By PM Kimbler
The Danger of Tolerance
Tolerance sounds like love. That’s what makes it so dangerous. We’ve been told that acceptance is kindness, that silence is unity, that making room for everyone means making room for everything. But there’s a difference between loving people and affirming sin—and the Church has lost the ability to tell them apart.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking, “Is this true?” and started asking, “Will this offend?” We traded the fear of God for the fear of man. And that trade has cost us everything.
It Starts With One Sermon You Don’t Preach
Compromise never announces itself. It doesn’t walk through the front door waving a red flag. It slips in through words like love. It hides behind “grace” and “compassion.” It whispers that faithfulness is legalism and that holding the line is hateful.
It starts with one sermon we don’t preach because it might empty the seats. One sin we don’t name because someone important might leave. One truth we soften because the world has already made up its mind and we don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, or even worse – because the collection plate might run low. We tell ourselves it’s wisdom. We tell ourselves we’re being strategic, that we’re building bridges, that we’re meeting people where they are. But bridges that require us to abandon the Gospel aren’t worth crossing. And meeting people where they are without calling them to something higher isn’t ministry—it’s enabling.
The early Church didn’t build bridges with the culture. They turned it upside down. And they did it by refusing to budge on truth.
We Don’t Call Sin “Sin” Anymore
Pay attention to how the Church talks now. The vocabulary has changed, and when you change the language, you change the message. We don’t call sin “sin” anymore. We call it a “struggle.” We don’t call repentance “repentance.” We call it a “journey.” We don’t talk about holiness—we talk about “authenticity.” We don’t confront—we “create safe spaces.” We don’t preach the Word—we “share our thoughts.”
We’ve swapped out biblical vocabulary for therapeutic language, and we’ve lost the sharp edge that conviction requires. The Gospel is offensive. It has always been offensive. It tells us we’re sinners in need of a Savior, that we can’t fix ourselves, that our best efforts are filthy rags before a holy God. That message doesn’t sell well. It doesn’t grow platforms. It doesn’t fill buildings. But it’s the only message that saves.
The moment we start editing the Gospel to make it palatable, we gut it of its power.
One Degree at a Time
Tolerance becomes compromise one degree at a time. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to abandon biblical truth. It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly. It starts when we stop preaching on certain topics—just the controversial ones, we tell ourselves. Then we stop believing they matter that much. We accommodate the culture, and before long we’ve adopted it. We tolerate what Scripture forbids, then we defend it, then we celebrate it.
This is exactly what happened to Israel. They didn’t reject God all at once. They just stopped driving out the nations. God told them to remove the false gods, but they didn’t. They let them stay. They intermarried. They adopted their customs. They told themselves they could coexist. And within a generation, they were bowing to Baal.
Judges 2:12 says they “forsook the Lord God of their fathers… and followed other gods from among the gods of the people who were all around them.” The gods didn’t invade. Israel invited them in—slowly, gradually, and with plenty of good reasons along the way.
We see the same pattern in modern denominations. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America didn’t vote to affirm homosexual practice overnight. First they stopped preaching on it. Then they called for ‘grace and compassion.’ Then they allowed ‘loving disagreement.’ By 2009, they were ordaining openly gay clergy in same-sex relationships. Thousands of congregations left to join more conservative Lutheran bodies. But the denomination chose cultural acceptance over biblical authority—one degree at a time, exactly like Israel.
The Topics We Won’t Touch
There are topics the modern Church won’t touch. Not because the Bible is unclear, but because the culture has already ruled and we don’t want the backlash. Sexuality. Gender. Abortion. Hell. The exclusivity of Christ. Repentance. Judgment.
These aren’t gray areas in Scripture. They’re only gray because we’ve allowed the world to cloud them. And when the Church goes silent on what God has spoken clearly, we don’t gain credibility with the world—we lose it.
I’ve sat in churches where the pastor spends forty-five minutes on time management and never once mentions eternity. Where marriage is redefined as “two people who love each other.” Where sin is a punchline, not a problem. Where hell is never mentioned because “we don’t want to scare people.” But people should be scared. If they’re heading toward eternal separation from God, the most loving thing we can do is tell them.
People don’t respect a Church that bends. They might attend one. They might even praise one for being “progressive” or “inclusive.” But they don’t respect it. Deep down, they know that an institution that won’t stand for anything will eventually fall for everything. The Church was never called to be respected by the world. We were called to be faithful to Christ—and sometimes that means being hated by everyone else.
Love Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
The world has convinced the Church that love means affirmation. That if we truly love someone, we will never make them uncomfortable, never challenge them, never suggest they might be wrong about anything. But that’s not love. That’s cowardice dressed up in nice language.
Real love tells the truth even when it hurts. Real love cares more about someone’s eternity than their feelings in the moment. Real love says, “I care about you too much to let you stay where you are.”
Jesus didn’t affirm the woman at the well—He exposed her sin and offered her living water. He didn’t affirm the rich young ruler—He told him to sell everything and follow Him. He called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones. And yet He loved every single one of them enough to tell them the truth. Love and truth are not enemies. You cannot have one without the other. And a church that calls itself loving while refusing to speak truth isn’t loving anyone—it’s lying to everyone. Love doesn’t coddle – it tells the truth.
Unity Without Truth Is Just Silence
We’ve been told that unity matters more than doctrine. That keeping the peace is more important than keeping the faith. That we should focus on what we agree on and stay quiet about the rest. That we’re all on the same team, so let’s not fight about the details. But unity without truth isn’t unity—it’s just silence. And silence in the face of error isn’t peace—it’s surrender.
Amos 3:3 asks, “Can two walk together, unless they are agreed?” The answer is no. You can walk near each other. You can walk in the same direction for a while. But you cannot truly walk together unless you’re going to the same place. And the Church cannot walk with the world and walk with Christ at the same time. We have to choose.
Paul didn’t pursue unity with false teachers. He called them out by name. He warned the churches. He drew hard lines. He told the Galatians that anyone preaching a different gospel should be accursed—even if it was an angel from heaven. Because he understood that an open door to error doesn’t create unity—it creates destruction. We’ve confused keeping the peace with keeping people comfortable. But comfort is not the mission. Faithfulness is.
We’re Afraid
Let’s be honest about why this happens. Let’s call it what it is. We’re afraid. Afraid of being mocked, canceled, labeled as hateful or bigoted or extreme. Afraid of losing members, donations, influence, platforms. Afraid of being left behind while the culture moves forward without us.
So we soften. We hedge. We preach around the edges and hope people figure out the middle for themselves. We say things like “God loves everyone” without mentioning that He also hates sin. We talk about grace without talking about the cross. We emphasize acceptance without mentioning that Jesus said, “Go and sin no more.”
But Proverbs 29:25 warns, “The fear of man brings a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord shall be safe.” Fear is a snare. And too many churches are caught in it. We’ve become so afraid of what the world will say that we’ve forgotten what God already said. The result is a Church that everybody likes and nobody fears—including the devil.
There’s No Faithful Compromise
There is no version of faithfulness that includes compromise on biblical truth. None. Zero. You can’t have it both ways. You cannot be faithful and silent. You cannot be obedient and accommodating. You cannot follow Jesus and edit His words to make them more acceptable to modern sensibilities.
The line isn’t always easy to see, but it’s always there. And every time we step over it—even with good intentions, even with compassionate motives—we move further from the Christ we claim to follow. Tolerance becomes compromise the moment we value acceptance over obedience. And once we cross that line, it gets easier to cross it again. And again. Until we can’t even remember where it was. Until we’ve normalized what God called abomination and celebrated what He called sin.
Will You Stand or Will You Bend?
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a choice. The same choice every generation of believers has faced. Will we speak the truth and risk being rejected? Or will we soften the message and fade into irrelevance? Will we fear God or fear man? Will we seek His approval or theirs?
The world will never thank us for standing firm. They’ll call us intolerant, hateful, backwards, on the wrong side of history. But Christ will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And His approval is the only one that lasts beyond this life.
Tolerance sounds like love. But when it leads us to abandon truth, it becomes the enemy of everything we were called to be. The Church doesn’t need to be more tolerant. It needs to be more faithful. And faithfulness always starts with the courage to say what everyone else is afraid to say.
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If you appreciated this article, you’ll love my book Why You Can’t Be a Christian and Vote Democrat: No Compromise, where I expose how the Church has traded truth for tolerance—and what it’s costing us.
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About the Author
Patrice Kimbler is a Christian conservative writer and the author of Why You Can’t Be a Christian and Vote Democrat: No Compromise. She speaks boldly on faith, culture, and politics—always through a biblical lens. Read her full bio here.