The Matt Walsh Show - Ep.87 - Tolerance is A False Virtue

Episode Date: August 21, 2018

There is too much tolerance in the Church. We have been indoctrinated into the idea that a Christian should never show intolerance or hatred towards anything. But this is false. Hatred and intolerance are parts of love. If we love people, and if we love God, then we will have a real, profound hatred for sin and evil. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bishop Morlino of Madison wrote an excellent letter about the abuse scandal, and I wanted to read two paragraphs of it to you and then focus in on two sentences in those two paragraphs. But just to give it the full context, this is what it says in part. It says it is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord. The Church's teaching is clear that the homosexual inclination is not in itself sinful, but it is intrinsically disorganizing. in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it, unfit to be a priest. And the decision to act upon the disordered inclination is a sin so grave that it cries out to heaven for vengeance,

especially when it involves praying upon the young or the vulnerable. Such wickedness should be hated with a perfect hatred. Christian charity itself demands that we should hate wickedness just as we love goodness. But while hating the sin, we must never hate the sinner, who was called to conversion penance and renewed communion with Christ in his church through his inexhaustible mercy. At the same time, however, the love and mercy,

which we are called to have even for the worst of sinners, does not exclude holding them accountable for their actions through a punishment proportionate to the gravity of their offense. In fact, a just punishment is an important work of love and mercy because while it serves primarily as retribution for the offense committed, it also offers the guilty party an opportunity to make expiation for his sin in this life, if you willingly accept his punishment, thus sparing him worse punishment in the life to come.

Motivated, therefore, by love and concern for souls, I stand with those calling for justice to be done upon the guilty. Now, the most notable thing is how he calls out the homosexual subculture in the church. And this is a subculture that a lot of people don't want to admit exists. Even people outside of the church are saying, oh, no, it's got nothing to do with that. Well, you've got people inside the church in the know who are saying, yes, this exists. It is directly linked to the sex scandals, and it's a big problem. So that's notable.

But also very notable is his call to hatred. perfect hatred, as he said. And I think there's a very important truth here. And I think we are, as Christians, as modern people in general, are repelled by the idea of hating. A call to hatred really upsets us. But that's only because we have been indoctrinated into the modern, effeminate version of the faith. The version of Christianity that thinks hatred is an objective evil, and it's the one thing we should always fight against as Christians. The version that says hatred cannot be of God because God is love and hatred is love's opposite. And of course it is true that God is love.

But the rest of that equation is completely wrong. It's untrue. Hatred is not the opposite of love. Hatred is really an element of love. Hatred is a part of love, a sign of love. Hatred is love turned militant. hatred is the ferocious part of love, the aggressive part. Now, there are, of course, bad forms of hatred.

There are a lot of, not all hatred is bad, but not all hatred is good, obviously. And we can easily tell if it is a good or bad hatred by looking at what the hatred militates against. Hatred is always opposing something. well, let's look at what it's opposing. So hatred of a different race of people is bad hatred. It's a disordered hatred because it is hatred directed at human beings, at individuals. But even this, you know, hatred is always attached to love.

So even this disordered hatred is attached to a disordered love. and the disordered bad love in this case that is attached to racial hatred would be the disordered enthusiasm that you have for your own race. A racist person makes their own race an idol. They elevate it far above where it belongs and so other races fall below it and are hated. Now, on the other hand, if a loved one has cancer and you hate the cancer, that hatred is linked to your love. of the person who's being destroyed by the disease. So it's a good hatred. It's a necessary hatred.

And it would be a very sick thing. It would be a very weird, strange, horrible thing if you didn't hate the cancer of a person who you love or of any person. For a personal example, you know, I can say that as a parent, I have really come to hate a lot of the filth on TV and the Internet. Now, I may have disapproved of it before,

But now as a parent, I hate it. When I see this stuff on TV, I really deeply hate it because of what it can do to my children and how it can steal their innocence. And so I have a real burning hatred for it that is attached to my love of my kids. So, and we all have that, right? We all, hopefully most of us love our kids. And so there are things in the world that we see could be harmful to our children. and we hate those things. It's part of being a parent.

It's part of loving somebody. Love, you know, I think love is something that always seeks to embrace its object, while hatred seeks always to annihilate its object. And so those of us who think that we should never hate must therefore believe that there's nothing in the world that deserves to be annihilated. When you hear people say, well, we've got to get rid of all the hatred, no more hatred in the world, I guess they believe that there's nothing in the world that should be hated, nothing in the world that should be destroyed. But I disagree. I think there's plenty to be annihilated, plenty to be

destroyed in the world. There are many ugly, terrible, awful, deadly, revolting things in our world, and I think we should have a raw raging hatred for all of those things, a hatred that stems from our love of those that we embrace and those that we want to protect from those things. And our rauest and most raging hatred of all should be directed at sin. The Bible is pretty clear on this. The Bible speaks repeatedly of this holy and righteous hatred, and it commands us. It doesn't just allow us, but it commands us to have this kind of hatred in our hearts. for sin and for evil. Psalm 97, let those who love the Lord hate evil. Proverbs 813,

to fear the Lord is to hate evil. Romans 12, 9, hate what is evil, cling to what is good. Proverbs mentions seven things that God hates himself. And in four places in the Bible, and you heard it referenced in that letter that I read, we're told about sins that are so terrible that they cry out to heaven for vengeance. That's how bad they are. Now, there's a passage in Revelation that I think is really interesting. It says, I know your deeds, your hard work, and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked people. Yet, I hold this against you. You have forsaken the love you had it first. Consider how far you have fallen. Repent and do the things you did it first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

But you have this in your favor. You hate the practices of the Nicolidens, which I also hate. So this is what makes it interesting. God is talking to the church in Ephesus, and he can find very few redeeming qualities about them except for their hatred and their intolerance. Those are the two things he cites positively. Those are the two good things. When he's indicting them for the bad things,

he says, well, but at least you have correct hatred and you're intolerant of wickedness. So that you got going for you. And we tend to look at those as the, well, those are the two things. hatred and intolerant. Those are the worst thing. In this case, God is saying, those are the two best things about you. Because we understand that they are ordered correctly. They're directed in the right direction. So they're good. And they are the redeeming qualities. You have to wonder what

redeeming qualities will God find in the church in America. Because we've also forsaken, we have also forsaken the love we had at first, but neither do we have this hatred for wickedness. and this intolerance of wickedness. So we have none of that going for us. And we tend to believe that, well, yeah, we've got all this bad stuff, but at least we're so tolerant. We're such a tolerant church now. We're so tolerant as Christians.

And so maybe all the bad stuff will be overlooked because of our tolerance. But the opposite is the case. Our tolerance will not compensate for the other sins because our tolerance is one of our greatest sins. Tolerance is never commanded in the Bible because it's not a virtue. It's a false virtue. We should be running hot and cold, as Revelation said. We should love and we should hate. And these things should be properly ordered and properly directed. The only things that we should really tolerate are the things that are morally neutral and thus we don't need to be told to tolerate them. So I can tolerate, for instance, the color of the shirt you're wearing, and I hope you

tolerate the color of the shirt that I am wearing because it's not pink, it's salmon. I tolerate the existence of that tree outside. I tolerate the sky. I tolerate the number seven. I tolerate the color blue. I tolerate the grass. These are many things that I tolerate because they're morally neutral. They just are. It would be very weird for me to have negative feelings about them. They just they exist and so fine they exist um they in themselves they have no moral substance but and that's why nobody would ever tell you well tolerate the grass you know tolerate that thing over that they they wouldn't tell you that it's the kind of things that people feel the need to tell us we should tolerate that should not be tolerated people tell us

we're told to tolerate people of other races. No, we shouldn't tolerate people of other races. We should love them. People tell us to tolerate opposing ideas. Well, no, we shouldn't tolerate opposing ideas. It really depends on what the idea is. If it's a bad idea, if it's a false idea, if it's a harmful idea, then we should reject it. We shouldn't just, we shouldn't simply tolerate it.

We should reject it. If it's a good idea, if it's true, if it's, and all that, then we don't. we should embrace it. I don't think tolerance really comes into play. We're told to tolerate debauchery and perversion and sin. No, we shouldn't tolerate those things. We should hate them because they're degrading and harmful and they're at a fence against God and against man. Things that have some kind of moral significance, good or bad, should provoke something in us stronger than mere tolerance. And if it's a sin, then it should provoke hatred. and it will provoke hatred if we really love God and if we're truly outraged at offenses against him.

Now, it'll be stipulated that we should always make sure, it said in the letter that I read, we should always make sure to love the sinner as we hate the sin. And that's obviously a mantra that you hear repeated quite a bit. It's true. we should make sure that we hate the sin and we're not hating the sinner. We shouldn't hate human beings because, as I said, to hate something is to want to destroy it, annihilate it, and we shouldn't have that feeling about a human being. And I guess I should say maybe it's more than just wanting to destroy something.

It's like wanting to damn it, really wanting to send it to hell, which is what we want to do with bad things, with sins, is just damn that. to hell down into the darkness. And we should never have that feeling about a person because we should always want people to be saved. We should always want people to even bad people to repent and go to heaven. That's the desire we should have for all people. So hate the sin, not the sinner.

But there really isn't a conflict here. We hate a sinner's sin because we love him and we love God. The two things are linked. So most of the time it doesn't even make any sense. It's redundant. It's pointless to tell someone, well, make sure you're not hating the sinner. Well, if I hated the sinner, I wouldn't hate his sin. If I really hate the sinner, then I probably won't have much urge to hate his sin.

In fact, if I really hate the sinner, I'll more likely take pleasure in his sin because it's destroying him and I hate him, and so I like to see him destroy. Think about it. Think about a time when you have really hated someone. Even though we're not supposed to hate people, many of us have committed that sin, I believe. So if you've ever hated someone before, as wrong as it was, did you feel disappointment? Did you feel sadness when you heard about the bad things that they did? if there's been someone say at work who you hate and but and then and then someone else comes up to you and says oh well hey guess what terrible things so and so did do you go no no don't tell me i i don't want to

be disappointed in them please don't tell me about those things um no you are you're amused you're delighted by the terrible things they do that's why people enjoy gossiping about those they dislike. And that's what makes gossip so vicious and so awful because it delights in sin. That's all point of gossip. Nobody gossips about good things. If it's a good thing, if you're complimenting someone behind their back, then it's not gossip. Gossip is always negative things and it's almost always, oh, guess what so-and-so did. Just listen to the terrible things they've done. And it's a hateful conversation. It's hateful of the person. And it is delighting in the bad things that they did. And I think that's

the mistake we make. We say that a gossipy person is judgmental, but that's not true. They aren't making judgments against sin. They're loving sin. The problem isn't that they have too much moral judgment. The problem is that they lack moral judgment entirely. So usually when we really hate someone, we have no inclination to hate their sin. And usually if we really hate somebody's sin. If we see someone doing something and it's wrong and we really hate the wrong thing, then that is going to come, at least in part, that's going to stem from our respect and love for that person because we just hate to see them doing this thing. And we've all experienced that as well. Think about as parents, especially, I don't have older kids, but especially as your

kids get older and they get to the age where they can really do really bad things and they can really hurt you. And think about when you've found out about your kid doing some really bad thing. And you absolutely hate what they did. You have a real hatred for what they did, but you have no hatred for them whatsoever. The intensity of your hatred for their actions comes from your love for them because you're so disappointed and hurt that someone that you love would do this thing and you wish you do anything if you could go back and erase it so that they never did that thing. Right? I think the temptation to hate the sin and the sinner together at the same time, that only really arises when the sin is so terrible and so horrific and our revulsion against it is so intense that we just have trouble separating the two. And that does happen. I think with the more minor sins, it's different. It's easy to hate.

a white lie, but not to hate the person who told the white lie. I mean, that's an easy, it's easy to separate those things. It's much more difficult, I think, when it comes to something like child rape. It is, in that case, much more difficult to hate the child rape while loving the child rapist. because that sin is of a certain nature and it's to a certain degree that we the militant side of our love takes over that kind of destroying, annihilating, offensive, protective kind of side of us. And we simply want to destroy everything associated with that sin. because this sinner has descended so deeply into the darkness that we can barely even recognize

his own humanity. And all we want to do is, like I said, my piece yesterday I wrote on this, is kind of like lobber grenade into that darkness and destroy everything inside of it. That's the inclination that we have. And it's wrong. We should repent of that. Even with something like child rape, we should hate. we should detest the sin with the five of a thousand sons, but we should not detest the person.

Although, like I said, with sins like that, it is really difficult to separate those two. And I have not figured out exactly how to separate them. I'll fully admit that. Probably in every case that I've read about a case like that, my first reaction is just full-on hatred for everything involved. And it's covering everything. I can't, I can't target it. It's not a targeted hatred. And so that's something I need to repent of. And that's something I need to work on. But, you know, and I think that's probably a case for a lot of us, right? And we should all work on that. We should never just accept the fact that we're hating another human being, no matter how terrible

that humanism. But I think we should also be worried about ourselves if we don't experience that temptation at all. Like when it comes to child rape, if you have no trouble not hating the child rapist, if you have no temptation to even hate them, and it's no problem for you, it's like, yeah, oh yeah, fine, I don't hate him at all. Well, that could mean that you are saintly and spiritually enlightened and so spiritually mature, and, and, and, uh, you have grown so much that you can easily separate the two, hate the sin, not the sinner. It's no problem for you. That could be the case, in which case I admire you. But more likely, and I think for most people in that category, it just means that you're indifferent. That's where it comes from. Maybe a more, more, more relevant

example is, um, abortion. So, um, um, um, um, abortion. So, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, I'll talk to Christians sometimes about abortion. Christians who are, I'm talking about Christians who would identify nominally as pro-life. You know, they say that, yeah, they don't support abortion. It's bad. You know, it's murder. So, I mean, they'll pay it lip service. But when you talk to them, it's clear that they have no real anger at all.

They don't really feel anything about it. And then they'll go on and they'll launch into a thing about, you know, I don't like how pro-life or sometimes they're too. they're too hateful and they're mean and all this. And they'll start talking about criticizing the methods that pro-lifers are too aggressive or too or too hateful in their approach and they'll be critical of that. They'll say, you know, we've got to be more reasonable. We need it to blah, blah, blah. And a lot of what they're saying is true.

But you realize when you're listening to them, it's easy for them to say that because they have no hatred at all for abortion. They don't have hatred for the people that are getting abortions, which is good. But they also don't have hatred for abortion. They just don't really care that much. They haven't really, they don't feel much about it. And so it's really easy for them to stand off at a distance and say, oh, yeah, don't, you know, you got to be more, be more civil, right? And that's bad.

I think if we have to err, it's better to err on the other side. I think if we have, if we have to air, it's better. to err on the side of having too much hatred for really evil things than not having enough or really any hatred for it. Because when you get on that side, now you're tumbling very close to indifference. And I think indifference is the most dangerous state for a Christian or really any person to be in. And it seems like it's very hard to climb out of indifference because it's a total lack of. It's a, it is a vacuum. There's nothing there. You feel nothing. And I don't, what do you do to generate those feelings of love and hatred and everything else? On the other hand, if you look at

something like abortion or child rape and you're so overcome with anger and fury at this awful, terrible thing, and maybe it's a little overboard because it starts bleeding into you're hating people, you know, that's bad. But it's, it's better to err on that side because then at least there's something there to work with. You've got the right general idea. I mean, you, you see this evil thing and you hate it. You hate it for the right reasons because of what it does to innocent people, and that's all good. And now you, through prayer and discipline, you just have to figure out how to target that more and be more restrained in your response to it. I guess my fear is that in our culture, among Christians and people in general,

we tend to err much more on the other side towards indifference. And it's because of that that we have come to see hatred as this objectively terrible thing that we should never ever do. Because a lot of us are never tempted towards it because we simply feel nothing. And that's a bad sign. All right. I'll leave it there. Thanks for watching everybody. Thanks for listening.

Godspeed.