The Tyranny of Tolerance
Bettina Krause July/August 2026The Norwegian-language movie Fjord, the winner of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, sheds an unexpected light on what drives many religious-liberty conflicts in North America today.
The film’s location is a picture-perfect Norwegian village. Into this friendly, progressive, tolerant community comes a family from Romania. They’re conservative Christians, out of step with modern European norms. Their clothes are different, and their five children aren’t allowed to watch television, play computer games, or have cell phones.
But this clash-of-cultures story doesn’t run a predictable path. The locals aren’t bigoted or unkind. The Romanian husband and wife are likable, not caricatures of religious extremists. And when the Christian parents are suspected of using physical discipline on their children, the movie unfolds in ways that are thought-provoking rather than formulaic.
Romanian director Cristian Mungiu deliberately leaves much that’s ambiguous. Whose actions inflict the most emotional trauma on the children? Is it (spoiler alert!) the devout parents, or the well-meaning officials who take the children from their home and separate them?
Which characters are the most closed-minded? The husband and wife who order their lives by the inflexible demands of divine revelation? Or the town officials who seem unwilling—or perhaps unable—to comprehend worldviews other than their own liberal secularism? In short, who is the more intolerant?
The Problem of Strong Belief
Fjord illustrates a paradox at the heart of every free society. British philosopher Karl Popper put it this way: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
In other words, a society that tolerates a wide range of beliefs and worldviews is caught between a rock and a hard place. What do you do with people who won’t buy into this principle of tolerance? People who hold strong, inflexible beliefs? People whose truth claims lead them to reject what a majority sees as moral imperatives?
Increasingly in Western societies, the answer is to narrow the range of acceptable beliefs—to be intolerant in the name of preserving tolerance. Or in the amusingly contradictory words of the United Nations’ Declaration of Principles on Tolerance: “Tolerance involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism.”
Here’s the problem: most faith claims are inherently “dogmatic” and “absolute.” For believers—regardless of their faith tradition—their truth has a divine origin and isn’t open to negotiation or compromise. And therein lies the crux of many of our religious freedom culture wars.
Compounding the problem is that the popular understanding of “tolerance” has shifted in recent decades. The older, classical view of tolerance—the view of Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant—assumes that objective truth exists. Accordingly, the best way for this truth to bubble up and be discovered is for society to protect free inquiry, to allow good ideas to be pitted against bad ideas, and dissenting views to test orthodoxy. This understanding of tolerance is the foundation for America’s constitutional protections for free speech and religious freedom.
Today the common understanding of tolerance has changed. Tolerance is required—not because we’re all engaged in the pursuit of objective truth, but because everyone’s truth must be equally affirmed and respected. From this perspective, then, a bigot is anyone who claims that their truth is superior and exclusive.
Intolerant Tolerance
This isn’t just abstract philosophizing. In Europe, Canada, and, increasingly, America, religious freedom claims are frequently dismissed as inconsistent with the values of a tolerant secular state.
Consider the uproar a few years ago over the right of Muslim women to wear “burkinis”—or full-body swimsuits—on French beaches. Although the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administrative court, ruled against blanket bans, many local authorities continue to outlaw burkinis in public places. In 2011 France also became the first country to ban religious face coverings in public or any religious garb for government workers. These laws clearly signaled that some personal religious practices must give way to the superior claims of laïcité, the secular nature of the French state.
In Belgium, which has arguably the broadest euthanasia provisions in the world, religious health-care institutions can no longer cite a “religious ethos” to stop euthanasia on their property. Health-care professionals are required by law, regardless of whether they have a religious objection, to refer patients seeking euthanasia to willing doctors.
In March this year, Finland’s supreme court found a member of parliament and a Lutheran bishop guilty of “insulting a group” for publishing a 2004 church pamphlet that made a biblical argument for a traditional understanding of human sexuality. On top of fighting a years-long legal battle, they were fined thousands of euros.
Canada is following European trends. The article on page 16 in this issue shows how the standoff between secular liberal values and the demands of faith is currently playing out in Canada’s national parliament.
Consider also trends in the United States, where some states are pressuring religious groups through anti-discrimination laws. In Maryland, for instance, the Seventh-day Adventist Church world headquarters is fighting to keep a long-standing exemption to anti-discrimination law that would allow it to hire only members of its faith.
In other states, conservative Christian families are sometimes denied foster care or adoption licenses by state social workers. As Liberty reported in September last year, these families are being ruled out because they say, when confronted with a hypothetical scenario, that their religious convictions would prevent them from actively supporting a child through a medical gender transition.
Common Sense
The point is not that Christians, or those of other faiths, are being persecuted in Western societies. If we want a picture of actual religious persecution, there are plenty of examples in China or North Korea. Or consider the mob justice visited on religious minorities in Pakistan and India, or the murder of Christians by Islamist groups in sub-Saharan Africa.
But the point is that intolerance in Western societies doesn’t run just one way. The exclusive truth claims of people of faith are all too often dismissed as wholly cynical exercises in bigotry and discrimination, rather than sincere religious commitments.
We need to find ways for people with differing worldviews to share the same space and, when they clash, to look for commonsense solutions rather than digging in for a zero-sum, winner-takes-all fight. That requires, at the very least, a presumption of good faith on both sides. It requires combatants to focus more on problem-solving than on painting each other as evil or beyond the pale. And it also requires a frank recognition that intolerance in the name of tolerance is still intolerance.
Article Author: Bettina Krause
Bettina Krause is the editor of Liberty magazine.