A stable tenet of why American democracy works is that it expects, and gets, tolerance for the differences of others. Full acceptance of the other is not necessary, only the recognition that everyone has the right to be left alone and that no one need suffer for being different.
Yet this ban against force in the creed of tolerance is most sorely tested when what has to be tolerated is irrational. And it can well nigh disappear when what has to be tolerated is not only irrational but claims the affection of someone one cares about. My sister-in-law recently moved from a rather secure if not well-paying job and the closeness of her family to Boston where she will soon go on staff at the Church of Scientology. Her official position will be Technical Secretary, or "Tech Sec" in the assonant jargon favored by the Church; she will be in charge of "auditing," the Church's favorite secular version of confession and psychoanalysis.
It would be an understatement to say that her move has caused hard feelings, especially with her mother, who sees the move as a move of desperation and unfinished adolescent rebellion. (My sister-in-law is thirty and a recent divorcee.) My mother-in-law, normally a rather dowdy Republican in her thoughts, has found not one iota of tolerance in her heart, not even to the point of saying simply that it is her daughter's right to mangle her life if she so chooses. The case strikes too closely to the heart and she will have nothing to do with high-mindedness. If the Church were to disappear tomorrow because of government harassment, IRS audits, vilification in the press, and vigilante action, she would have no democratic guilt that civil rights had been traduced. And many of her otherwise strong Republican and libertarian friends would not think her wrong and would not think the Church's demise a lessening of American pluralism.
Anyone who knows anything about the Church's history, or the biography of its founder L. Ron Hubbard ("Ron" to the initiated), will certainly conclude, even after rounding up the usual humble demurrals that we mortal human beings don't know one-tenth of one percent about anything, that the Church is the worst mulligan of science fiction and religious mythology. It claims to be scientifically able to pinpoint the malaise of the spirit and improve it through scientific techniques. And if anyone has bothered to read about any of the Church's activities -- its near subversion of the town of Clearwater, Florida, its civil suits against writers who dare to publish against the Church, its covert spy activity within the government -- will clearly see that the church has no intention of giving to the rest of the society in which it lives the same uncontested tolerance accorded it through the Constitution. It is, by any analysis except that of confirmed believers, a snake-oil show, a pseudoscientific enterprise buttressing outrageous religious claims, an organization whose sole purpose seems to be garnering peoples' money and exercising an abortive control over their lives both in and out of the Church. (Much of the information collected in the auditing sessions is often used to gag potential challenges by disaffected members.)
My sister-in-law's response to something like the preceding paragraph is to assert her right to her ignorance. How do I know that the news stories and interviews and other information were not trumped up, are not out-and-out lies to discredit the work of a great man? This is part of the siege mentality that makes being a member of the Church mean not being a member of the usual community of thinkers. People fully involved in the Church's activities can not, by definition, give in to the radical doubt that is the basis for all learning. They must act from first principles, that certain things are right without question, and from these principles deduce hermetically sealed conclusions whose internal integrity provides no opening for verification from the outside world. They create the world in their own image and then let the mind atrophy, keeping it nourished solely on the collected fat of an ersatz theism.
But here's the rub. In a democracy we are supposed to let this sort of thing go on. If the IRS were harassing the organization with no apparent reason than because it is the Church of Scientology, we would have to ask it to stop if we are as good democrats as we think we are. We must accord it the right to say what it wants, to whom it wants, when it wants to, just as we claim the right for ourselves. Yet it is an apparently shyster organization, and our denial of interference means that some people will ruin their lives and bank accounts. Do we owe these people some measure of protection, even if it means divesting them of some of their rights? Or do we let the free market of tolerance operate regardless of the results? My mother-in-law would disagree with the latter point when it concerns her daughter, agree with it when it relates to people in the abstract. Her nobility is provisional, and understandably so.
But the nobility, in the end, can not be provisional, no matter what the pain or private reservations. The apparent rottenness of a cause is no warrant for its destruction or intimidation. But the nobility need not be passive. If the Church proselytizes, then those who believe in the power of reasonable common sense have to work just as hard to eliminate what in human life carries us beyond the limits of good sense into a superstitious arrogance that enfeebles the will. The cost of giving way to the emotional need for vengeance will, in the end, be more destructive than allowing the exercise, however wrong-headed, of one's right to associate with whom one wants to associate. It is a shame that my sister-in-law believes that she can only find herself through the Church, and one can sympathize with her mother's vindictive desires. But if we trade in education and freedom for righteousness, we get nothing in return but the ashes of superstition. The higher morality is found in tolerance; the more worthwhile purpose is found in the reasonable mind. We must remember this at all times, for it is the only thing that makes the fight worth fighting.