Everyone, Including You, Is an Intolerant Hypocrite

FLUNKING THE TOLERANCE TEST

It is easy to deny the existence of moral absolutes until we somehow get trampled—and then we are quick to cry out for justice. When we suffer grave harm no one has to convince us that some actions deserve not tolerance but punishment. Sexual assault victims, for example, never complain that their values or feelings were violated. They understand that an old fashioned word like evil better describes their pain.

The new tolerance seems like a wiser, kinder, and gentler way to do life in a world rife with extremism. It seems to value the underdog and give voice to the groups and individuals who have been silenced. But as an overarching ideology the new tolerance leads to anarchy and misery—the very things it seeks to halt. The new tolerance flunks the test of real life.

Everyone draws lines. We do not let drunk people drive. We do not let smokers light up in hospitals. We do not let sex offenders teach in elementary school. We do not let thirty-year-old men marry fifteen-year-old girls. We do not let people lacking eyesight join the military and shoot guns. We do not let illiterate people graduate from Harvard. Why? Because we know these things are wrong. So wrong that we deem them intolerable. Even as fallen and faulty people we are still image-bearers of God who recognize that complete tolerance is both impossible and harmful.

Many focus group participants sensed this. The harder they tried to consistently apply the new tolerance the more they realized the dangerous road they were hurdling down. They hedged their statements with provisions like “if no one gets hurt,” which is subjective verbiage anyone could use to excuse their own bad behavior, or “if they are consenting adults,” a stipulation that forces us to ask why we tolerate things from nineteen-year-olds that we do not with sixteen-year-olds. Is that not arbitrary and intolerant?

Christians are correct to resist feeling pressured to approve or celebrate things that go against their core beliefs. And that’s how the give-and-take of life works. No one expects vegetarians to help promote butcher shops or environmentalists to lose their voice cheering a monster truck rally. Sometimes our best response to charge of intolerance is to say, “Hey, wait a second, you say we’re intolerant? You’re intolerant too.”