Why Tolerate Religion? A (Surprising) Nietzschean Answer

Abstract

In Why Tolerate Religion? Brian Leiter takes himself to show that the deference traditionally shown by the state to religion is irrational; there is no reason to think that specifically religious conscience is special “from a moral point of view.” In this paper, I argue that a challenge to Leiter’s view arises from an unlikely source: the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, to which Leiter himself serves as an able guide. Leiter approvingly interprets Nietzsche to hold that a certain form of egalitarianism, according to which all human beings are of equal basic worth, is grounded if and only if something like Christian theism is true: the equal worth of human beings does not outlive the death of God. Leiter thus unearths what he had denied existed: a reason for the state’s deferential stance toward religion. In the remainder of this paper, I examine Nietzsche’s (and Leiter’s) claims that such egalitarianism cannot be grounded in secular terms and that it can be grounded in theism, and I conclude that these claims are correct.