Does relativism lead to intolerance?

Question 60037.

Moral relativism arrived with a promise of peace. If there is no truth binding on everyone, the argument went, then nobody can impose anything on anybody, and we shall all live together in easy tolerance. That was the sales pitch. Anybody who has watched a public disagreement in recent years knows that the product did not match the description.

The question in front of us is not whether relativism is fashionable. It is whether it can do what it claims. My answer is that it cannot, and that the intolerance we are now seeing is not a betrayal of relativism but its natural fruit.

The promise and the collapse of moral relativism

Moral relativism says that moral claims are true only relative to a person or a culture. Your truth and my truth may differ, and neither of us is in a position to correct the other. Stated that way it sounds humble, and humility is attractive. It also sounds like a recipe for a quiet life, which after a century of ideological slaughter is understandable.

The collapse begins the moment somebody does something monstrous. Every one of us, including the committed relativist, reaches for language that assumes a standard higher than culture. We say that what happened was wrong, not wrong for us, not currently unfashionable, but wrong. If moral relativism were actually believed, the strongest thing anybody could say about atrocity is that they personally would have preferred otherwise, and nobody is willing to live there.

So relativism is asserted at the level of theory and abandoned at the level of practice. That gap is where the trouble starts, because a society still needs rules, and if it will not derive them from truth it will derive them from power.

The new orthodoxy

Watch what happens next. Since no argument can be settled by appeal to a shared standard, disagreement gets recategorised. You are not mistaken, you are dangerous. Your position is not false, it is harmful. And harm, unlike error, does not need to be refuted; it needs to be removed. That is how a culture that began by celebrating open mindedness ends up with sacking, deplatforming and public shaming as its normal instruments.

The result is an orthodoxy that is fiercer than the ones it replaced, and less honest, because it will not admit to being an orthodoxy at all. Older creeds could at least be examined, argued with and, if necessary, reformed. A moral consensus that denies it is a creed cannot be reasoned with, only obeyed.

None of this should surprise a Christian. Take away the fear of God and you do not get a neutral space. You get whatever fills the vacuum, and something always does.

What Scripture explains

The book of Judges ends with the sentence that everyone did what was right in his own eyes, which you can read at Judges 21:25. That is moral relativism in six Hebrew words, and the book has just spent twenty one chapters showing us the results. It is not a story of gentle diversity. It is a story of civil war, exploitation and the abuse of the weak.

Paul traces the same path in Romans 1. The exchange of the truth of God for a lie is not followed by a placid pluralism but by a hardening. Meanwhile Isaiah pronounces woe on those who call evil good and good evil, which you will find at Isaiah 5:20. Scripture treats the inversion of moral categories as a judgement in itself, not simply as a mistake.

The Greek word for truth, aletheia, carries the sense of what is unhidden, what is actually the case. Truth in the Bible is not a private possession but a public reality, and that is why Jesus could say that He is the truth rather than that He has a truth.

Why moral relativism cannot sustain itself

Every relativist system smuggles in an absolute. It has to. The claim that no moral claim is universally binding is itself offered as universally binding, which is a knot that cannot be untied. In the same way, the demand for tolerance is a demand, and demands need authority. Ask where the authority comes from and the conversation either stops or arrives at something suspiciously like a moral law.

There is also a simple human test. Nobody wants a relativist surgeon, a relativist accountant, or a relativist judge trying their case. We want truth in every area where the stakes are high, and then declare truth unavailable in the area with the highest stakes of all. That inconsistency is worth pointing out gently, because it is often the first crack of light.

Answering it with grace

When somebody tells me there is no absolute truth, I have learned not to pounce. I ask questions instead. Is that true for everybody? What would you say to a culture that decided your dearest cause was evil? Most people have never followed their own position to the end of the road, and walking it with them is more persuasive than announcing the destination.

Then I try to show that Christianity is not the enemy of tolerance but its only secure foundation. I can listen patiently to a man I believe to be profoundly wrong precisely because I am not the judge, because he bears the image of God, and because I was once wrong in ways I could not see. I have written further on this in how we answer the claim that truth is relative and in defending biblical authority in a post truth culture.

Relativism in the pulpit

It would be comfortable to treat this as somebody else’s problem, but the same instincts turn up inside evangelical churches in softer clothing. We hear that a passage means this to me, as though a text could carry as many meanings as it has readers. We hear that we should not be dogmatic, offered not as a plea for humility about secondary matters but as a general suspicion of confidence. That is moral relativism wearing a lanyard.

The remedy is not louder assertion. It is careful handling of the text itself, showing people that the meaning is there in the words and can be tested by anyone willing to look. Nothing dismantles the private meaning approach faster than a congregation learning how to read a paragraph in context. I have set out the method in what rightly dividing the word of truth means.

Preachers also need to distinguish between certainty and arrogance. A man can hold the deity of Jesus without flinching and still say honestly that he is unsure about the identity of the two witnesses. Being clear where Scripture is clear, and tentative where it is quiet, is not a compromise with relativism. It is the only kind of confidence that is worth trusting.

Conscience and the moral law

Paul argues in Romans 2 that Gentiles who never had the Law show the work of the Law written on their hearts, their conscience bearing witness. That is the strongest evidence against moral relativism that any of us will meet, because it is in the room whenever a person is wronged. The man who insists that morality is a social construct still expects an apology when you tread on his foot.

Conscience is not infallible, and Scripture knows it can be seared or weak or badly trained. But its existence is the signature of a Lawgiver, and its persistence is why relativism never quite takes. If you want the fuller picture, I have written on what the conscience is.

So when you meet relativism in conversation, remember that you are not arguing with a settled worldview. You are arguing with a theory that the person’s own conscience is already contradicting several times a day.

One more observation before we move on. Moral relativism tends to be strongest among people who have never suffered a serious injustice. Sit with somebody who has been robbed, betrayed or abused and you will find that the theory evaporates within about thirty seconds. They do not want a conversation about competing perspectives. They want it acknowledged that a real wrong was done to them by a real person, and that the wrong deserves an answer. Christianity is the faith that says God agrees, and that the answer came at Calvary.

So, now what?

If you are a believer, resist the pressure to soften your convictions into preferences in order to keep the peace. It will not buy the peace you hoped for, and it will leave you with nothing to offer the person who eventually asks whether anything is really true. Hold the truth without shouting it. That combination is rarer than you might think, and people notice it.

If you are not yet a believer and the collapse of moral relativism has left you uneasy, that unease is a signal worth following. The fact that you cannot stop believing in real right and real wrong may be telling you something about the world you actually live in. Where do you think that sense of obligation came from?

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!

Isaiah 5:20, ESV