On 'Intolerant tolerance'

George Pell writes with insight and power in explaining why Western intolerence of Christianity is much more than simply inconvenient or bothersome for Christians. At the heart of the conflict are both the nature of reality and the witness of the church:

The great question that exercises modern culture is the meaning of human autonomy and especially sexual freedom. But this struggle is fundamentally a struggle over a religious question—a question that revolves around the reality of a transcendent order. One way of putting it is: “Did God create us, or did we create God?” The limited scope that secularism is prepared to concede to religious beliefs is based on the assumption that we created God. As long as the supremacy remains with man, as long as faith is understood as a private, therapeutic pursuit, it is permissible. But when people insist that faith is more than this and that the supremacy is not ours, religion must be resisted—increasingly through the law.

The use of antidiscrimination law to advance the autonomy project is not new, but the withholding or retrenchment of protections for church agencies and conscience provisions for individuals is a dangerous trend. A number of factors are at play here, but the broad effect is to enforce conformity. It seems that, just as the faith and convictions of individual believers have to be privatized and excluded from public life, the services that church agencies provide to society have to be secularized. The service the Church gives has always been a source of its growth and strength, and church agencies working in the areas of welfare, family, education, and health bear witness to the values that Christian leaders put forward in public debate. Part of the logic in attacking the freedom of the Church to serve others is to undermine the witness these services give to powerful Christian convictions. The goal is to neutralize this witness to the reality of Christian ­revelation.

The question of autonomy, freedom, and supremacy plays itself out, among other places, in the contest between religious and sexual freedom. Absolute sexual freedom lies at the heart of the modern autonomy ­project. Well beyond preferences about sexual practices or forms of relationship, it extends now to preferences about the method and manner of procreation, family formation, and the uses of human reproduction in medical research. The message from the earliest days of the sexual revolution, always barely concealed behind the talk of “live and let live” and creating space for “different forms of loving,” was that limits on human sexual autonomy will not be tolerated. This is generating the pressures against religion in public life.

I strongly recommend reading Dr. Pell's whole article.