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Is monotheism intolerant? It would certainly seem so, if the media is any indication. Whenever the media reports on monotheism these days—whether it is a story about Christian conservatives fighting same-sex marriage legislation, a suicide bomber detonating an explosive in the name of Islam, or an Orthodox Jew censoring women's speech—it always seems it is because monotheism has reached a new low in intolerance. Of course, critics of monotheism will argue that there is nothing accidental about this inclination toward intolerance.1 Monotheisms, they will point out, understand themselves to have an exclusive claim on the truth, a claim to which intolerance is integral and inevitable, for if a religion (or any system of thought, for that matter) understands itself to be the one and only truth, then it must, by necessity, reject, be intolerant of, all other accounts of the spiritual, the divine, and indeed the world itself, as so many falsehoods. Perhaps, monotheisms wouldn't be so problematic if this exclusive understanding of the truth (and of themselves) was purely a theoretical matter, but this is never the case. As the critics will argue, the exclusive understanding of the truth always finds its way to the world of practice, where it draws distinctions between peoples, practices, and cultures, holding one side up as normative and the other as aberrant. Indeed, as the critics will point out, it is from these practical distinctions that monotheistic truth draws its very meaning and power.2 Perhaps, such distinctions were useful once upon a time when religions served as the common framework that knit disparate peoples and populations together into a single society, but now they are completely useless—or, worse than useless, dangerous and destructive. Relics of a bygone era, monotheisms no longer have any place in a modern liberal society—or perhaps, even stronger, they are the very bane of that society—and therefore should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Or, so the critics claim.
If this were all there was to say about monotheism—if monotheism has become (or always has been) truly nothing more than a system of intolerance—then there would be no other recourse than to join the critics in their call for the end of monotheism (or indeed religion itself). But, I suspect,...