The Great Gap

To many modern educators, tolerance is a virtue; to Sidney Smith, president of the University of Toronto (enrollment: 10,852) and one of Canada's top educators, it can also be an evil. Last week, speaking at Windsor, Ont.'s Roman Catholic Assumption University, Protestant Smith told why: by trying too hard to promote tolerance in religion, modern campuses are actually promoting "religious illiteracy."

"I believe," said Smith, "that we have gone too far along the road of secularizing institutions of higher learning. There is a gap in liberal education; it has been caused by the policy, which is all too prevalent in universities throughout the English-speaking world, of evading, ignoring, or even opposing the teaching of religion . . . This lacuna in liberal education is both lamentable and inexcusable . . . To the student who knows nothing of theology, much history is meaningless, much philosophy is distorted, and much literature is unintelligible."

It is all very well, said Smith, to tolerate different points of view. But "the tolerance of religious differences is not the same thing as ignoring religion altogether. One can be tolerant in a positive way, through sympathy and understanding, or one can be tolerant in a negative way, through apathy and moral cowardice. This negative kind of tolerance begets indifference, and indifference is at the root of religious illiteracy."

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