Radical changes cannot come soon enough.

Have you noticed that the meaning of tolerance has shifted in recent decades? In the fifties and sixties (yes, I was around back then), tolerance meant putting up with a neighbor who played their radio a little too loud by the pool. It meant not overreacting when someone cut into your lane on the highway. It meant letting your teenage son wear mismatched clothes — and grow his hair longer than you’d like. However, as Christian author William Watkins points out, “Being tolerant never meant condoning immoral behavior, letting harmful beliefs go unchallenged, or permitting a person’s dangerous lifestyle to influence, much less be taught, to others. In those days we may have disagreed about what is true, but few challenged the bedrock conviction that ‘true’ is the opposite of ‘false,’ and that truth does not tolerate untruth. We believed then that some beliefs and lifestyles promoted the common good while others undermined it.” Today, the “tolerant” person is wide open to other belief systems, truth claims, moral convictions, and lifestyle choices. He or she believes that “whatever works for me is my truth” just as “whatever works for you is your truth.” We should all just live and let live. This means that being tolerant today means not merely that we recognize another person’s right to have a belief different from our own, but it means we agree that all views are equally valid and all lifestyles equally appropriate. The new tolerance is grounded in relativism. Relativism involves the idea that anything can be true for the individual, but nothing can be true for everyone. It is considered presumptuous to think one knows the truth for all people. The truly loving thing to do is to unquestioningly allow everyone to hold their own truth without challenge. THIS is the “new tolerance”! The scary thing is that this new version of tolerance has become the de facto mindset of Western culture. May the good Lord help us!