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Tolerance once meant respecting differences without agreeing, but today it demands total acceptance. This shift fuels moral relativism, undermines social cohesion, and paves the way for civilisational suicide.

That worldlings can greatly misunderstand and misconstrue what tolerance is all about is understandable. That so many Christians do the same is not. But of course the long-standing meaning of the term ‘tolerance’ has changed radically over recent times.

It used to reflect the well-known adage attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. One could disagree — and disagree strongly — with what someone had said, yet still tolerate the person saying it.

Tolerance, of course, presumes disagreement. If you love your wife and agree on most things, you have no need to tolerate her. But today the notion of tolerance has been turned on its head. Now tolerance means you must agree with what the other person is saying, or you are a narrow-minded bigot, and guilty of the sin of intolerance!

This tactic is used all the time by the secular left. If you dare to differ with them and their beliefs, values, lifestyles and activities, you are an evil intolerant hater who should be removed from polite society. If you dare insist that marriage is between a man and a woman, that children have a fundamental right to their own mother and father, that killing babies if morally unacceptable, or that Islam is not a religion of peace, you are called every name in the book.

There is now no tolerance coming from the secular left, even though they are the ones shouting ‘tolerance’ the loudest and the most often. Thus, the conservative and the Christian simply has to expect this as the new normal.

Such a state of affairs is a recipe for cultural and civilisational suicide.

A Closer Look at Tolerance

No one and no nation can last long in a climate that says, “Let’s just tolerate everything and condemn nothing.” Here is a path to certain ruin. Without drawing boundaries and maintaining limits, we are simply in a moral and mental meltdown. The Christian, of all people, should know this best.

Indeed, Scripture makes it clear. Recall that God himself is not tolerant and does not wink at everything. As Habakkuk, speaking of God, puts it in Habakkuk 1:13: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.” And Paul wrote, “Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good” (Romans 12:9).

We should never tolerate that which is evil, sinful, false, or contrary to Scripture. As our Lord said of the church in Thyatira in Revelation 2:20-21:

But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.

Years ago, A. W. Tozer had it right when wrote in Man: The Dwelling Place of God:

A new Decalogue has been adopted by the neo-Christians of our day, the first word of which reads ‘Thou shalt not disagree;’ and a new set of Beatitudes too, which begins ‘Blessed are they that tolerate everything, for they shall not be made accountable for anything.’ It is now the accepted thing to talk over religious differences in public with the understanding that no one will try to convert another or point out errors in his belief… Imagine Moses agreeing to take part in a panel discussion with Israel over the golden calf; or Elijah engaging in a gentlemanly dialogue with the prophets of Baal. Or try to picture our Lord Jesus Christ seeking a meeting of minds with the Pharisees to iron out differences.

Archbishop Fulton J Sheen was likewise right in stating:

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

And more recently, Richard J. Mouw put it this way in his 1992 book, Uncommon Decency:

Christian civility does not commit us to a relativistic perspective. Being civil doesn’t mean that we cannot criticise what goes on around us. Civility doesn’t require us to approve of what other people believe and do. It is one thing to insist that other people have the right to express their basic convictions; it is another thing to say that they are right in doing so. Civility requires us to live by the first of these principles. But it does not commit us to the second formula. To say that all beliefs and values deserve to be treated as if they were on a par is to endorse relativism — a perspective that is incompatible with Christian faith and practice. Christian civility does not mean refusing to make judgments about what is good and true. For one thing, it really isn’t possible to be completely nonjudgmental. Even telling someone else that she is being judgmental is a rather judgmental thing to do!

When Open Societies Become Suicide Pacts

As I have said, this push for non-judgmentalism, tolerance and reckless acceptance of all things harms us all — and it harms cultures and nations as well.

A recent, short article by Samuel Gabriel titled ‘The Limits of Tolerance: When Open Societies Become Suicide Pacts’ makes this point well, and is worth sharing here in full:

The philosophical foundation of liberal democracy, that a society should tolerate diverse viewpoints and ways of life, contains a fundamental paradox identified by philosophers like Karl Popper: if a society extends unlimited tolerance to those who would destroy tolerance itself, the tolerant will eventually be destroyed along with tolerance. This isn’t theoretical abstraction but observable historical pattern that plays out repeatedly across different contexts and time periods.

The mechanism operates through what might be called ideological asymmetric warfare. Groups that do not believe in pluralistic values can exploit the openness of liberal societies to advance agendas that would eliminate that very openness. They use free speech protections to spread messages advocating censorship, leverage democratic processes to gain power they would deny to others, and employ legal protections while working to dismantle the rule of law. This creates a fundamental imbalance where one side operates with constraints while the other does not.

This dynamic becomes particularly dangerous when combined with demographic change. Societies experiencing large-scale immigration from cultures with incompatible values face the additional challenge that new arrivals may not share the host society’s commitment to liberal principles. This creates a situation where the native population’s tolerance enables its own cultural and eventually political displacement by groups that would not extend the same tolerance in reverse.

The historical pattern shows that civilisations often fail to recognise this threat until it’s too late. Elite classes frequently dismiss concerns about cultural compatibility as bigotry, refusing to acknowledge that not all values systems are equally compatible with liberal democracy. Meanwhile, the practical reality is that societies require some degree of cultural cohesion and shared values to function: the more diverse a population becomes in fundamental worldview, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the consensus necessary for self-governance.

The solution cannot simply involve becoming as intolerant as the threats faced; that would mean abandoning the very values worth preserving. Instead, healthy societies must develop the wisdom to distinguish between diversity that enriches and diversity that undermines. This requires making judgments about which differences are compatible with the underlying framework and which are fundamentally antagonistic to it.

Ultimately, every society must define and defend its core boundaries, not just physical borders but cultural and ideological boundaries as well. This doesn’t mean rejecting all difference or innovation, but it does mean recognising that not everything can be tolerated if the tolerant society itself is to survive. The alternative is the slow-motion suicide where a civilisation’s virtues become the instruments of its destruction.

Being free of all limits, constraints and boundaries may sound quite liberating, but in the end it simply and inevitably leads to servitude, and finally, to death.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Originally titled ‘Tolerance and National Suicide’. Image courtesy of Unsplash.