Robert Putnam of ‘Bowling Alone’ fame has co-authored a new book with David E Campbell called ‘American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us’. Its findings are that religious people are more charitable and non-religious people are more tolerant. Here’s my question, which is better for society, charity or tolerance?

Of course, a person can be both charitable and tolerant, both intolerant and uncharitable, and various other combinations in between.

However, it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine how a person could be very tolerant and very uncharitable. For example, think of the type who goes to Ibiza for a sex and booze holiday. I’d imagine they would be very tolerant of all kinds of sexual shenanigans but that they wouldn’t so much as cross the street to help a person in need. Their tolerance would arise from not really giving a damn.

On the other hand in this scenario I can also imagine a fairly narrow-minded Christian who would mightily disapprove of any sexual shenanigans outside marriage going out of their way to help someone in need, that is, the type who would tut-tut practically everything they read in the papers or see on TV, but who is also a fantastic neighbour.

I can think of an Evangelical Protestant couple of my acquaintance who would have typically traditionalist (and therefore ‘intolerant’) views about cohabitation, divorce, homosexuality etc but who would also cross the Gobi Desert to help someone.

I’m also reminded of an article by former British politician and atheist, Roy Hattersley, at the time of Hurricane Katrina in which he observed that the people helping the victims of the disaster were Christians, not secular humanists.

Tolerance on its own is simply an edict to live and let live. It doesn’t oblige anyone to help anyone else. In fact, tolerance is often a disguised form of moral relativism. Moral relativism explicitly rejects all moral systems based on the words ‘Thou Shalt’ replacing them with the words, ‘Do it if you want’.

In other words, because a philosophy of tolerance often collapses into relativism, it drains society of the moral injunction to help your neighbour.

Christianity on the other hand instructs us to love our neighbour as ourselves and Putnam’s book confirms what other research has shown, which is that religious people in general are much more charitable than non-religious people, even though they are also somewhat more intolerant than non-religious people.

So again I ask, is it better for society to have charitable people or tolerant people? As Putnam’s new book shows, this isn’t a false choice as charity and tolerance very often don’t go hand in hand.