Unless you have been vacationing in a cave somewhere in the nether regions of the Congo, you’ve probably heard of the brouhaha that has developed over Brit Hume’s advice to Tiger Woods:

Tiger Woods will recover as a golfer. Whether he can recover as a person I think is a very open question, and it’s a tragic situation with him. I think he’s lost his family. It’s not clear to me that — whether he’ll be able to have a relationship with his children.

But the Tiger Woods that emerges once the news value dies out of this scandal — the extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He’s said to be a Buddhist. I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.

So my message to Tiger would be, “Tiger, turn your faith — turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.”

Many liberals are furious that Brit Hume would make such comments, for a variety of reasons.  The primary reason appears to be that he is claiming Christianity is true over and against Buddhism.  That is a politically correct no-no, labeled “intolerant.”  We’re supposed to act like our religious beliefs are no more true than the next religion’s.  How tolerant is that requirement?!  The fact of the matter is that religious claims are usually exclusive and contradict competing religious claims.  Given this fact, if one really believes the tenets of their religion, they cannot help but to think their religion is true and others’ false.

More fundamental is the fact that Hume was simply making an observation about what Christianity does, and what Buddhism does not offer its adherents.  Christianity, unlike Buddhism, offers personal forgiveness for sins.  It provides redemption from our moral failures.  Buddhism provides no such thing.  In Hume’s opinion Tiger Woods is in need of forgiveness, and thus in need of Christianity.

Michael Gerson has written a wonderful opinion piece in The Miami Herald exposing just how ludicrous the attacks on Hume have been.  Here are a some choice quotes:

The assumption of these criticisms is that proselytization is the antonym of tolerance. Asserting the superiority of one’s religious beliefs, in this view, is not merely bad manners; it involves a kind of divisive, offensive judgmentalism.

But the American idea of religious liberty does not forbid proselytization; it presupposes it. Free, autonomous individuals not only have the right to hold whatever beliefs they wish, they have a right to change those beliefs – and to persuade others to change as well. Just as there is no political liberty without the right to change one’s convictions and publicly argue for them, there is no religious liberty without the possibility of conversion and persuasion.
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The root of the anger against Hume is his religious exclusivity – the belief, in Shuster’s words, that “my faith is the right one.”’ For this reason, according to Shales, Hume has “dissed about half a billion Buddhists on the planet.”

But this supposed defense of other religious traditions betrays an unfamiliarity with religion itself. Religious faiths – Christian, Buddhist, Zoroastrian – generally make claims about the nature of reality that conflict with the claims of other faiths. Attacking Christian religious exclusivity is also to attack almost every vital religious tradition. It is not a scandal to believers that others hold differing beliefs. It is only a scandal to those offended by all belief. Though I am not a Buddhist or a Muslim, I am not “dissed” when a Muslim or a Buddhist advocates his views in public.

Hume’s critics hold a strange view of pluralism. For religion to be tolerated, it must be privatized – not, apparently, just in governmental settings, but on television networks. We must not only have a secular state but a secular public discourse. And so tolerance, conveniently, is defined as shutting up people with whom secularists disagree. …

How is our public discourse improved by narrowing it – removing references to the most essential element in countless lives?  True tolerance consists in engaging deep disagreements respectfully – through persuasion – not in banning certain categories of argument and belief from public debate.

Indeed.  I am particularly fond of his observation that the sort of religious pluralism that is offended by Hume’s comments is one that thinks “for religion to be tolerated, it must be privatized.”  So true.  That sort or pluralism is not tolerant at all.

HT: Stand to Reason