Why Not Tolerate Intolerance?
In his introduction to The Retreat from Tolerance, Australian commentator Phillip Adams makes a frank admission: “I’ve been fighting bigotry for 50 years,” he writes. “Does this smack of arrogance? Far from seeking to cast myself in an heroic light, that sentence is a confession. Let me now complete it. I’ve been fighting bigotry for 50 years—my own.”
It’s an admission with which most of us can identify when we are honest with ourselves. We have a natural liking and inclination toward things that are familiar, people who look like us and those who think like us—and a natural dislike and bias against anything different. An attitude of tolerance is the practical safeguard against abuse inspired by these prejudices. It’s about how we treat each other, both as a society and individually.
tolerance and intolerance
Over the past couple of decades, intolerance might have been regarded as the last remaining “sin.” Almost everything else, it seemed, could be allowed, justified or excused, but intolerance was the peculiar failing of those who endeavoured to maintain some form of morality. With the rise of terrorism in recent years, some have been forced to reassess their formulation of tolerance. Now an appropriate limit to tolerance seems more acceptable.
But the problem with this view of tolerance is that it misses the point. Tolerance is not an “anything goes as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else” attitude. Such a position was summed up by writer Clement F Rogers when he asserted that “it is easy to be tolerant when you do not care.” But that’s not really tolerance; it’s just carelessness. And much of what has been passed off as tolerance in recent years is simply a moral lack.
Instead, those who show the greatest tolerance are those with the most definite personal beliefs and morality, yet allow others the freedom to think and live differently. Ironically, it is those with the strongest belief who are least threatened by the differing views and lives of others and thus have the greatest capacity for tolerance. As former US president John F Kennedy described it, “Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one’s own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.”
kinds of tolerance
As such, tolerance seems an appropriate Christian response to those around us. As people who value freedom of belief and practices, we should condemn the oppression or persecution of others, regardless of the nature of their difference. According to Christian writer and leader John Stott, in an interview with Christianity Today last year, this legal tolerance is the first level of tolerance, the fight for “equal rights before the law of all ethnic and religious minorities.”
Intolerance takes many forms, but as with most distortions of social interaction, the minorities, the underprivileged and the voiceless suffer most. Accordingly, these groups or individuals are the greatest beneficiaries of a more tolerant society. It may be that significant aspects of social injustice could be remedied with greater tolerance.
But there are more than just legal avenues to facilitate the breakdown of social injustice. In Stott’s formulation, the second level of tolerance is social tolerance. Stott describes this as “going out of our way to make friends with adherents of other faiths [people who believe and act differently to us], since they are God’s creation who bear his image.”
It can be comparatively easy to expound and champion tolerance for a distant people group or cause. When “they” are at a safe distance, we don’t have to interact with the awkward reality of actual people who think, smell and act differently. But true tolerance will seek to build relationships with people, despite the inconvenience and messiness inherent in such relationships.
The third kind of tolerance, according to Stott, is intellectual tolerance. But it is here that he sounds a note of caution: “To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feebleminded.” This is the irrationality of the “anything goes” tolerance. Adopting an unquestioning intellectual tolerance is to surrender our discernment, and taken to the extreme will endanger tolerance itself. Without moral or intellectual resources to choose one over the other, there is little to recommend tolerance over intolerance. If “anything goes,” why should we not tolerate intolerance—even our own?
the need for tolerance
And there is an urgency that does not allow us to leave that question hanging. The temptation when talking about subjects such as tolerance is that we assume we are the benefactors of tolerance. We should also realise that we are as different from the person to whom we might show tolerance as they are from us and we are in need of their tolerance in an equal measure. Perhaps tolerance is not something we give so much as something we need from most of the people we come into contact with. When we display the bigotry Phillip Adams admitted, we need the tolerance of those against whom we are prejudiced. Perhaps it’s the best we can hope for, most of the time.
Tolerance is both necessary and good. But novelist E M Forster suggests, “Tolerance is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.”
But there is more. When tolerance gives out, as it does all too easily, love is again required, love for your enemies and for those whose difference impacts upon your life: “If you love only those who love you, what good is that? . . . If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else?” (Matthew 5:46, 47, NLT).
This is the same humble love—or grace, if you prefer—God demonstrates when “he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and on the unjust, too” (verse 45). There is a limit to God’s tolerance.
This is love as a kind of tolerance-in-overdrive. It is not just ignoring or putting up with something with which we disagree; it is truly seeking the good of those we do not like, even as they continue to do things with which we disagree.
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