Religious tolerance isn’t exactly popular these days. The ethno-religious violence coursing through and from the Muslim Middle East has been compared with the Thirty Years’ War, and for once the analogy does not seem misplaced. The major European countries swing between ultra-accommodating and ultra-suspicious or xenophobic attitudes toward the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, especially but not only the newcomers. In America, whose founders turned religious toleration into the natural right of all, significant cracks, mainly of a different kind, have opened in the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.
More about: Arts & Culture, History & Ideas, Religious Freedom