When Tolerance Goes Too Far

“Implicit in this choice was the belief that tolerance of all values was more important than inculcating any particular set of values and, thus, that tolerance was the most important aim of society.”

Abstract

A commitment to tolerating different values and engaging in a competition of ideas is fundamental to Western democracy. However, when societies lose their common sense of norms and values, people struggle to connect and find a sense of meaning. By exploring the costs of dogmatically pursuing “tolerance,” we can come to a more nuanced view that avoids the pitfalls of both relativism and dogma.

In the late 1960s, American schools turned away from teaching traditional virtues and instead embraced values clarification, a distinctly amoral and individual approach to exploring values. Rather than promoting specific beliefs like “cheating is wrong,” values clarification sought to help students discover their own values. Students were led through a series of questions that were supposed to help them determine what they “prize” or “cherish” and then to integrate these values into their behavior.

This approach claimed to be a value-neutral method for unlocking students’ beliefs. Teachers were instructed to keep their opinions to themselves and were even given a handbook that told them which questions they should ask along with how they should respond to typical student answers. But the choice to pursue values clarification rather than to promote specific virtues (as most civilizations have done throughout history) communicated clear value judgments that were transmitted from and into mainstream culture. Implicit in this choice was the belief that tolerance of all values was more important than inculcating any particular set of values and, thus, that tolerance was the most important aim of society. This was reinforced through other expectations, like asking students not to ask “why” questions about their classmates’ choices. Students began to internalize a sense that one should never judge; after all, who were they to claim anything was better or worse?

The symptoms of this worldview are evident throughout modern culture and religion. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton surveyed teenagers across America about their religious beliefs and found that while a majority claimed to be Christian, their actual beliefs indicated a new predominant faith, which the researchers called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. The defining characteristic of this religion was that it was almost entirely nonjudgmental, even about whether people should pursue religion or not. Most teenagers claimed to believe in a god who wanted them to be nice but did not require much else. God was just there to step in when they needed help and to take them to heaven when they died. As Smith and Denton write in their book Soul Searching, “For most teens, nobody has to do anything in life, including anything to do with religion. ‘Whatever’ is just fine, if that’s what a person wants.”