Beyond Tolerance

Our society promotes a sense of tolerance for each other, tolerance for those who are different than us or different than the norm. Often conservative Christians react negatively to the 'tolerance trend', because it tends to promote tolerance for others, but not tolerance toward Christians. I'd like to propose a different way for Christians to look at tolerance.

Tolerance is a lower standard.

The secular world tends to think they are taking the high road when promoting tolerance. It's certainly a higher ideal than hate. Maybe we even think that hate is the opposite of tolerance, but it's not. As it seems to play out, tolerance is organized apathy. In other words, the effect of the ideal of tolerance is to tolerate everything, which is in essence to not really care about anything. This is simple apathy; hardly a higher standard.

On a spectrum of caring and not caring, tolerance is at the bottom of the scale. Two other ideals at the other end of te caring scale are hate and love. Both show a great amount of engagement or interest; one negative, one positive. We certainly want to avoid the strong engagement of hate, but we should strive toward the higher ideal of caring and love.

Love is a higher standard.

Love shows that someone cares enough to act and to act on the behalf of another. Tolerance shows that one doesn't really care; you can do what you want even if it will seriously harm you. Love does more than let you do what you want, it laughs together, it helps each other, it encourages, it challenges, it protects! I could go on, but you get the idea.

Let's live to a higher standard, rather than buying into the artificial standard of tolerance.