Tonight in Manhattan, the Templeton Book Forum hosted a dialogue between Michael Novak and Heather Mac Donald on the issue of God. I am a great admirer of Novak, and agree with him on many of the issues; I have blurbed his new book, No One Sees God, which I strongly recommend to all NRO readers. But I found Heather Mac Donald the pleasant surprise of the evening: She was highly intelligent and brutally honest, but never left the path of politeness and civility. She was a credit to her side of the argument, and we need more people like her. The discussion between Novak and Mac Donald did end rather abruptly, just as Mac Donald asserted a key point: Religion had to be dragged kicking and screaming by secularists of the Enlightenment into the affirmation of tolerance of different points of view that we all celebrate today. (All, that is, except for the occasional blogger who tries to be “edgy” by launching a contrarian defense of intolerance. We can safely leave him out of it.) Had the event gone on longer, I’m sure Novak would have had an intelligent response. Here’s mine, in the form of a Q & A: Q. Do Christian principles require respect for the civil rights and human dignity of those who disagree with Christianity? A. Yes. Q. Did organized Christianity, in general, respect these principles before secularists dragged it kicking and screaming into doing so? A. No. Q. Does that mean that Christians who answered yes to Question One are lying, or at least engaging in highly convenient spin-doctoring? A. No. As a matter of historic fact, it was secularists who forced Christianity to be truer to its own general principles. But, for believers, this can only provide evidence of God’s work in the sphere that calls itself secular. Believers need not erect a Manichean cosmology in which the “religious” are right about everything, and the “secularists” wrong. God is bigger than that. Jesus got the religious people of his home town very angry when he said: “I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; but unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.” It is proverbial that God works in mysterious ways. He sometimes works through the “outsiders”–as He did through the non-believers influenced by the Enlightenment, and as He does through such people as Heather Mac Donald today. We should be very grateful to them, for keeping us honest.