Evil talks about tolerance only when it’s weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be. And America has no special immunity to becoming an enemy of its own founding beliefs about human freedom, human dignity, the limited power of the state and the sovereignty of God.
Of course, the contempt of the allegedly open-minded Left hardly surprised McGinley, who wrote in her poem The Angry Man: The other day I chanced to meet / An angry man upon the street / A man of wrath, a man of war / A man who truculently bore / Over his shoulder, like a lance / A banner labeled “Tolerance.”
F.F. Bruce in his book, The Hard Sayings of Jesus, reminds us that Christ made many enemies. Bruce states: “The Jesus whom we meet in the Gospels, far from being an inoffensive person, gave offence right and left. Even his loyal followers found him, at times, thoroughly disconcerting. He upset all established notions of religious propriety. He spoke of God in terms of intimacy which sounded like blasphemy. He seemed to enjoy the most questionable company. He set out with open eyes on a road which, in the view of ‘sensible’ people, was bound to lead to disaster.”
That such texts will give offense to some is true. Truth, however, is more important than harmony. Were that not the case, there would have been no war in heaven, no gospel of Jesus Christ, and no reason for the Father and the Son to appear to Joseph Smith in the Sacred Grove. If we are to be a Christ-like people, we must value truth above life itself.
The plain fact of the matter is that you cannot build strong testimonies out of weak doctrine. As there is no courage without a struggle, so there can be no spiritual strength without a challenge. We have claim to neither peace nor safety save we build on a strong foundation.
Any time we declare something to be true, we have picked a fight with that which is untrue. We cannot, as Marion G. Romney assured us, do the Lord’s work without offending the devil. [12] It is as certain as the night following the day that we will never be able to declare our message without opposition or without giving offense to some.
If the gospel message is true, it must by its very nature have things in it that require faith to accept. If we are going to get serious about it we can hardly expect to find gospel truths getting along compatibly with worldly fashions, nor can we expect them to get an approving nod from those who worship at the shrine of their own intellect.
When I was a young man, tolerance meant that we treated those with whom we disagreed with civility. It did not mean that we were obligated to accept their point of view. To many of the young people in my classes today, it means that we are to be non-judgmental, holding all men and all ideas to be equal and that it is morally wrong to say that something is morally wrong. It is not an unusual thing to have students cover willful disobedience in the blanket of God’s love and to advance the idea of a universal salvation that sounds dangerously like that advocated by Lucifer in the councils of heaven.
The secular Left, on the other hand, has a famously low tolerance for opposing ideas. The Right likes to criticize this characteristic of the Left, especially among college students and millennials, but I think they're criticizing the wrong thing. Hostility to opposing beliefs isn't necessarily a vice. A lack of open-mindedness isn't always a sign of ignorance or arrogance. The problem with snowflake college students isn't they're intolerant of differing views, it's that they're intolerant of the right views.
And whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, it will never be accepted of him, and in the Hereafter he will be one of the losers.