Some years ago, a new high school was built in my hometown. At the old high school, Mormon students had been permitted to leave campus during the day for religious instruction (“Seminary”) at a small building across the street. With the tacit aim of putting a stop to Seminary, many in the community advocated for the new school to be a “closed campus.”  But after the local ministerial association wrote a letter in favor of allowing Seminary to continue on principles of religious liberty, the school board passed—by a single vote—a closed-campus policy that made an exception for the Mormon students.

At the time, my father was assigned to oversee the Seminary program in our local stake. Accordingly, he presented a letter of gratitude on behalf of the stake to the next meeting of the ministerial association, where the ministers received him quite warmly.

The ministers hadn’t counted on Dad continuing to attend their meetings, however. As Dad put it, he arrived the next month “with the stated intent to determine whether the LDS community could have a role to play in promoting faith and values within the community.” Unfortunately, that month the association had invited a speaker to address ways of dealing with the Mormons and their missionaries.

In Dad’s words: “I just listened quietly; opting not to challenge anything said; interested in hearing of their fears and what they thought should be done to fight against the Mormon scourge; somewhat amazed that they didn’t seem to hold back any punches during the discussion despite having a known Mormon in the room.”

The ministers figured that once Dad knew just what they thought of Mormons as non-Christians, he wouldn’t bother coming back. But a local Catholic priest, who had recently been invited to participate in the association, quelled the discussion by saying that if the Mormons weren’t welcome in a “community” ministerial association, then the Catholics weren’t interested in participating either. Ultimately, if not altogether peacefully, Dad was permitted to join the organization.

This story illustrates the power of tolerance, but also its limits. The word “tolerance” comes to us from the Latin tolerare, which means “to bear or endure.” Thus it is that we speak of people having a certain tolerance for pain, and indeed the idea of tolerance itself seems to imply the prolonged experience of something unpleasant. Dad’s silence during the anti-Mormon lecture was tolerant in just this way: he bore an affront in the hope that his patience might bear fruit.

Father Greg’s magnanimous act, I want to suggest, involves tolerance in much the same way. As an adherent of the Nicene Creed, he had the same basis as anyone else present for questioning Dad’s “Christianity.” And yet he bore Mormonism’s affront to his own beliefs, perhaps because he thought that “faith community” demanded just this sort of tolerance.

I do not mean to call those who objected to Dad’s participation in the association intolerant. Indeed, our contemporary tendency to use “intolerant” as a rather damning slur points to the limits inherent in any scheme of toleration, because the intolerant are usually themselves intolerable (a problem that Honna Eichler has begun to grapple with quite thoughtfully).

Insofar as the roots of modern American toleration go back to the challenges presented by proliferating religious sects in seventeenth-century England, there have always been some beliefs that could not be tolerated. Urging toleration among Protestants, John Milton wrote in 1673 that adherence to two core doctrines—sola scriptura and the idea that nothing should be believed on the basis of tradition alone—ought to enable Protestants of all stripes happily to coexist. Because, however, Roman Catholicism “is a Religion taken up and believ’d from the traditions of men and additions to the word of God,” it is “the only or the greatest Heresie” and as such ought not be tolerated, because it is fundamentally inimical to toleration.

Noah Feldman’s book Divided by God traces the long and painful process whereby Catholicism has been assimilated to American Christianity: witness the invitation for Father Greg to join an association of evangelical ministers. In recent decades, we’ve seen the birth of the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” bringing Jews into the fold of the tolerable after a lot longer than 40 years in the wilderness. The tent of toleration has expanded, but not infinitely, as Dad’s experience shows.

If inter-religious dialogue is to be dialogue in more than name only—that is, an exchange between parties with real differences—we can’t really get away with eliding the different boundaries that we draw between what is tolerable and what is not. These days, people often say “tolerance” when they mean “acceptance.” Tolerance first becomes a possibility, however, precisely when we encounter that which we simply cannot accept or maybe even stomach.

Insisting that others accept what they hitherto had been wary of tolerating merely replaces one form of oppression with another. This is an old story: it’s happened again and again.

Even though Dad participated in the ministerial association for several years, leading to warm personal relations with several of the ministers and to many opportunities for Mormons to serve our community working side-by-side with members of other congregations, eventually the organization petered out. Some of the new ministers in town worked with some of the old ones to form a new association, this time making sure that the “Mormon question” was settled in advance. Because Dad was by this time Treasurer of the old association, he donated the remaining funds to a local interfaith care-giving project.

To be sure, there is much value in seeking and building on common ground, but the success of that enterprise depends in part on admitting that there are some things that we do not now and probably never will have in common and then choosing to bear the burden of such differences patiently. Tolerance takes some intestinal fortitude, yes, but if unpleasant experiences can’t be redeemed, what can?