TOLERANCE HAS ITS LIMITS

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No one and no nation can last long in a climate that says, “Let’s just tolerate everything and condemn nothing.” Here is a path to certain ruin. Without drawing boundaries and maintaining limits, we are simply in a moral and mental meltdown. The Christian, of all people, should know this best.

Indeed, Scripture makes it clear. Recall that God himself is not tolerant. As Habakkuk, speaking of God, puts it in Habakkuk 1:13: “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.” And Paul wrote, “Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good” (Romans 12:9). We should never tolerate that which is evil, sinful, false, or contrary to Scripture. As our Lord said of the church in Thyatira. 

“But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her sexual immorality.” Revelation 2:20-21

Archbishop Fulton J Sheen was likewise right in stating: America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

This push for non-judgmentalism, tolerance and reckless acceptance of all things harms us all — and it harms cultures and nations as well.

A recent, short article by Samuel Gabriel titled ‘The Limits of Tolerance: When Open Societies Become Suicide Pacts’ makes this point well, and is worth sharing here in full: The philosophical foundation of liberal democracy, that a society should tolerate diverse viewpoints and ways of life, contains a fundamental paradox identified by philosophers like Karl Popper: if a society extends unlimited tolerance to those who would destroy tolerance itself, the tolerant will eventually be destroyed along with tolerance. This isn’t theoretical abstraction but observable historical pattern that plays out repeatedly across different contexts and time periods.

The mechanism operates through what might be called ideological asymmetric warfare. Groups that do not believe in pluralistic values can exploit the openness of liberal societies to advance agendas that would eliminate that very openness. They use free speech protections to spread messages advocating censorship, leverage democratic processes to gain power they would deny to others, and employ legal protections while working to dismantle the rule of law. This creates a fundamental imbalance where one side operates with constraints while the other does not.

This dynamic becomes particularly dangerous when combined with demographic change. Societies experiencing large-scale immigration from cultures with incompatible values face the additional challenge that new arrivals may not share the host society’s commitment to liberal principles. This creates a situation where the native population’s tolerance enables its own cultural and eventually political displacement by groups that would not extend the same tolerance in reverse.

The historical pattern shows that civilisations often fail to recognise this threat until it’s too late. Elite classes frequently dismiss concerns about cultural compatibility as bigotry, refusing to acknowledge that not all values systems are equally compatible with liberal democracy. Meanwhile, the practical reality is that societies require some degree of cultural cohesion and shared values to function: the more diverse a population becomes in fundamental worldview, the more difficult it becomes to maintain the consensus necessary for self-governance.

The solution cannot simply involve becoming as intolerant as the threats faced; that would mean abandoning the very values worth preserving. Instead, healthy societies must develop the wisdom to distinguish between diversity that enriches and diversity that undermines. This requires making judgments about which differences are compatible with the underlying framework and which are fundamentally antagonistic to it.

Ultimately, every society must define and defend its core boundaries, not just physical borders but cultural and ideological boundaries as well. This doesn’t mean rejecting all difference or innovation, but it does mean recognising that not everything can be tolerated if the tolerant society itself is to survive. The alternative is the slow-motion suicide where a civilisation’s virtues become the instruments of its destruction.

Being free of all limits, constraints and boundaries may sound quite liberating, but in the end it simply and inevitably leads to servitude, and finally, to death.

Adapted from an article by Bill Muehlenberg: Tolerance Without Limits: How Nations Risk Cultural and Civilisational Suicide, 2nd January 2026.

IS TOLERANCE A CHRISTIAN VIRTUE?

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The Christian principle of equality sanctifies distinctions and differences — between male and female, for example, or between one nation’s culture and another’s — so that all souls might be equal in loving God. The leftist view of “equality” eradicates distinctions and differences, thus destroying the dignity embodied therein. This devilish operation is also performed on — or perhaps through — another of the chief tenets of leftism: tolerance.

Tolerance is not a Christian virtue; it is rather an earthly shadow or social mirroring of the fuller virtue of mercy.

As is made abundantly, almost appallingly evident in the form of Christ crucified — that bloodied and mangled God-man hanging upon the cross — mercy is forgiveness of some evil. It was, after all, sin which so brutalized Christ, but it was love — not merely nails — which pinioned Him to the cross. Mercy is the handmaiden of that other and greater virtue, charity, but mercy’s twin is charity’s manservant, justice. Mercy and justice balance one another out in the service of charity, with those twin virtues finding their fulfillment and completion in charity.

Justice without mercy to encourage it towards charity would be no virtue at all; it would, at best, be cold legalism and, at its worst, approach cruelty. Just so, mercy without justice to guide it towards charity becomes simply indulgence, indifference, and even “tolerance.” While Christ, in His mercy, forgave mankind its sins and evils with His arms outstretched upon the cross, justice demanded that those sins be called evils; if Christ’s mercy were simply forgiving sin by calling it some other name, by declaring that sin was no longer evil, His sacrifice would have been an act of mere and almost superfluous indulgence; it is the twin virtues of both mercy and justice, working hand in hand, which were operative in the crucified Christ, who is Himself the zenith and indeed source of all virtue.

It is this truth, preserved throughout the centuries by Christianity, that leftism so viciously assaults with its proclamation of “tolerance.” Mercy is twisted and warped so that all manner of sin and degeneracy demands to be tolerated.

The Catholic archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia Charles J. Chaput once declared, “Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.” This is where “tolerance” moves beyond brutalizing just mercy and proceeds to mangle its twin, justice. For while mercy may call a thing an evil but choose, in obedience to love, to forgive it, justice demands, also in obedience to love, that that thing still be called an evil. “Tolerance” reverses this process: that which is evil is, in a Satanic mockery of mercy, called good, while justice is turned on its head so that the only thing not tolerated by “tolerance” is true justice. 

Even as Christ hung on the cross, weighted down with all the sins of the world, He cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Though crushed beneath the weight of untold hundreds of millions of sins, beaten and broken, bloodied and bruised for the sake of forgiveness, Christ still declared sins to be sin; His mercy demanded His suffering, His justice demanded His clarity.