On 17 May, Obama was barracked by anti-abortion protestors as he gave the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. They were incensed by the prospect of a pro-choice and pro-stem cell research President giving a speech and receiving and honorary degree from the most distinguished CatholicUniversity in the world.

During the election, Obama played what seemed to be a clever game when it came to his platform on so-called life issues. His rhetoric was soft and conciliatory, his policy uncompromisingly pro-choice. He attempted to do the same at Notre Dame, rehearsing the story of his correspondence with a pro-life doctor who complained that one of his campaign websites described pro-lifers as ‘ideologues’:

I wrote back to him and I thanked him. And I didn't change my underlying position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that - when we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.

Those on the pro-life side will continue to be frustrated by what could easily be perceived as a rhetorical slight of hand; it’s no good saying that the issue has ‘moral and spiritual’ dimensions if your policy does not reflect this. But there is integrity here, and it is this: Obama knows his mind on the issue, and will not change it, but that does not mean he can ignore the problem of how utterly irreconcilable views, a fundamental plurality of communities and values, can be held within a single society.

In his language of ‘opening of hearts and minds’ and the ‘presumption of good faith’, Obama is looking for more than the notion of tolerance based on individual autonomy, which could never really resolve the question of how political communities define the good; politics is the stuff of our interdependence, not our independence. He also knows that the idea of procedural tolerance (juridical limits on those with the power to compel, coerce and intervene) is of limited use. In simple terms, we know that the state can not be tolerant of all points of view in any meaningful sense. The United States of America has to have a statute on these issues – a position, arrived at through broadly democratic processes. Yet the community is divided, neither party content, both always campaigning and seeking to win legal ground. At best there is a fair process, resulting in ongoing uncertainty and unease. At worst, under the strain of what John Horton has called the paradox of toleration (the notion that is right to permit that which is wrong), some give up on the very idea of a liberal policy, and conclude that there are some positions, some views, which can be allowed no space whatsoever. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

So when tolerance is not enough, where do we go? The missiologist Lesslie Newbigin once wrote of the need for Christians to develop a ‘proper confidence’ in the Gospel, drawing on the best of open minded liberalism and the moral courage of fundamentalist certainty. This depends on what tolerance, as it is currently practiced in the United States and United Kingdom, seems to know little of: an intellectual humility, accepting our ultimate human fallibility and the fact the truth is never completely with our grasp.

Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.