Remember those halcyon days when tolerance pretty much meant live and let live? It wasn’t tied to any ideology nor did it imply approval of another’s views or way of life. You could strongly disagree with someone and yet still be tolerant and respectful of their person. Sadly, those common sense parameters no longer seem to apply. Today you’re either all in or all out. You’re either a member of my tribe or a hateful bigot, with no middle ground on which to stand.

Tolerance was one of the cardinal principles underpinning the new American republic which allowed a polyglot melting pot of ethnicities, religious, and political factions to mix and blend itself into a cohesive nation. Subvert the meaning of tolerance and the nationalism which once united and molded diverse peoples into “Americans” begins to break down into petty tribalism. Granted there has always been considerable friction among classes, races, believers, and even the sexes throughout our history so, no, we have never fully lived up to the ideal. Nevertheless, despite our human imperfections and prejudices Americans have long held onto the idea that tolerance is somehow intrinsic to our success and way of life.

All that seems to have changed radically over the past 25 years during which time tolerance has evolved into a very one-way street, essentially becoming a tool of social blackmail wherein certain activists demand, in the name of tolerance, that the rest of us endorse and approve their favored agendas. To resist or to express any opinion to the contrary is to be mercilessly demonized as a “hater,” especially when your own views reflect traditional Christian values. Christianity, precisely because it holds us all accountable to some minimal social and moral standard, is thereby derided as cruel, divisive, inequitable, even hateful. And the benefits of toleration no longer needs be extended to any individual, group, or institution that is already deemed systemically hateful.

This new tribal mindset demands intolerance toward any who dare to disagree with the tribe on any subject (particularly those hateful ‘rigid’ Christians). A new ‘enlightened’ ethos has swept over the land which rejects out of hand any objective moral norms. This means that no one ever need suffer the inconvenience of feeling bad about their own bad or negligent behavior. In fact, to injure someone’s feelings today has become the moral equivalent of committing a felony or mortal sin. Even parents, under this new dispensation, shall have no right to criticize or even point out to their children any immoral or dangerous actions. Tolerance demands that you swallow hard and accept every deviant behavior your child may choose to engage in, and not only to begrudgingly accept it but to ardently celebrate, defend, and applaud it. But to even consider a kind spoken word of correction is to cross the ‘hate’ line.

Call it the slippery slope of moral relativism or the failure of authorities to unequivocally affirm that 2+3 will always add up to 5; but never 4 or 7. The problem is that once a parent, teacher, or legislator abandons truthfulness for the sake of sparing someone’s feelings a downward trajectory leading to failure becomes inevitable. The surest way for a parent to ruin their child’s life is to tell that child only what it wants to hear, never what it needs to hear. The real cruelty is denying others the truths they will need to live full and productive lives and thereby creating narcissistic, self-possessed weaklings incapable of dealing with life’s many challenges.

Nothing more illustrates this destructive dynamic today than the so-called gay pride ethic. Society is now expected to genuflect before the altar of sexual deviancy in order to make those poor souls with disordered passions “feel” accepted. Refuse to burn incense to the queer gods and you will instantly be branded as a hater. Now all of us, whether hetero or homo sexually oriented, are still sinful and broken men or women. True charity forbids any of us to look down on another simply because their weakness may be different than our own particular weakness. To do otherwise is to become a hypocrite. But to take pride in; to celebrate and openly parade one’s peccadillos before family, friends, and neighbors is the height of arrogance. How ludicrous would if be to celebrate “gossip pride” or “glutton pride” or even “embezzler pride” months where we proclaim to the world our worst faults, not in the spirit of humbly seeking forgiveness, but in an orgy of self-congratulation.

Shame is thus inverted and turned into a badge of honor; crime is re-framed as public virtue. Gay pride is not pride as in pride of place, pride for one’s country, or even for some outstanding accomplishment. This is a darker form of pride, namely the pride in one’s own downfall from grace. It thus represents a diabolical pride which attempts to make one into one’s own god. Pride is, after all, the deadliest of the seven capital sins, so to take pride in one’s disorder and tolerantly pretend that sin is now a virtue is tantamount to insisting that 2+3 can equal 4. It is both perverse and illogical. But if one insists on believing that 2+3=4 or that sin is the essence of liberation, psychologically he has come to a place where he can no longer tolerate anyone who still maintains that 2+3=5.

Truth is oftentimes more tolerant of error that error is of truth. By virtue of tolerance, truth can afford to be patient and magnanimous in the hopes of eventually nudging error back to the camp of truth. Error, on the other hand, can ill afford to be tolerant of a truth which may at any moment expose it. So the surest way for error to hold its ground is by attacking the truth. This need to “fight or perish” predicates an intolerance of truth. Error can always tolerate other forms of error but to survive it must vigorously suppress the truth. Far from the truth being ‘rigid’ if there is any rigidity it most often manifests in those proud souls defending sin and error.

It is those who expound error who are the least tolerant. Whether it be climate alarmists, LGBTQ+ and transgender activists, or race hucksters they all do everything in their power to shut down civil debate by bullying and proactively labeling any who oppose them as deniers, haters, extremists all in order to silence, mute, cancel and remove all such voices from the public square. Today’s progressive left no longer feels the need to even make a pretext of tolerance. They preemptively disqualify their opposition via character assassination, censorship, and bureaucratic intimidation.

We can tolerate persons without being forced to tolerate wrongdoing and error. But the current false tolerance, viewed as permissiveness, is having a devastating effects on our society. Case in point is the famously “tolerant” city of San Francisco, although the same could be said of most of our major cities where tolerant (lax) social policies have created rampant homelessness, drug abuse, crime, and filth. The tolerance of vandalism and theft is rapidly turning once vibrant cities into hellish pits of despair for those who cannot get away, and yet their civic leaders blindly refuse to reverse course. In the midst of all the misery these mandarins insist on proving (to themselves apparently) that 2+3 can be made to equal 4. All they have really proven is that the tolerance of evil always trends towards violent anarchy in the end, yet they could easily have learned that lesson from any decent history book. Tolerance after all is a blade that cuts both ways, so it must always be wielded carefully and prudently or the injury may be to one’s self.

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.