Today it seems as if being offensive is cause for intolerance.

Last week I read a portion of an address the former provost of Stanford University delivered to the board of trustees of that school. In it, he decried the trend toward intolerance in an academic environment. I found the article because one of my Facebook friends posted a response published in Slate.

If you are unfamiliar with Slate, here’s the Wikepedia description:

Slate is an online liberal / progressive magazine that covers current affairs, politics and culture in the United States.

Given that piece of information, it’s clear what angle the article took in responding to the charge that academic institutions, Stanford University specifically, have become too intolerant. The Slate article, in fact, is titled “In Praise Of Intolerance.”

Yes, you read that correctly: intolerance. The goal, you see, is truth, according to Alan Levinovitz, the author of the article. To make the point, he references hatred and the Holocaust, then this:

Likewise, biologists reject creationism not because it is intolerant of evolution, but because it is wrong. The same is true when immunologists reject vaccine skepticism. White supremacists, creationists, and vaccine skeptics refer to their exclusion from higher education and mainstream media as a form of intolerance. And they’re right—academic institutions are intolerant of their views. Yet we can all agree that Stanford needn’t change its hiring practices. Those who strive to stamp out these dangerous views are intolerant, but justly so. (Emphasis mine).

So, creationism, according to Mr. Levinovitz, is an intolerant view. An offense, you might say. Because that’s what the charge is in these institutions: students are offended when a Christian organization like Interversity, requires that those in student leadership should be Christians. Because, you see, requiring Christian organizations to be run by Christians is apparently discriminatory.

As I recall, Christian student groups have been allowed back onto University of California campuses, but new legislation in the state government came up this past summer affecting private colleges and universities regarding transgender issues. For now the bill has been withdrawn, but the point is clear: as a culture, we are, in the name of tolerance, moving more and more toward intolerance.

Ironically, the document considered the Law of the Land in the United States, contains an amendment insuring that those of us who hold opinions others find intolerant, still have a right to speak.

But Mr. Levinovitz would seem to take the view that those holding “wrong ideas” ought not be allowed to publish them or voice them in a public place like a university campus.

The longtime best-selling book of Christian apologetics—C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity—calls for religious nationalism (“all economists and statesmen should be Christians”) and argues that God wants men to be the head of the household. These are popular ideals, but they are poisonous and deserve fierce resistance, not complacent tolerance.

So the ideas C. S. Lewis espoused, even ones taken out of context, apparently, ought not be tolerated. Was Lewis giving offense? Or are those who disagree with him simply offended because they find his conclusions in contradiction to their own?

The question is, how soon will Lewis be ousted from university bookstores? Will students be able to find copies of the Narnia books or his space trilogy in their libraries? Or in any library, if Mr. Levinovitz’s ideas about intolerance become widely accepted?

And what about the books of today. Should writers strap on the veneer of the tolerant in order to have a chance to be published in the general market? Just recently I heard about a wonderful manuscript that speaks to some of our western society’s raw wounds regarding racism. Can that story break through the barriers of traditional publishing? Unlikely, given the sensitivity with which publishers approach new books.

Christian publishers have their sensitivities, too. They want clean fiction, stories that are not negative toward Christianity, that have an element of faith. They would perhaps be seen as intolerant of stories that contain scenes of promiscuity and language laced with profanity.

Ought general market publishers have tolerance toward, say, transgender issues, but not toward pro-life issues? I suppose those that own those publishing companies can choose which ideas to support and which to label as an offense.

The real question is this: are Christians ready to be marginalized further? Are we preparing to share the gospel regardless of how offensive the culture finds it or how offended people claim to be?

I’ve long said that Christians are not to be offensive in the way we speak, but the Bible itself says the message of the gospel is offensive to those who are perishing. To tell people they are sinners, is offensive. To say that some are saved and some are not, is to appear in the eyes of our culture to be discriminatory. To be hateful. To hold a position that ought not to be tolerated.

The point is, the more Christians withdraw from the culture, the more we fail to engage the offensive questions publicly, the less likely we will be to do so at all in another twenty years.

Are we to outshout those who say the kinds of things Mr. Levinovitz said—that creationism is wrong and not to be tolerated? That’s not the most effective approach, I don’t think, and it’s not the one the Bible endorses.

We are to make disciples, Jesus said before He left earth. We are to go into all the world and preach the gospel. But we are also to live as salt and light.

So I wonder, are Christian novels today shining light? Yes, I realize we, the actual, physical people who follow Christ, are to be salt and light. But how do we show our light if not by what we do and say and think? How do we influence and affect the culture around us, giving flavor and providing the preservative power of the gospel, if not by what we say and write?

In the end, are we an offense to those around us or are they responding, one way or the other, to the truth of God’s word, live out in what we Christians do and say and write?