The subject of power is not a simple matter of which majority sits on which minority at any given time. Looking around the world today and back through history, we see the horrors to which interreligious conflicts can lead — Muslims versus Hindus, Orthodox Eastern Serbs and Croatian Roman Catholics against Bosnian Muslims, Catholics versus Protestants in much of Europe after the sixteenth century, not to omit our own lesser, but horrible, history of persecutions in colonial America and the martyrdom of Joseph Smith as well as a number of his Mormon followers. We see, too, the fragility of the lessons these oceans of blood should have taught. The powerless call out for tolerance. Achieving power, they may soon forget. The descendants of Rome’s Christian martyrs remember too well the role of the torturers rather than the agonies of their own ancestors.

Melvin Frank (1913-1988) American screenwriter, director

Faith and Freedom: Religious Liberty in America (1994)