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.

AMERICAS CIVILISATION DECAY ACCELERATES

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What does civilizational decay look like? On Wednesday afternoon, Americans received a major warning sign that their Republic is teetering on the brink. It came in the unlikely form of a Senate cloture vote — a rather obscure parliamentary procedure that sets up the final passage of a bill in the Senate. But it wasn’t just any cloture vote, and it’s not just any bill under consideration.

I’m talking about the so-called Respect for Marriage Act, it is anything but that if you accept marriage as defined by God, and it just moved one step closer to President Biden’s desk, where it will certainly be signed into law. It passed cloture by a vote of 62-37, as 12 Republican senators joined Senate Democrats to throw “people of faith under the bus” — and possibly into prison.

Whether you realize it or not, marriage is one the best indicators of the health and stability of a nation. Just like buildings societies demand a stable foundation. Without one, they will crumble and crash, leaving a wreckage of human suffering and misery in the ruins.

No matter how hard progressives try to deny it, marriage is the irreplaceable foundation for stable societies. Not just any “marriage” but one man joining with one woman in a permanent, monogamous, committed union and dedicated to caring for any offspring such a union may produce.

Patrick Brown, at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, put it clearly. He explains that:

“But the institution of marriage itself — in law, custom, and tradition — is intimately bound up with the act of creating and raising children. Marriage, at its core, is the social institution most fundamentally oriented towards procreation. It is God’s way, (he said societies way) of harnessing, binding, and supporting the relationship that creates a new life, and it gives the child produced from that union (and his or her parents) the best chance at a stable life.”

Why is marriage the bedrock of society? Because it is how humanity endures throughout the ages, just as God intended for it to be. Jesus, Himself reminds us of the inescapable gravity of marriage.

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.” Matthew 19:4-6

Now, Jesus is addressing divorce here, but the principle, which is that God-defined marriage is between one man and one woman for life, applies to the proposed redefinition of marriage that is now sailing through the United States Congress with the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act.” They are trying to separate “what God has joined together.”

If we start unraveling this thread, there is no telling where the stopping point may be. Well, we actually do have a stark and dark preview: “sex change” operations on teenagers at top hospitals around the country, “kid-friendly” drag shows in your small town, and the rise of the acceptance of pedophilia. When you cut the brakes on God’s design for human sexuality and flourishing you can soon expect to fly off the cliff and crash into hell.

Lest I conclude on such a dark note, join me in remembering that just as human history began with a marriage so too it ends with a marriage. The arc of redemption stretches from Genesis 2:21-25, the marriage of Adam and Eve, to Revelation 19:6-9, the “marriage supper of the Lamb,” that is, of Christ and the Church. The Senate, the Democrats, and worthless Republicans may prevail against the definition of marriage and our religious liberty here in America, but God has guaranteed that the gates of Hell will not prevail against His church (Matthew 16:18)

However, the Bible reveals it will take Jesus’ return to this earth to restore sanity to the world. First, Jesus comes in the clouds to take His Saints to heaven, and then He pours out His wrath upon an unrepentant world with the Trumpet and Bowl judgements. The severity of God’s judgement is fierce. Below, I reveal what the Bible tells us about the first two trumpet judgements. The judgements escalate in intensity.

We need to warn our unbelieving family members and friends of what they are facing if they do not repent of their rebellion against God and His commandments. Show them how to ask God for His saving grace provided by Jesus. It is only by dying to self and becoming a new creature in Jesus Christ with the Holy Spirit indwelling their spirit can they avoid God’s coming judgement.

The Seven Trumpets
“Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to blow them. The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were thrown upon the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up. The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood. A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.“ Revelation 8:6-9

The above is a much-abbreviated version of the original article published at the Standing for Freedom Center. The last three paras. are mine.

The author William Wolfe served as a senior official in the Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a director of legislative affairs at the State Department. Prior to his service in the administration, Wolfe worked for Heritage Action for America, and as a congressional staffer for three different members of Congress, including the former Rep. Dave Brat. He has a B.A. in history from Covenant College and is finishing his Master of Divinity at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.