Does Relativism Lead to Intolerance?
Question 60037
One of the strangest features of the contemporary West is the way relativism — the insistence that there are no absolute truths, especially in matters of morality — has produced not the tolerance it promised but a new and remarkably aggressive form of intolerance. The culture that declared “there is no absolute truth” now enforces its own moral absolutes with a fervour that would make the most rigid dogmatist uncomfortable. People lose their livelihoods for stating biological facts. Institutions are pressured to conform to ideological orthodoxies under threat of public shaming. The question is how this happened, and what the Bible has to say about it.
The Promise and the Collapse
Moral relativism promised liberation. If there are no absolute moral truths — if every person and every culture defines right and wrong for themselves — then no one has the right to impose their values on anyone else, and the result should be a society of unprecedented tolerance and mutual respect. This was the vision, and for a brief period in the late twentieth century, it was taken seriously as a coherent philosophy. “Who are you to judge?” became the defining question of the age.
The problem is that relativism is self-refuting. The statement “there are no absolute truths” is itself an absolute truth-claim. The demand “you must not impose your morality on others” is itself a moral imposition. The moment relativism is applied consistently, it collapses — because every person and every society, in practice, holds certain things to be genuinely and non-negotiably wrong. The relativist who insists that all moral claims are equally valid will not, in fact, tolerate racism, child abuse, or environmental destruction. Their relativism has limits, and those limits reveal that they hold moral absolutes of their own. They have simply replaced the old absolutes with new ones while pretending they have abolished the category altogether.
The New Orthodoxy
What has emerged in the vacuum left by the collapse of Judeo-Christian moral consensus is not the absence of moral authority but the rise of a new moral authority — one that is enforced with considerable rigour but lacks any coherent philosophical foundation. The new orthodoxy centres on a cluster of commitments: radical sexual autonomy, gender self-identification, the redefinition of justice as equity of outcome, and the elevation of subjective feeling as the arbiter of truth (“my truth,” “your truth,” “speaking my truth”). Dissent from any of these commitments is treated not as a difference of opinion but as a moral failing, often described in quasi-religious language: heresy, bigotry, violence, harm.
The irony is thick. A culture that began by insisting that no one has the right to impose moral judgements on others now imposes moral judgements with extraordinary force on anyone who disagrees with the prevailing consensus. The person who says “there is no absolute truth” will react with absolute moral certainty when someone challenges progressive sexual ethics. The tolerance that was promised has given way to a new intolerance — one that is arguably more oppressive than what it replaced, because it operates without the honesty of admitting it has moral convictions at all.
What Scripture Explains
The Bible is not surprised by any of this. Romans 1:18-32 describes a pattern that maps onto the current cultural moment with uncomfortable precision. When humanity suppresses the truth about God, the result is not neutral agnosticism but active moral inversion. God “gave them up” to degraded thinking (Romans 1:28), and the consequence is not merely individual moral failure but the corporate celebration of what God has condemned: “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practise such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practise them” (Romans 1:32). The culture does not merely tolerate sin; it demands approval. And those who refuse to give approval are treated as enemies.
Isaiah 5:20 identifies the same phenomenon: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” Moral inversion is not a modern invention. It is one of the signature characteristics of a society that has rejected the knowledge of God. When the true source of moral authority is abandoned, false sources rush in to fill the vacuum — and they always demand absolute submission, because a moral framework without God has no mechanism for grace, no category for forgiveness, and no patience for dissent.
Why Relativism Cannot Sustain Itself
The reason relativism produces intolerance rather than tolerance is that human beings cannot actually live as relativists. We are moral creatures, made in the image of a moral God. The work of the law is written on the human heart (Romans 2:15), and no amount of philosophical sophistication can erase it. When people abandon the God who grounds moral reality, they do not stop making moral claims; they simply make them without foundation. And moral claims without foundation become assertions of raw power rather than appeals to shared truth — which is why the new moral orthodoxy relies so heavily on social coercion, economic punishment, and institutional pressure rather than on rational argument.
The gospel addresses this at its root. It provides what relativism cannot: an actual foundation for moral truth (the character of God), an actual diagnosis of the human problem (sin), an actual mechanism for change (the new birth), and an actual hope for a world in which justice and mercy are perfectly reconciled (the return of Christ). The Christian is not intimidated by the new intolerance, because the Christian knows something the relativist has forgotten: truth exists, it is knowable, and it will have the last word.
So, now what?
The church must speak the truth with clarity and kindness in a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to both. Relativism has not delivered what it promised. It has not produced a tolerant society; it has produced an anxious, angry, morally confused society that punishes dissent while insisting it values diversity. The Christian alternative is not a return to cultural Christendom or the imposition of Christian morality by force. It is the faithful proclamation of the God who is there, who has spoken, and whose word provides the only solid ground on which a just, merciful, and genuinely free society can be built. That proclamation will be costly. It has always been costly. But the truth outlasts every empire that tries to suppress it.
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” Isaiah 5:20