On November 13, 2023, the James Madison Program hosted a lecture at Princeton University with Jed Atkins, titled, "Liberalism and the Christian Origins of Tolerance."
Tolerance is usually regarded as “the
quintessential liberal value.” This position is supported by a standard
liberal history that views religious toleration as emerging from the
post-Reformation wars of religion as the solution to the problem of
religious violence. Requiring the separation of church from state,
tolerance was secured by giving the state the sole authority to punish
religious violence and to protect the individual freedoms of conscience
and religion. This standard liberal history exerts a powerful hold on
the modern imagination: it undergirds several important recent accounts
of liberal tolerance and virtually every major study of tolerance in the
ancient world. Nevertheless, this familiar narrative distorts our
understanding of tolerance’s premodern origins, unduly restricts the
language available to us to speak about tolerance, and impoverishes
present-day debates.
In the lecture, Professor Atkins will illustrate
these claims by showing how the standard liberal history obscures
tolerance’s origins in a North-African Christian tradition that derives
accounts of political judgment and patience within pluralistic
communities from theological reflection on God’s roles as a patient
father and just judge. By recovering this forgotten tradition, we can
better understand and assess the choices made by leading theorists of
liberal tolerance and, as a result, think better about how to achieve
peaceful coexistence in an increasingly polarized and violent world.
Jed W. Atkins is the E. Blake Byrne Associate Professor of Classical
Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at
Duke University. He directs The Transformative Ideas Program as well as
The Civil Discourse Project and chairs the Department of Classical
Studies. A scholar of Greek, Roman, and early Christian moral and
political philosophy, Atkins has published three books with Cambridge
University Press: Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason, Roman Political Thought, and The Cambridge Companion to Cicero’s Philosophy (co-edited with Thomas Bénatouïl). His fourth book, The Christian Origins of Tolerance, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
