Tolerance inescapably leads to intolerance

The religion of the moment in the West is “Tolerance.” With its own set of doctrines, including egalitarianism, human rights (without responsibilities that is), gender neutrality, and diversity, Tolerance is being foisted upon us all. But despite the name, the religion of Tolerance is led by people who appear to take their cue from certain leaders of the medieval church, and they are becoming increasingly aggressive in making sure that everyone converts—or else.

Of course, this is entirely contradictory. Proclaiming Tolerance as your creed, and then living a fanatical intolerance to those who disagree, is odd, to say the least. But why do the self-proclaimed Tolerance types turn out to be oh-so-intolerant? And furthermore, where does it lead?

I want to begin where we should always begin, with the theology behind the matter. Our God is intolerant. For example, He was intolerant of people taking fruit from a certain tree (Genesis 3:16-19). He was intolerant of people bringing their own fruit to Him as an offering before they had first brought the appointed sacrifice (Genesis 4:3-5). He was intolerant of people building temples to reach up to heaven to make a name for themselves (Genesis 11:1-9). And He is intolerant of a whole bunch of other things, including idolatry, blasphemy, adultery, murder, anger, greed, bitterness, drunkenness, fornication, theft, covetousness, etc.

But here comes the paradox. Despite being deeply intolerant of all those things that contravene His character, within the moral boundaries that He has set He is the most tolerant of all beings. He began by creating a garden with a multitude of fruit trees, and allows the man and woman to eat from them all—except the one. As far as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is concerned, God is absolutely intolerant, and if they eat it they will die. But beyond that one prohibition, He gives them perfect liberty and so shows Himself to be overwhelmingly tolerant.

This is why God’s law is described by James as “the law of liberty” (James 1:25). A legalist sees nothing but a bunch of laws and rules to be observed, and standing behind them a rather austere and petty judge, intolerant towards the slightest infringement. Those who understand the true character of God, on the other hand, see that His very nature means that there are certain things which must be off limits, towards which God must be intolerant, but that gladly accepting and submitting to these boundaries is the key to finding true freedom: “So shall I keep Your law continually, forever and ever. And I will walk at liberty, for I seek Your precepts (Psalm 119:44-45).

Now if God is both intolerant and tolerant, and if we are made in His image, what should we expect to see in ourselves? Simply this: that we too are capable of both tolerance and of intolerance. In fact, capable is not really a strong enough word. It is not just that we are capable of being tolerant or intolerant, but rather that these traits are inescapable. Our problem lies not in the fact that we are intolerant of certain things, but rather that because we are fallen creatures, we are often tolerant and intolerant about all the wrong things, so we are out of kilter with God.

So despite the claims of those proclaiming Tolerance as their creed, you will not find anyone who is totally tolerant. It is utterly impossible. The question is not whether we are tolerant, but rather what we tolerate. It is not whether we will be intolerant, but what we will not tolerate.

Adherents of the modern religion of Tolerance would have us believe that they are the most tolerant people the world has ever seen. In contrast to their intolerant forbears, they have cast off all inhibitions, superstitions, and bigotry to become the first people in history to attain to a level of absolute tolerance. “They are the people and wisdom will die with them” (Job 12:2).

Yet this is not really so. For no matter how tolerant they like to think they are, or would like others to think they are, sooner or later they will run up against the inescapable concept—ingrained in them as the image bearers of God—where, upon finding someone whose views are utterly incompatible with their own, they face a dilemma: Should I tolerate this view, or should I not?

It could be a baker who won’t bake a cake celebrating a “marriage” between two men or two women. It could be someone who won’t accept what they are being taught in a diversity training course because it teaches something anathema to their beliefs. Or it could be a school that teaches creationism. What to do?

In their ideal world, all such people will surrender, dropping their archaic and outdated beliefs, falling down before the altar of the god, Tolerance. But if they refuse? Well, I hardly need to tell you the answer to that, and you can probably think of a number of recent cases where this kind of scenario has happened. Just to give a few brief examples, in the U.K. at the moment a Christian baking company is facing court for refusing to bake a cake with a “pro-gay” slogan. A man working for the Red Cross has just been banned from working for them because he held up a sign outside a cathedral saying “No same-sex marriage.” And a Christian school has just failed an inspection because it is not “actively promoting” other faiths.

What this means is that the religion of Tolerance contains the seeds of its own demise. On the one hand, those who espouse it can continue trying to be consistent with the creed, allowing the baker to turn away the homosexual couple or the school to teach Christianity as the Truth. But the problem with this is that by being 100 percent tolerant, you are bound to end up with all sorts of things which are by definition intolerant, and which therefore present an insurmountable challenge to the religion of Tolerance: militant Islamism, for example, as well as the most terrifying prospect to an adherent of the religion of Tolerance, the exclusive claims of Jesus Christ, the Son of God as “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Needless to say, the Tolerance faith could not survive very long if it were to retain a consistently tolerant stance towards all things.

The only other possibility is to deny the right of the baker to refuse to bake the cake, or the right of a school to teach creationism, or the right of a preacher to name certain things as sin, and to do all this in the name of Tolerance. But of course by doing this, you end up with a society that is intolerance incarnate—a “Toleranny” perhaps. No prizes for guessing which of these we are headed for.

Now I realize that some people might think that I’m being quite naive here in portraying the followers of the religion of Tolerance as really having tolerance as their aim. Actually I’m not being naive at all. I have no doubt that there are some within the movement that really do understand that the propagation of Tolerance is merely a tool to destroy Christianity, and that they are prepared to act like tyrants to see this happen. However, as with most movements, the vast majority of adherents who espouse the cause simply go along with it without really understanding the real purpose of it.

I think that there is an opportunity here. Unlike the ringleaders of the movement, the vast majority of adherents to the cause don’t really understand just how intolerant the whole cause must become just to survive. They really don’t understand the inescapable concept, that because the world has been established by a God Who is both intolerant and tolerant, they are therefore incapable of being the absolutely tolerant people that they believe themselves to be.

We should push back on this, and we should do so both graciously and relentlessly. When someone claims that Christianity is intolerant, don’t spend time trying to disprove the claim. Rather, cheerfully agree that it is indeed intolerant of a great many things, and then point out all the things that Tolerance is intolerant of. Why are they so intolerant towards the baker who can’t in good conscience bake that cake? Why will they not tolerate a school teaching creationism? Why won’t they tolerate Islamism being taught in schools? Could it be that they, just like the rest of us, are actually intolerant of certain things? And if so, isn’t their commitment to the cause of Tolerance rather hollow—merely a fig leaf to cover imposing their beliefs on the rest of us?

Rob Slane lives with his wife and five home-educated children in Salisbury, England. He is the author of The God Reality: A Critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, contributes to the Canadian magazine Reformed Perspective, and blogs on cultural issues from a Biblical perspective at www.theblogmire.com.

The Achilles heel of the religion of Tolerance is, ironically, that it is fundamentally and inescapably intolerant. When we encounter it, we should lovingly, persistently encourage true tolerance.