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Chapter 13: Warfare Strategy (4) – Intolerance
CONTENTS:
PART 13.1: An Intolerant Youth Focus The Modern World Recapping Cancel Culture & Divisiveness
PART 13.2: A Closer Look at Intolerance Focus Testimony Resource Example Comment-Response The Person versus the Belief New Versus Old Intolerance Trumps Truth Not what is true, but what works
PART 13.3: Fuelled by Ignorance
PART 13.1: An Intolerant Youth
Focus: An expression of intolerance seen in modern culture warriors, is the demand to think what they think, regardless of the truth, as we saw in the previous chapter as we thought about the demand to ‘believe what I believe'.
The Modern World: The Times 1 st May 2022 declared, We already know that holding an unapproved opinion can cost your job, your reputation and your mental health in the court of social media. It now appears the very institutions charged with protecting our liberties and upholding the constitution — of which freedom of expression is the bedrock — are, instead, enforcing that protocol.
The Times, 24th June 2022, referring to the latest survey of what students actually think, declared,
It paints a disturbing picture of a student body that is ferociously intolerant and unwilling to be exposed to any viewpoint it doesn't share. The idea of banning certain groups or issues from all public discussion — censorship, in other words — is accepted by the majority.
Recapping Cancel Culture & Divisiveness: In chapter 12 under ‘Fixity of Belief' we considered the concept of closed minds which are really an attitude of intolerance, the inability to accept viewpoints that run contrary to my own. We also briefly considered biblical examples of those with closed minds, of intolerance. For the culture activists, intolerance is simply a certainty of course or passage in a crusade to sweep away all traditional morality under the guise of righting wrongs. The cultural crusader thus holds a high moral view of themselves, despite the fact that so often truth is a casualty.
PART 13.3: A Closer Look at Intolerance
Psa 101: 5 “Whoever slanders their neighbour in secret, I will put to silence; whoever has haughty eyes and a proud heart, I will not tolerate .”
Focus: Intolerance was once seen as a reaction against what is evil. Today, however, intolerance, is a hostile reaction using a dogmatic and erroneous belief in equality, to anything that claims to be truth.
Testimony: During the end of the 1970's, and for seventeen years through into the 1990's, I taught Law to a late-teens and early twenties group at college. As a starter exercise to overcome their fears of ‘Law', in groups I had them imagining a survival society after a nuclear holocaust that had to re-establish itself so they needed to decide did they need laws and on what basis would they decide them. They always declared, yes, we need laws to protect the weak because ‘people' are nasty! Without God in the equation they struggled to form a basis on which to formulate their laws.
At the beginning of that seventeen-year period, often two groups of thirty, only one person would say there was no such thing as absolutes of right and wrong, i.e. they virtually all said yes there were things that were definitely wrong and things that were definitely right. Now here's the big thing. As that period, starting at the end of the 1970's, progressed through the 1980's and into the 1990's, bit by bit that changed until at the end, in the mid-1990's they ALL (except for the occasional Christian) said there were no such things as absolutes, nothing that was definitely wrong.
How could they justify traditional ‘wrongs' such as murder or rape? It all depends, nothing is black and white, there may be causes, it's relative, measured in comparison to other things, who are we to say what is? That was 1995, so is it surprising that nearly thirty years on, with no voice speaking against this, that we find ourselves in a fog of confusion over beliefs and opinions?
Resource: As far back as 1998, (three years after the end of my Law teaching) Josh McDowell (well known for his incredibly detailed and well-researched books on apologetics) and Bob Hostetler, in their book, ‘The New Tolerance' warned how intolerance in the guise of tolerance was warping modern thinking to cancel Christian beliefs.
They first reminded us of a traditional dictionary definition of tolerance: “to recognise and respect others' beliefs practises etc. without sharing them,” and “to bear or put up with someone or something not especially liked.”
Example: They went on to example a young person whose outlook on life is clearly very different from their parents' and the young person explains to their parents, “You have your value system and I have mine. The fact that they are different doesn't mean one is right and the other wrong and it doesn't mean we can't respect each other's opinions. In fact that's the whole point we need to respect and honour differing value systems yours mine and everyone else's – just as we honour and respect our own. Anything else would be intolerant. “We can't force our values or beliefs on other people it's just not right.”
Comment-Response: The consequence of that is that it becomes wrong to espouse a view contrary to that in popular existence (godless non-Christianity). The last line of that quote is true, one can never force another to agree with you. Having said that, the theory being espoused here is clearly untrue. The young person in the example is appealing to an assumed equality of all outlooks in life . However such a person would start feeling uncomfortable (if they would even be willing to think these things through) if you asked them about the extremes of left or right wing politics. (Remember we came across when we considered multiculturalism.)
An example is the extreme left - Communism – which may have various social appeals to it but has proved questionable when you consider its application and practical outworking seen in a) the millions killed by Stalin last century for the sake of communism and b) the fact that the regimes in, Russia and China are totalitarian states where a minority force the majority to abide by the Party's dogmatic doctrinaire demands, which also controls state-media and the lives of millions within their boundaries. Freedom to believe what you will is forbidden if it conflicts with Party dogma – the State is all-important.
The opposite example is the extreme right – Nazism – seen in the twentieth century as the outworking of a deranged dictator, Adolph Hitler, who again caused the death of millions in his crusade on behalf of the superior race of his ideology, and in particular caused the death of over six million Jews in concentration camps. Those who would try to espouse Nazism seek to deny the Holocaust but the historical evidence is overwhelming. But these things are never mentioned in discussion about intolerance. (See below).
McDowell and Hostetler point out that the new ‘tolerance' is in fact seriously intolerant of the Christian faith and of those expressing their faith in any form. What the new intolerance does is legitimize questionable beliefs and cancel anyone who dares question those new beliefs. Of course we accept, if not demand, questioning when it comes to political policies, but not when it comes to matters of worldviews and ‘religion'. Further the demand for tolerance of all, soon turns into a demand not to tolerate anyone who has views contrary to your own. The new tolerance is soon seen to be intolerance, a weapon used to silence those who question the downward direction of civilization.
The Person versus the Belief: The argument of the new tolerance says that if we disagree with the beliefs and worldviews of others we are in fact demeaning those people and as such we should be ‘cancelled', cast out and cut off from society.
The failure of the argument is twofold. First, you can love and accept a person while disagreeing with their outlook and way of life. In Jesus' powerful ‘Parable of the Prodigal Son', the father in the story would never have agreed with the son's desires and outlook, but nevertheless gave him his share of his inheritance and allowed him to go his own way. Yet he was there to welcome him with open arms the moment he returned home. Jesus could meet with the ‘low life' of his day and eat and drink with them and was clearly accepted by them, even though he would never have accepted their ways of life.
The demand to accept outlook and beliefs in order to accept the person is an indication of insecurity. i.e. I can only feel secure in your presence if you will agree to my views. Douglas Murray's comment about universities, that we saw earlier, points to the inadequate training of modern young people to learn to discriminate and discern by discussion and discovery.
The second failure of the argument of tolerance (that is intolerant) is that the stance against the Christian or other belief person, is as equally intolerant as any other form of intolerance; it stands on its false belief that it alone is right and all others are wrong.
New versus Old: Consider:
Traditional tolerance = everyone has an equal right to believe or say what they think is right. New tolerance = what every individual believes or says is equally right, equally valid. (In fact, as we can see from what we have been saying, the new tolerance does NOT accept that the Christian position, say, is valid because it challenges what is wrong.) i.e. Traditional tolerance doesn't accept that every idea or opinion is correct. New tolerance is unable to distinguish between right and wrong!
As McDowell and Hostetler, cited another example:
Intolerance trumps Truth: Once upon a time when seeking to share the Gospel, a believer when challenged might ask, ‘Can I share with you the evidence for my beliefs which are, I believe you will agree, quite credible. In the new intolerance such a believer is shut down with cries of, “You are intolerant of other beliefs, you are a bigot!” The truth is rarely considered for the new dogma is that all truths are equal. The era of George Orwell's ‘1984' is here, that we noted when we considered ‘cancelling' in the previous chapter.
Not what is true, but what works: Talk of evidence is questioned. Looking at what works is a credible alternative which IS REALLY GOOD NEWS for us. In extensive reading generally and for these notes specifically, one thing has become clear: increasingly secular writers are saying • that this present Western world of ours is not working, • the ways we conduct (broken) family relationships is harmful and damaging our young people, • the way we encourage permissive sex is actually harming women in ways that have been ignored until recently and sexual predators are no longer acceptable.
I will quote them in some detail when we come to consider the specific areas of sexuality, gender and race, but quite clearly the tide IS turning and sane voices are being raised (sadly not by the Christians mostly) against the destructive patterns of behaviour that the West has allowed itself to be seduced by. The enemy has been laughing all the way to the graveyard but forgot that Jesus was biding his time, knowing that if you let the human race off its leash it will go in an ever-decreasing downward spiral of self-destruction until, rather like the little boy in Hans Anderson's story of the two con men and their invisible clothes, the lone voice is heard, “The Emperor has no clothes!”
PART 13.3: Fuelled by Ignorance
Before we complete this chapter, we might ask the question, how do these activists get away with what they are saying? Douglas Murray in his ‘The War on the West' is quite clear – it is because of widespread ignorance:
The assault on the West's history succeeds because it speaks into a vacuum of vast historical and contemporary ignorance. A poll of young British people carried out by Survation in 2016 found that 50% had never heard of Lenin, while 70% had no idea who Mao was. About 16 to 24 year olds who had grown up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 41% had positive feelings about socialism, while just 28% felt the same sentiment towards capitalism. One possible reason for this is that 68% said there had never learned anything in school about the Russian Revolution. Equal if not greater ignorance can be found in America. A poll carried out in 2020 found that almost 2/3 of Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 had no idea that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. According to the study almost half of the Americans in their 20s and 30s could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established by the Nazis during World War Two. About one in eight young people (12%) said that they had not heard of the Holocaust and didn't think or didn't think they had heard of it. It is therefore, perhaps of little surprise that such distorted views of Western history can exist in such a climate of ignorance among the young, and the purveyors or the new tolerance can get away with their claims. There is a challenge to remember history.
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