One claim frequently made about Christians is that they are bigots. Some are and some are not. There are people who are Christian because they were raised Christian, and many of these are bigots. There are others however who came to Christianity after following other paths, and these are not bigots at all.
In a place where Christianity is the dominant ideology, most bigots are going to be Christians. In the same manner in a place where Communism is the dominant ideology, most bigots are going to be Communists. They will especially be bigoted about business. I came from a Communist country, and it took me majoring in economics at University of Virginia to overcome that bigotry.
The early Christians weren’t bigots at all. They were radicals fighting a cruel and oppressive empire in which three quarters of the population were slaves. That empire had a lot of advanced knowledge. Their message outlasted that empire and became formative to the current civilization. Clearly we are seeing much greater things than bigotry at work. The idea of religion being bigotry explains how it gets transmitted through generations. It does not explain how such an unlikely event has occurred.
The problem with many religions is that they say such things as that the mind is incapable of understanding the ways of God or that the Tao is inexpressible. I believe that anything is expressible if you are good enough at expressing, and anything can be understood if your understanding is advanced enough. The problem has been an inadequate understanding of what is intellect – a blinkered rationalism that claims anything creative, spiritual or intuitive to be irrational. So we see the academia practicing a gimmick that “an extraordinary claim requires an extraordinary amount of proof” and out of that consideration throwing away much valid research. What we see is bigotry in the same people who most loudly claim to be against bigotry – in this case, bigotry in the name of reason.
We will see bigotry in any ideology that has lasted for longer than a generation. Parents and schools will raise the children in the ideology that they practice and will take strong measures to make sure that they don’t question it or go to other paths. We will see this in Christianity; we will see this in rationalism; we will see this even in Buddhism. So in “Madame Butterfly” the Japanese Buddhists reject a young woman because she falls in love with an American and espouses Christianity. How much worse will it be for Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, sceptics or Muslims.
To actually not be a bigot one needs to question the ideas with which one has been raised. This is a very difficult and dangerous process. Even if one does not like the ideas, they remain in his head and colour his perception and thinking. And then of course when they are challenged, the people loyal to these ideas attack and try to drag him back into their fold.
So yes, there are bigoted Christians; but not all Christians are bigots. There was a time when Christianity was a new idea challenging an established order, and people involved in it were not bigots at all. As for bigotry, once again, it can happen under any ideology. And the more one acquaints himself with the practices of the world, the more he understands this to be the case.