History offers countless examples of religious intolerance on a massive scale, where entire populations were identified, targeted, and harmed in the name of purity or righteousness. But intolerance doesn’t only appear in the sweep of nations. It can take root in the quiet corners of ordinary life, in the places meant to offer refuge, even in the local church.
In early 1955, my mother was doing everything she could to protect her two young boys from an abusive, alcoholic husband. Even my earliest memories, when I was only three, carry the echoes of yelling, torn nightgowns, and the constant fear that settled over our home as we waited for Dad to return from whatever drunken stupor he carried home that night. Sometimes he brought dinner: a cold slab of meat, rock‑hard mashed potatoes, a dab of gravy. Many nights, he brought nothing at all.
My mother’s nightly prayer was simple: that he would walk through the door and pass out. But too often, a word or gesture would set him off, and the violence would erupt again. She took the brunt of it while we were hurried off to bed. My baby brother, only two weeks old, didn’t know to keep his crying quiet — and if the sound disturbed Dad, it became another excuse for rage.
One day, while he was at work and with the news that there was another woman in Dad’s life, Mom gathered us up, boarded a bus, and made the three‑hour trip to my grandparents’ home. We were welcomed with open arms, but it wasn’t long before she was being urged to return to her husband. In the early 1950s, being a divorcee was simply not acceptable. But Mom stood her ground. She never returned to the waiting violence.
The church, however, had its own view of what God required. The church pastor pressed her to reconcile, insisting that returning, even at the cost of her safety, was the righteous path. When she asked the pastor to baptize us, he agreed, but he did not want his church to appear weak on the sanctity of marriage, so he insisted that the Baptism ceremony for us would only be held privately. Our souls could be saved, but not in the public eye.
Intolerance can be found at many different levels. And sometimes, the most painful forms are the ones wrapped in the language of faith.
What my mother faced privately, many communities have faced publicly. Intolerance rarely remains contained within a home or a congregation. Once it takes root, it begins to shape the wider world. By the 1980s and 90s, the same moral certainty that once pressured a young mother to return to danger had found a new and more volatile outlet. Across the country, religious rhetoric hardened into a justification for hostility, and eventually, for violence. The pattern was no longer personal — it had become national.
By the late 1990s, that hardening had taken on an even more dangerous form. In Birmingham, Alabama, the New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic had lived for years under a steady rhythm of threats, protests, and the kind of hostility that slowly becomes part of the landscape. Staff arrived early, left cautiously, and learned to move through their days with a quiet vigilance that no one should ever have to normalize.
On a cold morning in January 1998, that vigilance proved tragically insufficient. A bomb detonated outside the clinic, killing an off‑duty police officer working security and critically injuring a nurse arriving for her shift. The attack shocked the nation, but for many who had watched the rhetoric escalate over the previous decade, it felt like the inevitable outcome of a culture that had grown accustomed to seeing violence framed as righteousness.
The man responsible claimed he was acting on moral conviction; a distorted certainty that turned faith into justification. And while the vast majority of religious communities condemned the act, the bombing revealed something deeper: intolerance had been allowed to grow roots, nourished by years of language that blurred the line between spiritual passion and moral permission.
It was a moment that forced the country to confront an uncomfortable truth. When intolerance becomes the norm, when it is repeated, excused, or wrapped in sacred language, it can move from the margins to the mainstream with alarming ease. And once it does, the consequences are no longer theoretical. They become painfully and publicly real.
Moments like Birmingham remind us that intolerance rarely announces itself with sudden force. It grows quietly, fed by certainty, repetition, and the subtle permission we give it when we look away. Long before a bomb is built or a threat is made, something shifts in the collective imagination… a hardening of language, a narrowing of compassion, a belief that some people are no longer worthy of the same dignity as others. And once that shift takes hold, the extraordinary begins to feel ordinary.
What happened in 1998 was not just an act of violence; it was the culmination of years in which hostility had been allowed to masquerade as conviction. Faith, which should have been a source of humility and care, became a tool for drawing lines, assigning blame, and excusing harm. When intolerance becomes the norm, it doesn’t simply change what people do; it changes what they believe is acceptable. It reshapes the moral landscape until the unthinkable becomes part of the background noise.
These patterns are not confined to the past. In recent weeks, even official government communications have adopted increasingly explicit Christian language during the holiday season, prompting renewed debate about the boundaries between faith and public life. At the same time, some political voices have called for the nation to reclaim a distinctly Christian identity, as though belonging itself must be filtered through a single religious lens. Even foreign policy has begun to echo this posture, with military actions framed in terms of defending Christians abroad. None of these moments stand alone. They are part of a steady drift, a cultural confidence, that elevates one faith above all others, often at the expense of the pluralism that has long defined the American promise.
The challenge before us is not simply to condemn intolerance when it erupts, but to recognize it in the quieter moments when it begins to take shape. We will need to guard against nuances in the language we normalize, in the assumptions we accept, and in the boundaries we allow others to draw in the name of faith. If we are to resist the drift toward a world we never intended to build, we must learn to see the early signs with clear eyes and a steady heart. The work of preserving our shared dignity begins long before the breaking point. It begins with the courage to notice.
The question before us now is whether we have already crossed the breaking point, or whether we still have the courage to turn back.