On unacceptable belief

There are different ways in which religions today still police heresies. Some do so very formally, in the same way that was done in the Middle Ages. But then also, it’s this notion of social heresy, community heresy – that we do still have norms of acceptable belief, there are still absolutely a difference, a difference in belief, a difference in opinion that, again, in particular communities can be unacceptable, can tip into that. And so while we have, as in the Middle Ages, a great deal of diversity, and we struggle to balance unity and diversity in the same way that people in the Middle Ages did, there is still an assumption that a community is healthy when it has this kind of community agreement.