After being assaulted by a family member, the sixteen-year-old British girl was placed in a foster home.  Her foster mother had years of experience, a good reputation, and was fully licensed by the state.  She was also a practicing Christian.

While in foster care, the young girl on her own became interested in the Christian faith and began attending church.  Her foster mother neither encouraged nor discouraged her interest.  After a while, the young girl professed faith in Christ and was baptized. And that's when the trouble began.

The girl had been born into a Muslim family.  Baptism into the Christian faith is apostasy for Muslims, punishable by death.  The strange thing, however, is that the trouble didn't come from her family or the Muslim.  It came from the British government.

In what amounts to a frontal assault on religious liberty, officials immediately closed the foster home and moved the girl, ordering her to stay away from church for at least six months in order to reconsider her decision.

In a country where the soil is soaked with the blood of those who died fighting for religious liberty—the religious liberty that we also enjoy here in what was an English colony—something has gone terribly wrong.

That something is the seemingly insignificant shift from a belief in religious liberty to a belief in religious toleration.

In a world that has toleration as its highest virtue, religious toleration sounds like a good idea.  Most people would agree that the world would be a better place if every nation practiced religious toleration. 

But does this assumption have any validity? In the April 2008 issue of Touchstone magazine, human rights scholar William Saunders made the surprising argument that religious toleration rather than being a virtue is a source of religious coercion, persecution, and martyrdom.

This is because religious toleration is based on the belief that while religion may be an unavoidable part of human life, it is, nonetheless, dangerous and needs to be managed and controlled.

Saunders quotes John Shattuck who served as Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Clinton administration.  In a 2002 speech Shattuck said:

Freedom of religion is predicated upon the existence of more than one religion.  But a multiplicity of religions has always meant conflict, and religious conflict often led to war and human devastation.  This was the state of reality for centuries and millennia, and it is hardly a ringing endorsement of religious freedom.

Shattuck is not in favor of religious liberty.  Instead Shattuck believes that religious toleration is a "strategic necessity" and is "necessary for the internal protection of religion itself."  That is, religion is a danger that must be kept on a leash.