Tolerance Reloaded
Speaking recently at a national conference, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan stated, "Unquestionably, very evil things happen in the world” however "...the difficulty is to know where to draw the line." But "If we are intent on naming evil, then let us name it intolerance."Really now? Can evil be that difficult to recognize?
Mr. Annan's statements reflect the growing belief that the only virtue is tolerance and the only evil, intolerance -- where tolerance carries the demand of accepting my neighbor, as well as, accepting what he does. It is a tenet at the heart of relativism where value-free choice is touted as a right along with freedom from interference, criticism, or consequence. And in the wake of this new morality, it has become more offensive to name evil than to do evil.
Regrettably, this new morality has also taken root in the Church where, according to George Barna, only 32% of "born-again" Christians believe in absolute truth. After all, since Jesus accepted everyone, He couldn't have been too serious about moral absolutes, right? Seemingly so if you listen to what George Dennis O'Brien, author of The Idea of a Catholic University, has to say,
"...Any single biblical text may be trumped by the overall message, which for Christian(s) ... is a message of love and acceptance..."
O'Brien's message is that love supplants all other moral truths. This growing sentiment reflects the distortion of the classical view of tolerance, moored in the belief that universal truths exist and are knowable. As a result, the classical view was elitist towards ideas while being egalitarian towards persons.
However, without absolutes personal beliefs became sacrosanct and modern tolerance drifted from its classical roots and became egalitarian towards ideas and elitist towards people. And with time, came the inevitable speech codes to silence those who believe that certain things are true and others false. For example, intolerance has come to mean moralizing, bigotry, racism, misogyny, and fanaticism. The result is the self-destruction of relativism’s very underpinnings, as Gregory Koukl writes in the Myth of Tolerance,
"...if one rejects another’s ideas, he is automatically accused of disrespecting the person... This often results in the very elitism regarding people relativists say they are trying to avoid. Christians who think their ideas are true are often verbally abused, called bigoted, disrespectful, ignorant and -- can you believe it -- intolerant."
As Koukl indicates, the classical aspect of tolerance -- the ability to have discourse and disagree about beliefs has been totally abandoned in the modern distortion. However, since people can only be tolerant of those with whom they disagree, this underscores the self-refuting nature of moral relativism, where "tolerance" is nothing more than intolerance.
So what are the Christian responses to those whose beliefs and behaviors are different from our own?
True discipleship requires that we not only comfort and feed His sheep, but that we help them understand why they are hungry. The costly nature of discipleship means living AND speaking His truth, even at the risk of being marginalized. As the late Francis Schaeffer writes in The God Who is There,
"Both a clear comprehension of the importance of truth and a clear practice of it, when it is costly to do so, is imperative if our witness and our evangelism are to be significant in our own generation and in the flow of history."
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