Religion (as opposed to conscience) is a corporate rather than an individual matter – Milton may have belonged to a sect of one, but most of us who are in any meaningful sense religious are members of corporate bodies extending through time and space. And corporate bodies to exist at all must define their boundaries: this is who we are, this is what we believe, this is how we behave. And this requires an implicitly if not explicitly excluded “not that.” This being the case, if freedom of religion means, most fundamentally, the freedom to be a heretic, it equally means the freedom to declare that the other guy is a heretic. In a very real sense, a social environment that is hostile to religious intolerance must necessarily be hostile to religious freedom.

The whole post is worth reading since in its discussion of the seeming contradictions between the origins of Hannukah and its role in American society today.

The fact remains that most British Muslims, like the wider community, are not politically active, do not sit on committees, and do not attend seminars and meetings. They are working hard, bringing up families, planning their holidays, and going about their business.

– Rt. Hon. Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government on ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’: the Government’s Approach, 17 July 2008.

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Depoliticization involves construing inequality, subordination, marginalization, and social conflict, which all require political analysis and political solutions, as person and individual, on the other hand, or as natural, religious, or cultural on the other. Tolerance works along both vectors of depoliticization — it personalizes and it naturalizes or culturalizes — and sometimes it intertwines them.

– Wendy Brown, Regulation Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton University Press, 2006, p.15.