WASHINGTON – After urging Tiger Woods to accept the “forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith” – and comparing Buddhism unfavorably to that hope – journalist Brit Hume insisted he was not proselytizing. In this, he is wrong. His words exemplify proselytization.

For this, Hume has been savaged. Media critic Tom Shales put him in the category of a “sanctimonious busybody” engaged in “telling people what religious beliefs they ought to have.” Blogger Andrew Sullivan criticized Hume’s “pure sectarianism” which helps abolish “the distinction between secular and religious discourse.” MSNBC’s David Shuster called Hume’s religious advice “truly embarrassing.”

The assumption of these criticisms is that proselytization is the antonym of tolerance. Asserting the superiority of one’s own 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.

Proselytization, admittedly, is fraught with complications. We object to the practice when an unequal power relationship is involved – a boss pressuring an employee. We are offended by brainwashing. Coercion and trickery violate the whole idea of free religious choice based on open discussion.

But none of this was present in Hume’s appeal to Woods. A semi-retired broadcaster holds no unfair advantage over a multimillionaire athlete. Hume was engaged in persuasion.

“Persuasion, by contrast,” argues political and social ethics professor Jean Bethke Elshtain, “begins with the presupposition that you are a moral agent, a being whose dignity no one is permitted to deny or to strip from you, and, from that stance of mutual respect, one offers arguments, or invites your participation, your sharing, in a community.”

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 nearly 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. Many commentators have been offering Woods advice in his current travails. But religious advice, apparently and uniquely, should be forbidden. In a discussion of sex, morality and betrayed vows, wouldn’t religious issues naturally arise? 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.

In this controversy, we are presented with two models of discourse. Hume, in an angry sea of loss and tragedy – his son’s death in 1998 – found a life preserver in faith. He offered that life preserver to another drowning man. Whatever your view of Hume’s beliefs, he could have no motive other than concern for Woods himself.

The other model has come from critics such as Shales, in a spittle-flinging rage at the mention of religion in public, comparing Hume to “Mary Poppins on the joys of a tidy room, or Ron Popeil on the glories of some amazing potato peeler.” Shales, of course, is engaged in proselytism of his own – for a secular fundamentalism that trivializes and banishes all other faiths. He distributes the sacrament of the sneer.

Who in this picture is the more intolerant?

© 2010, Washington Post Writers Group