Twenty years ago now I was studying for a postgraduate certificate in education. Most of my fellow-students were considerably older than me, often at the beginning of a second career. As was the fashion in those days, the course began with lots of ice-breaker type exercises with other students. From there we progressed onto all kinds of group work. Consequently I got to know the other students very well. The course lasted for only one year but in those days I became aware of something that’s been far more useful to me than anything I ever learned about teaching. As I listened to the other students and engaged with them on ‘issues’ such as abortion, sexuality, religion and race I begin to notice something I’d never really thought before. It was that only certain opinions were allowed to be voiced. It was as though there was an unwritten contract that defined how we were supposed to think about the world. The views permitted were loosely identified as the tolerant ones. There was great pressure to think in a certain way and strong censure if anyone expressed an opinion that fell outside certain parameters. In discussion and debate my Christian views were excluded from the start. They were considered too ethnocentric. I’d been awakened to the intolerance of people promoting the tolerance creed.
In more recent years we’ve become accustomed to hearing about Christians who’ve fallen foul of the tolerance agenda. Christian Unions at various UK universities have been refused support from the students’ union and forced off university campuses for refusing to sign up to their diversity policy. Quite amazing when universities – in theory at least – exist to facilitate free enquiry and expression! A Christian couple in Cornwall who ran a hotel were prosecuted for refusing a room to two men in a homosexual relationship. They lost the case but appealed. When the case eventually reached the Supreme Court in London, the presiding judge chided the couple for seeking to violate the deepest part of the men’s identity, their sexuality. As I listened to the judge being interviewed in the radio, it struck me that it didn’t seem to have crossed her mind that in ruling against the hotel owners, she was insisting that they violate the deepest part of their identities, their Christian faith. These examples are revealing. With the greatest of irony they demonstrate that the people promoting themselves as the custodians of tolerance are often highly intolerant; they tolerate no one with a different worldview to their own.
We Christians in the western world need to wake up and whenever possible expose the naked hypocrisy of ‘the tolerance agenda’, an agenda that has found its way in almost every corner of our society. Whether it’s the classroom, the healthcare profession, government policies, the legal system or the media, the tolerance agenda is in your face. Tolerance has become the number one virtue to defend. The hypocrisy of it all is that the tolerance agenda purports to be fighting for freedom of expression when in reality it’s about the absolutisation of one creed and the rejection of all others. It’s a creed that has achieved enormous traction in recent years, converting many along the way. Dissenters are labelled narrow-minded fanatics, while those who give in to its agenda are applauded for their maturity and for having entered the modern world. These converts to the cause seem not to have noticed that there is nothing tolerant about joining the tolerance agenda!
The tolerance creed is subtle – even sinister – and it’s important to have clarity about how it works in getting its own way and silencing opponents. So let me give it a try. As a number of commentators have pointed out[1] the word tolerance has changed its meaning over the last forty years. Previously, to be a tolerant person meant that when you met someone with a perspective different to your own, you disagreed with them but upheld their right to hold a different view. You were tolerant of them. Live and let live was the name of the game. But in more recent times to be tolerant has come to mean something quite different. A tolerant person today is someone who affords equal status to all perspectives and refuses to label any of them wrong, even to the point of deliberating celebrating each one. In contrast, the intolerant person is someone who denies that all views are equally valid and likely believes that one is more valid than the others. Ironically, such a person is not tolerated; they are given the status of a pariah.
What must be noticed in the new definition of a tolerant person, is that they must affirm the equal validity of every view. Only this is the ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ way to understand the world. But the thing to realise is that this is a view, a worldview no less. It is a truth position- its truth is that all views are relative. The folks holding to this truth are the only ones allowed a bird’s eye view; they know how the world works, they have the privileged position. No one else is permitted a privileged perspective – the Christian or the Muslim or the Marxist or the Jew – these worldviews are ruled out of court as inadmissible. The relativistic interpretation of life trumps all others. But relativism rests upon certain assumptions: (1) That there is no God (2) That God has not spoken (3) That all ‘truth’ is constructed from within the world (4) That every human being has the right to define reality for themselves. The tolerance agenda of relativism is just another way of upholding the atheist’s charter. Looking on as Christian believers we stand aghast and must confess that never in human history has such a clever way to gag the Truth-Speaking God been invented. Massive spiritual deception is at work.
As we look out on secular societies today we see a situation where manipulation, duplicity, bullying and sheer silliness rule the day. The culture-shapers demand that we all hold to the ‘correct’ view of same-sex marriage, the role of women and men, transgender and so on. What they are battling for is an exclusive way of defining reality. At the same time as we’re being told that the cardinal virtue is to be open-minded, the liberal opinion makers are judging and censoring people who are ‘have the wrong view’. As Tim Keller explains in his book, The Reason for God: “Proponents of this approach want all people who disagree with them over the nature of truth, to drop their truth claims and adopt theirs. If all exclusive views are to be discouraged, why not theirs as well?”
From my point of view, perhaps most worrying all of is that people who should know better have been hoodwinked by the tolerance creed. For example, many Christian churches have felt the need to acquiesce to more liberal views on sexuality, and along the way they haven’t noticed that they’ve merely jettisoned one exclusive worldview and adopted another exclusive worldview. There’s nothing more open and tolerant about them than before. They’ve just been conned, have cozied up to the culture and lost their prophetic voice in challenging the culture. More worrying, I keep meeting people brought up in Christian homes who have rejected their parents’ faith and now label them intolerant and judgmental. They seem to be unaware that everyone in the world without exception has a worldview and that whatever worldview you hold, you are by default claiming that others are wrong. Again these folks have simply rejected one creed for another, not seeing that there is a clever game at work to win over every one to one universal atheistic worldview.
We Christians need to see through the dishonesty and sheer nonsense of the tolerance creed. We need to speak out and expose the folly of what is happening in our and other societies. Furthermore, preachers must teach their people these things and parents their children. Our children’s minds are being brainwashed as they marinate in a culture that transmits the tolerance agenda in a million subtle ways each day. We live in a world where dangerous ideas rule the day, seeking to eviscerate the heart of the gospel. For if Christianity stand for anything, it stands for the existence a God who is really there and that God is not silent, He has spoken Truth to the whole world in the Person of His Son and in Scripture. In a world awash with relativism and a million conflicting voices calling for our attention, more than ever we need to know the God of truth. Only in knowing Him is there hope and sanity.
[1] See for example, DA Carson, The Intolerance of Tolerance https://www.icmbooksdirect.co.uk/product/15709/intolerance-of-tolerance; Josh and Sean McDowell, The Beauty of Intolerance https://www.icmbooksdirect.co.uk/product/25045/the-beauty-of-intolerance.
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2016-10-09. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.