by substituting the revelations of Joseph Smith
for reliance upon Scripture alone) and even challenged some of those values
outright, such as monogamy and private property. As a result, the Mormons were
brutally persecuted until they hauled themselves overland to the periphery of
American society. Eventually, the Mormons modified or abandoned many of their
earliest practices and today have become one of the quintessentially American
religious sub-groups promoting mainstream American social values. Even the
Roman Catholic Church, which was at first regarded as profoundly hostile to
American individualism (because of its communal tradition) and freedom (because
of its polity which devolved authority from the top down), eventually came to
accept the separation of Church and State in America (though not without
creating serious and long-standing tensions with Rome by doing so).
7. It has now become almost
a cottage industry to create new diatribes and analyses lamenting the failures
of the liberal individualism of American society and resurrecting an appeal to
the common good or the community as a whole. See, e.g., Robert Bellah, et al.,
Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
8. Even the rise of the
evangelical "new right" does not really reverse the trend toward post-Christian
values. Many of the social values of the evangelical right, for example, are
far more reflective of possessive individualism and militarism than they are of
the communal, pacifistic teachings of Jesus. The Christian America they want to
recreate is more reminiscent of the Christendom in Denmark that that
quintessential Christian iconoclast, Kirkegaard, wanted to remove from the face
of the earth as the most monstrous blasphemy against true Christianity.
17
9. There were, as we know,
opponents of slavery in the antebellum years who were just as opposed to
permitting slavery to remain a matter of free choice even when upheld by
majority opinion in certain states of the union. If we find their views
principled and admirable, it would be hypocritical to deny the same accolades
to those who feel that abortion should not be a matter of personal choice (no
matter how we might feel about the morality of abortion).
10. As. it turns out, the
original intent behind the separation had nothing to do with prohibiting
churches from influencing politics - the evangelical consensus simply assumed
they would - but rather sought to protect both the right of the states to
determine the relation of the Churches to state government 'and to prohibit the
federal government from interfering with internal church polity.
I1. This is especially,
true in those Christian, theologies that stress the doctrine of the Incarnation
of God into the world. By becoming “flesh,” God embraced the world
and removed the traditional devaluation of the secular order which had
prevailed in theologies which stressed a divine/human dichotomy. This
acceptance of secularization is particularly pronounced in the work of the late
German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
12. See, e.g., the work of
William M. Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982).
13. See especially Reinhold
Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner, 1932).
14. See, e.g., Michael
Perry's "Neutral Politics?" in The Review of Politics 51 (Fall 1989):
479-509.
15. This fact does not
overlook the history of persecution that many religious communities suffered.
Such persecution produced a martyrdom that, in its own way (perhaps even a more
powerful way), recruited new members and enabled the group to survive.
Nevertheless, tolerance as well has played a major role in the survival of most
religious groups.
18