Americans used to know how to disagree. We’ve lost that. Wow, have we ever lost it. You could blame that on many things, but one stands out as the saddest and most ironic: our obsession with “tolerance.” It was supposed to bring us together, but it’s set the stage for explosive conflict instead.

It wasn’t always like this. America was known for a practice I now view with nostalgia: peaceful transitions of power. One party would lose an election, and its people would say, “Oh, well, at least our Constitution still works. Let’s keep working at it. Maybe next time.” These days it’s violence and mobs instead. It happened after the 2016 presidential election, and it’s been echoed in the past few weeks since the Senate vote on Kavanaugh.

Political leaders used to support peaceful dialogue. I could get nostalgic about that, too, because we’re not hearing anyone even talk about it these days. Well, actually they are, but not like they used to. Not with Hillary Clinton telling liberals to call off all civility, and Maxine Waters calling for mob action. They’re speaking up and saying exactly the wrong thing.

Colleges used to host debates on controversial ideas. Ahh, I remember the days! But it’s just about impossible now. Conservative guest lecturers get shouted down, if they’re even allowed to step foot on campus.

Trained in Tolerance

Yet all this comes after decades of training in tolerance. You’d think we would have learned something, wouldn’t you?

Actually, we have. We’ve learned not to talk about our disagreements. We’ve learned not to engage them productively. We’ve even learned they don’t really matter. “You’re going vegan? That’s so committed of you!” The same answer works both ways: “You’re doing the high-animal-fat Keto diet? That’s so committed of you!” 

It works with beliefs, too. “You’re Muslim? Cool!” “You’re Jewish? Cool!” “You’re Hindu? Cool!” It’s all cool. Doesn’t matter how much their beliefs differ; they’re all cool. Everything’s just fine.

When It’s Not Cool

It’s fine, that is, until they meet Ted Cruz at a restaurant. “You’re voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh? Sorry, man, that’s not cool. I don’t agree at all. But we can still get along.” They could say that, but they don’t know how. They haven’t had any practice in it. They haven’t learned how to handle pushback.

So they implode. They mob a senator. They blow a White House press secretary out of a restaurant. They shout and stomp their feet at a visiting campus lecturer. And after all that, a former Attorney General says this is a great way for his side to get what it wants.

That’s where we stand after decades of “tolerance.”

The Tolerance Sham

All this comes after decades of training in tolerance. You’d think we would have learned something, wouldn’t you?

Tolerance was supposed to bring us all together, but it’s never been anything but a sham. “Hey, man, that’s cool!” was never a real human interaction; it was only surface-level conflict avoidance.

Real human interaction means respectfully finding out what each other thinks and feels. It means having the freedom actually to disagree; and freedom to disagree means (hang on, here’s the truly radical part) being able to say, “You know, I think you’re wrong on that.” “I don’t like that part, and here’s why.”

That’s human interaction. Of course, I haven’t yet reached the part that describes respectful, even loving human interaction. That’s what happens when two people can disagree openly yet treat each other warmly as fellow human beings regardless.

It’s at its best when people practice Jesus’ instruction to love their enemies. That’s a tough teaching, for it requires holding the thought, “This person is actually an enemy of mine” in mind alongside, “Yet I’m still going to seek what’s best for them.” That’s hard. It takes practice, and it takes the actual work of Christ in us.

But even the simpler thing, disagreeing without bashing each other, is hard to find anymore. There’s not a lot of it going on these days. We are so desperately out of practice. Because we’ve been too busy “tolerating” each other to learn how to actually get along.