Everyone, Including You, Is an Intolerant Hypocrite

GOOD BIGOTS AND BAD BIGOTS

Not all the focus groups saw they were doing the same thing they scorned in others. So the facilitator served up a real-life scenario. She asked the San Francisco women: “You’re an eighteen-year-old going to college and your roommate is an evangelical Christian. Knowing that, do you switch roommates?” Here was the conversation that followed:

“That’s a factor.”

“That’s prejudiced. That’s like finding out somebody’s gay, or finding out somebody’s a different ethnicity. That’s full-on prejudiced, to just say, ‘I know one thing about this person, and I don’t want to room with them.’ That’s going against everything we say we have a problem with, with them. That seems totally wrong. If they’re a jerk, and they happen to be an Evangelical Christian, that’s something different. Based on their faith, that’s pure prejudice.”

“I think it’d be more likely for them to be judging me, than me judging them….”

“I feel like all the judgments being made are more just the whole institution of it, but with individual people, you don’t know how they’re going to be….”

“I feel like we’re bashing them.”

“Yes. If I believe in that and I found out my roommate is an Evangelical, I would probably want to switch.”

The issue of tolerance moved from the theoretical to the personal. They claimed to oppose intolerance. But at least some of the San Francisco women were unwilling to live by their own rules and room with a Christian. Their response was—in their own words—“prejudiced,” “judging,” and “bashing.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling the tolerance. Imagine if participants made these comments about African Americans. Women. Asians. Left-handed people. Democrats. Homosexuals. Pick a group. Do you think the conversation would have continued? Intolerance is not just a Christian issue but a human issue. It is not a case of the tolerant versus the intolerant but the intolerant versus the intolerant. So how do we find our way forward? By looking at tolerance biblically and practically from the Christian perspective that God is intolerant as the next blog discusses.

(1)D. A. Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012 page 3).

(2)ibid page 98

(3)Sidney Simon quoted in Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998 pages 75-76).