Beyond Tolerance: Lessons on Religious Tension from Nigeria

By: Oludamini Ogunnaike

“If we want to keep America’s religious tensions from erupting as they have in Nigeria, we need to move beyond mere tolerance and begin valuing and reaping the benefits of our nation’s diverse religious landscape. We also cannot take a peaceful civil society for granted. We need to fight for peace by having civil conversations with people who disagree with us and by learning about one another’s faiths, not to prove our own superiority, but to learn about and from each other. And most urgently, we need to resist the cheap demagoguery that seeks to generate and mine religious tension for short-term political advantage.”