"More and more people care about religious tolerance as fewer and fewer care about religion"
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Tolerance becomes easiest to praise once belief stops costing you anything. Alexander Chase’s line lands because it flips the expected moral arc: we like to imagine religious tolerance as a hard-won civic virtue achieved through empathy and pluralism. He suggests it’s also a demographic artifact - a byproduct of secular drift. When fewer people are emotionally and socially invested in doctrinal truth, the stakes of disagreement collapse. You can be magnanimous when you’re not convinced the other person’s soul, nation, or eternal destiny is on the line.
The wit here is quietly acidic. “More and more” versus “fewer and fewer” gives the sentence its seesaw rhythm, a neat piece of arithmetic that exposes a cultural trade: we’re congratulating ourselves for generosity that may be less virtue than inertia. Chase is poking at a modern liberal self-image that treats tolerance as an unqualified good while avoiding the uncomfortable question of what happens when “tolerance” becomes a substitute for conviction, not a discipline practiced alongside it.
Context matters: Chase wrote in a 20th-century West where church attendance and public religiosity were beginning to loosen, even as memories of sectarian violence and ideological absolutism were fresh. In that environment, “religious tolerance” can function as social glue, a way to keep the peace in increasingly mixed societies. Chase’s subtext is not anti-tolerance; it’s anti-self-congratulation. He’s warning that a society may celebrate open-mindedness precisely when it no longer has to wrestle with the hardest kind: tolerating beliefs that genuinely challenge, offend, or compete for power.
The wit here is quietly acidic. “More and more” versus “fewer and fewer” gives the sentence its seesaw rhythm, a neat piece of arithmetic that exposes a cultural trade: we’re congratulating ourselves for generosity that may be less virtue than inertia. Chase is poking at a modern liberal self-image that treats tolerance as an unqualified good while avoiding the uncomfortable question of what happens when “tolerance” becomes a substitute for conviction, not a discipline practiced alongside it.
Context matters: Chase wrote in a 20th-century West where church attendance and public religiosity were beginning to loosen, even as memories of sectarian violence and ideological absolutism were fresh. In that environment, “religious tolerance” can function as social glue, a way to keep the peace in increasingly mixed societies. Chase’s subtext is not anti-tolerance; it’s anti-self-congratulation. He’s warning that a society may celebrate open-mindedness precisely when it no longer has to wrestle with the hardest kind: tolerating beliefs that genuinely challenge, offend, or compete for power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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