by Matthew A. C. Newsome ©2002

The following editorial was submitted to the Asheville (NC) Citizen-Times newspaper in December 2002, but never published.

Readers of the Citizen-Times will have noticed an ongoing debate in the op-ed pages over whether or not Christianity is a “tolerant” religion.  Those citing examples of Christian intolerance evoke the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Spanish Conquistadors.  Many challenge this, and take offence when Christianity is called more intolerant than Islam, as it was by one letter writer.  The unstated assumption on both sides is that tolerance is to be praised, and intolerance condemned as the worst kind of bigotry.

But what is tolerance?  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as the “capacity to endure pain or hardship.”  As examples it mentions tolerance to a drug, and tolerance to a virus.  It says toleration is “the allowable deviation from a standard.”  This assumes a standard is in place, which is something we have forgotten.  In tolerating more or less anything, we have done away with our standards.

You tolerate a screaming infant on an airplane.  You put up with it for a while because you have to.  Toleration is not the same as acceptance or approval.  But Christians today are labeled intolerant if they refuse to accept or approve of something that goes against their moral standards.

It is not hard to find examples.  Christians believe that abortion is wrong.  That comes from the Ten Commandments (the display of which cannot be tolerated in a court of law), which contain such intolerant statements as “thou shalt not kill.” The killing of an innocent human being is morally evil.  However, for the past three decades, abortion has been legal in the United States.  We are forced to tolerate it, although we do not have to accept it.

But this September, California Governor Gray Davis said that isn’t enough.  He signed a number of pro-abortion bills, one calling abortion a “fundamental human right.”  Another requires all state ob-gyn students to learn abortion procedures with no exceptions for personal conscience.  It seems the “pro-choice” lobby just can’t tolerate those who choose not to kill.

Nor can they take a respectful break for the holidays.  Christmas is the time of year when we celebrate of the birth of Jesus Christ, whom Christians believe to be God Incarnate.  During this most holy season, Planned Parenthood, the largest for-profit abortion provider in the nation, sends out thousands of greeting cards bearing the message, “Choice on Earth.”

This is an allusion to Luke 2:14 which calls for "peace on earth, good will toward men." Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women for America, criticized Planned Parenthood for "choosing to profit from a day sacred to Christians by offending them.”  Planned Parenthood, for good measure, had a member of their Clergy Advisory Board send a letter to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly asserting that Jesus was pro-choice.

We’ll just have to tolerate it, I suppose.  But let anything resembling a manger scene appear in a public venue and the ACLU will be up in arms, as they were most recently down in Franklin (NC).

Christians haven’t always been so tolerant.  Just open up your history books.  European Christians were intolerant of increasing Muslim aggression in the Holy Land – once the most Christian place on the globe – and so launched the Crusades to help Arabic Christians stem the tide of Islamic invasion.  They were not successful, and in 1480, that invasion came to the Italian city of Otranto, where Muslim Turks killed 12,000 inhabitants and enslaved the rest.

Queen Isabelle of Spain could not tolerate this, and so in that same year established the court of the Inquisition (which was not nearly so horrible as popular history describes).  Its role was to address those who falsely converted to Christianity for subversive reasons.  Professing Jews or Muslims were not subject to the Inquisition.  They were tolerated.

Spanish Christians continued their intolerance in the New World, where conquistadors brought not just the sword, but missionaries of Christ to the Aztec empire.  They could not tolerate the native religion whose gods required large-scale human sacrifice.  The humble priests who risked their lives to come and minister to these people believed they had truth that could save men’s souls and were audacious enough to share that with others.  How intolerant.

Some things simply should not be tolerated—such as terrorism, or child abuse, or murder.  Tolerance can be good or bad, depending on its object.  But tolerance for its own sake is not a virtue.  It’s a mark of apathy.  He who will tolerate anything cares about nothing.  This is what Christians are being asked to do in modern society.  And that just shouldn’t be tolerated.