You can get a bit depressed, surfing around gathering religion stories for the Times Online Faith blog. Muslim staff in Sainsbury’s are being let off handling alcohol. Some Muslim medical students are refusing to learn about diseases related to booze or promiscuity.

The Archbishop of Mozambique is promoting chastity by saying that European-made condoms are deliberately infected with HIV. A mosque in Toronto has ordered its faithful never to wish people Happy Birthday or join in Thanksgiving, Hannukah or Christmas parties, because: “How can we bring ourselves to congratulate or wish people well for their disobedience to Allah?”

All of which – bear with me – sends me fleeing back for comfort to an evening in September, in the little village of Laxfield in Suffolk. It was the climax of a two-day festival: not a harvest-home or the final fête of summer, but something more unusual and resonant. The Laxfield Festival of Tolerance is held annually in honour of a shoemaker called John Noyes, who 450 years ago this September was rash enough to express the Protestant view that the host at Communion was not the actual body of Christ.

It was 1557, near the end of the short, savage reign of Bloody Mary, who tried to reverse the tide of Protestantism by burning more than 300 people at the stake for dissent (a few years earlier or later, of course, the shoe was on the other foot and Catholics got executed for treason). Noyes, as a shoemaker, probably met a wider variety of people than many villagers, and as a self-employed craftsman he had his pride. Anyway, he stuck to his guns and was imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to burn at the stake in his home village.

Whereon the villagers of Laxfield, many of whom undoubtedly were Catholic believers, got together in protest and extinguished their cottage fires. In the days before matches, this was a considerable inconvenience as well as a political risk (John Jarvis of Norwich got whipped naked round the market and put in the stocks, just for making a disrespectful remark about the executioners on the day). But the village thought the domestic upheaval and the risk well worth it for the trouble their rebellion caused the execution team.

In the end the man with the faggot had to break in to the one house where a chimney still smoked, to light it. Noyes died, but Laxfield had made its point in stubborn Suffolk style. You don’t doom a man for what he believes, even if you think he’s wrong. You don’t let a neighbour be persecuted, even if he’s not of your faith. Thus 450 years later Laxfield holds a festival of tolerance to show solidarity with those long-dead ancestors.

Which brings me back to that sense of icy rage at modern intolerance, accepted and even sometimes encouraged in the name of delicacy or diversity. Sainsbury’s are allowing Muslim check-out staff to opt out of touching even sealed bottles containing alcohol. Worse, some Muslim medical students refuse to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases, and a few will not help patients of the opposite sex. The BMA and GMC confirm that such demands are being made. They have been turned down; moreover, the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Doctors and Dentists Association condemn the requests and say rather nicely: “The prophet said, Learn about witchcraft but don’t practise it.”

But there it is: a terrible self-righteous minority who must not be indulged: not ever, not at all. Myself, I would not only fail such students but demand repayment of all the money spent on their training.

This is not an Islamophobic observation; intelligent Muslim scholars distance themselves from this nonsense. They also say the shopworkers “exploiting and misusing” Sainsbury’s goodwill. It is also not Islamophobic because precisely the same applies to Christians – who also have been known to behave with disgraceful intolerance, and not only in the 16th century.

Last week’s statement by the Archbishop of Mozambique, Francisco Chimolo, that condoms are secretly infected is downright wicked. Simply because his co-religionists believe that fidelity and abstinence are the best life, the Archbishop utters nonsense like: “I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose . . . they want to finish with the African people.” He also claims that retroviral drugs sent from Europe to help Aids victims are infected with HIV. Similarly, there are US Christian charities that will not help African prostitutes; and closer to home, we have had plenty of soi-disant Catholic and Protestant Irish bombers who thought it fine to kill innocents, and clerics who did not condemn them.

Tolerance does not imply weakness or a lack of personal belief. Tolerance, as Laxfield would have it, is a sign of strength. It says: “My faith and principles, are not threatened by your disagreement. Go in peace, find your own way.” In the caring professions, in medicine and charity, a refusal to do anything for those you deem sinners is not far off from the spirit that would send them to the stake. It is not cultural diversity: it is a horror.

Luckily, carrying on across the chatter of the worldwide web with a dispirited investigation of other religions’ views on contraception and Aids and doctors, we chanced upon Rabbi Yitzchok Breitowitz, and this gem of calm, religious kindliness: “Any case of sickness, whether Aids, cancer, or heart disease, may or may not be a divine punishment, but that is God’s business, not ours. The Torah requires that we not stand by idly while others suffer.” Muslims, Christians, please copy.

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