Tolerance as a Christ-like Attribute

The Hand of God, YongSung Kim

Because I'm in a new ward and I just met my new bishop on Sunday, I'm anticipating having the opportunity to speak in church soon. I haven't spoken in church since my faith transition. Even introducing myself feels endlessly fraught and complicated now.

I'm realizing though that I've had talk on Tolerance formulating in my head for the past two weeks. So if I get the chance to speak, it will probably be about that. What put me on that path was something I heard the Elder's Quorum President say. He was quoting President Monson out of context to caution about the risks of being too tolerant. It made me realize that a mistrust of tolerance has been going on in LDS discourse for a long time.

It's only in recent years that a false dichotomy has been drawn between being loyal to God/the institutional Church and being tolerant to social change in our discourse. Before that, it was seen as a virtue. An attribute of Christ. A hallmark of discipleship.

Tolerance is not a weakness or a moral failure. That may be how it's presented in the Republican party. But that's an attitude with no place in the Church. 

Tolerance is a skill, a talent, and a spiritual gift given by God to facilitate compassion. Tolerance is how we exercise patience with others. It's how we are challenged to see issues from more than one perspective. It's how we learn to admit that our way of looking at the world is not the only way to see it. Exercising tolerance with people who are different from us gives us opportunities to receive correction and repent. It's a necessary part of being in a Church that believes in continuing revelation.

We live in an environment where it is rare that we are given the full, objective truth about anyone or anything. There are hidden actors behind algorithms trying to further their own agendas by influencing what we think about literally everything. Their goal is to catch us unaware and uninformed because that's when we're most susceptible to being manipulated. Social media platforms operate to prioritize engagement. They figured out years ago that generating conflict and feeding insecurities are the best ways to do that.

Who we trust. Who we mistrust. Who we love. Who we dehumanize. How we see those around us—it's all being fed to us by machines, programmed by people we don't know and will never meet. These same forces are at work within the Church. We are not immune to those influences. The confrontations at play within our society are at play within the Church. Deepening mistrust and the normalization of disrespect based entirely on political ideologies and social issues have taught us to withhold our compassion from each other.

I've seen those campaigns at work. I've watched as members of the Church have done real harm to others because of how they've been radicalized online. I've been on the receiving end of those attacks more than once.

Exercising tolerance is an opportunity for us to develop the gift of discernment—to recognize and reject that manipulation. Committing to exercise tolerance will protect us from the campaigns at work trying to spread racism, sexism, hatred, prejudice, and violence.

In overcoming these influences, we have a perfect example in Jesus Christ—the one who ate with tax collectors and sex workers. The one who saved the adulteress from being stoned in the street because he could see the predatory guilt in her accusers.

Jesus Christ is the perfect example of tolerance. It's the single most important example he ever set. Why do I say that? Because his compassion is what we love most about him. It's what allows him to be our Savior. He saves us from the cruelty of this world.

In the Sermon on the Mount in Matt.5:44-48, Jesus gave the commandment for us to be perfect like our Heavenly Parents. He didn't say that the route to that perfection would be obedience to law. When we read those verses in context, Jesus taught it would be in our capacity to love our enemies, to pray for them, and to tolerate the people who are different from us that we become perfect. Tolerance is the pathway to becoming Christ-like.

That is the single most important skill we will ever learn. It's the entire purpose of coming to mortality—to learn to encounter and embrace differences when it's not an easy thing to do. That is the only way we will ever develop the capacity for the universal, unconditional love our Heavenly Parents have for all of their children.

 

One of my favorite sacrament hymns is "In Humility, Our Savior." It's short. It's a beautiful use of alto voices. It was written by a woman. And it brought us this gem:

"Fill our hearts with sweet forgiving, Teach us tolerance and love."

Tolerance brings the healing and peace of Christ to those who embrace it. I know I need it. My church needs it. My country needs it. This world we share needs it.