We have something to learn from the church here. For long decades, the Protestants and Catholics did bloody battle for dominance of Europe. It seems silly to

We have something to learn from the church here. For long decades, the Protestants and Catholics did bloody battle for dominance of Europe. It seems silly to those now who think religion is a trivial lifestyle choice, but the lesson is to be learned by viewing this from their perspective. To them, each saw the other as putting the immortal souls of the masses in grave danger. The stakes could not possibly be higher, which is why the solution was so hard to see. Freedom of religion is a very, very counterintuitive idea if you think religion is deadly important. The churches agreed to live together in peace, not because they concluded their cause was unimportant, but because they could see resolving their disputes with blows was error-prone and cruel. The best way forward, the best chance truth had, the most just and practical way to live, is to commit to resolving these conflicts with words only. The idea was so successful that today we would not think even of dragging someone out of a cult against their will. Even if a religious idea is obviously bad, we are committed to opposing it with words only because the lesson of history is that the alternative is so much worse. It's a lesson we need to learn in politics. We are not at the point where opposing political views generate open warfare, but I wonder more and more if we might be heading in that direction. But we do oppose each other in ways we wouldn't tolerate in a religious context: we ostracize and chase away people with unpopular views from various societies, either virtual or physical. We organize campaigns of legal or personal harassment. We organize economic pressure to attack the livelihoods of individuals whose views we find offensive. All of these tactics run the same moral risk that physical warfare does: if you turn out to be wrong, you have done a grave injustice. And someone is wrong. You can't be sure it isn't you. Therefore, to prevent society being an awful place to pursue your conscience, none of us should do these things. Worse, a campaign against an idea that consist of anything other than criticizing the idea runs the risk of being wrong. Strenuous debate is the arena in which truth has the best chance, so it is where we should all agree to fight. We need to learn the lesson the church learned centuries ago. We need to commit to fighting our political battles with words only, not because they are so unimportant that we can tolerate error, but because they are too important to let the strong and popular hold sway.