When Loving People Means Telling Them the Truth

A Thumbs Up Nobody Quite Meant

Picture a family WhatsApp group on a Sunday afternoon. Somebody’s cousin posts a graphic with a sunset on it and a line underneath saying that all religions lead to the same God, and within a minute the thumbs have come in. The aunty who runs the group sends three. A nephew just back from his master’s degree abroad adds a clapping emoji. And one man, who goes to church every week and who has been taught that Jesus is the only way to the Father, reads the line twice and puts his phone face down on the table.

He doesn’t reply. He’s been called intolerant before, at a dinner and once on a bus, and he has noticed that the word works like a verdict. You can’t appeal it. It arrives sounding kind, and the only answer anyone expects from you is an apology. So he does what many of us have done, and he decides the safest opinion he can hold is none at all. He will smile, nod, and keep what he actually believes inside his own head, where it can’t offend anybody.

I’d like to speak to that man, because I think he’s been handed a false choice. He has been told that the Christian options are to approve of everything or to be a bigot, and he has been quietly agreeing to a tidy arrangement that neither Scripture nor common sense supports. The word that sits in the middle of the arrangement is tolerance. It deserves a better hearing than it usually gets, from both sides, and the argument has more than two ends.

What the Word Used to Mean

Words don’t announce when they change. They shift the way a river shifts course over decades, and one morning you look up and the water is somewhere else.

The Bible scholar D. A. Carson, in The Intolerance of Tolerance (2012), argued that this is exactly what has happened to the word. In its older sense, tolerance meant putting up with views you thought were wrong. You let someone hold a belief, say it aloud, and argue for it, and you kept the right to say you thought they were mistaken. That was the point. There was nothing to tolerate if you agreed. In the newer sense, on Carson’s account, the weight has moved from allowing contrary opinions to accepting all of them. In a line quoted by Daniel Snape in his review for The Pneuma Review, Carson describes the shift as one “from allowing the free expression of contrary opinions to the acceptance of all opinions” (Carson, 2012, pp. 3 to 4, as quoted in Snape, 2016).

You can see the difference in public documents. The UNESCO Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, adopted in Paris on 16 November 1995, begins by saying that “Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures,” and the sentence goes on from there. In the next clause, it adds something that I’d like Christians and their critics to read together: “Tolerance is not concession, condescension or indulgence.” So even the most official definition of the word keeps a line between respecting a person and agreeing with everything the person says.

Nigerians are better placed than most to understand why the older meaning matters. Section 38 of our constitution gives every person freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to change his religion or belief, and to “manifest and propagate” it in worship, teaching, practice and observance. Look at what that sentence protects. It protects a Muslim’s right to call people to Islam and a Christian’s right to call people to Christ, and it protects a person’s right to say no to both. Nobody in that sentence is required to agree with anybody. They are required to let each other speak, and to live in the same country afterwards. That is the old tolerance, written into law, and I’d defend it against all comers.

The Best Case for Calling Us Intolerant

Before I say what I think is wrong with the new meaning, I owe it a fair hearing, because the person who holds it is not stupid and often not unkind.

Here is how I think such a person would put it, and I hope she’d say yes, that’s my view. You tell me every human being is made in God’s image, and I believe you mean it. But then you tell my brother his relationship is a sin, or my friend that her religion is false, and what I hear underneath the kindness is a ranking. In my experience, “I’m only telling you the truth” has too often been the sentence that comes before a door closing. People have been sent out of family gatherings with it, and out of churches, and in some places out of their lives. And in this country we have buried far too many neighbours who were killed by people who were perfectly certain they were right. When I ask you to tolerate everything, I’m asking for peace. I’m not trying to destroy your faith. I’m trying to get everybody home alive.

I think that is a serious position, and parts of it are simply correct. Christians have used the truth as a weapon, and some of us have enjoyed it. The fear of religious violence in Nigeria is not an invention, and the people who carried it out did not all belong to one faith. A church that answers this with a lecture on logic deserves the contempt it gets.

But the argument has a weak joint in it, and it’s the place where peace and agreement are treated as the same thing. They aren’t. Peace comes from restraint, and Nigerians have learned over a long and bloody history that it can survive a very great deal of disagreement. It cannot survive one side deciding that the other has no right to hold its view. The new tolerance, by asking for applause, makes the same mistake from the other direction. And it is worth noticing how quickly it turns hard on anyone who won’t clap, so that the loudest calls for tolerance sometimes come attached to the least patience for a person who says I disagree.

Patience Is a Fruit and Approval Is Not

Paul gives a list in his letter to the Galatians, and it is a good place to check what the Spirit actually produces.

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,”

— Galatians 5:22 (ESV)

The verse carries on into gentleness and self control. Look through the list and tolerance isn’t on it, in either meaning. Patience is. That is a different word, and I think it is closer to what the old tolerance was reaching for. Patience is the capacity to bear with a difficult person for a long time without giving up on them. Paul uses the idea again when he tells the Colossians what to do with each other.

“bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other;”

— Colossians 3:13 (ESV)

Notice that the verse takes it for granted that there is a complaint. Bearing with someone presupposes that something about them is hard to bear, and the apostle doesn’t ask us to pretend otherwise. We are asked to stay in the room, to keep forgiving, and to stay patient with the person while continuing to say, when it’s time, that something is wrong. This is more costly than applause. It’s easy to affirm a stranger, and it’s much harder to put up with a difficult uncle for thirty years.

So when a friend tells me that a Christian ought to be tolerant, I’m happy to agree, as long as we’re clear which tolerance we mean. If you mean bearing with people, listening to them, defending their right to speak and to worship, sitting at the same table and refusing to treat them as enemies, then yes, and Jesus was more tolerant than most of us. He was accused of eating with sinners, which is exactly what the Pharisees said of him in Luke 15. If you mean approving of every belief and calling every road the same road, then no. That isn’t on Paul’s list and it isn’t love. Love doesn’t need me to believe everything you believe. It needs me to stay.

Where Jesus Was Not Gentle

It would be dishonest to stop there, because the gospels show Jesus saying things that no public relations adviser would have signed off on. In Matthew 15 the Pharisees complain that his disciples don’t wash their hands in the way the elders required, and Jesus answers that they have set aside the commandment of God for the sake of their tradition. The disciples are worried. They come to him afterwards with the kind of nervous question that Nigerian families know very well, the one that begins Sir, do you realise that they are offended?

“Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?”

— Matthew 15:12 (ESV)

He doesn’t apologise. He says this.

“Let them alone; they are blind guides. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

— Matthew 15:14 (ESV)

There’s a physician’s directness in that, and I don’t think it is cruelty. It’s what a doctor does when he has read the scan and decides not to talk about the weather. But I should add that the offence was never the aim. Jesus didn’t wake up looking for people to upset, and he spent far more of his time with the broken than with the proud. The offence was what happened when the truth entered a room that had been furnished with comfortable stories. John the Baptist lost his life for telling a king the truth about his marriage (Mark 6:17 to 18). James was put to the sword by Herod (Acts 12:2). Neither man was killed for rudeness.

The one place in the New Testament where tolerate is used as a charge is worth reading with care, because it’s often stretched further than it goes. In the letter to the church at Thyatira, the risen Christ says this.

“But I have this against you, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess and is teaching and seducing my servants to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols.”

— Revelation 2:20 (ESV)

That is a rebuke of a church for what it allowed inside itself. A teacher inside the congregation was leading Christians into immorality and idol feasts, and the elders had let her carry on. It isn’t a verse about how we should treat our unbelieving neighbours, and nobody should use it as one. What it does show is that the risen Christ can hold a church responsible for its silence. A congregation can be so anxious not to give offence that it stops teaching altogether, and that, too, is a failure of love. A pastor who has noticed that the whole village is following a false road and says nothing because the village is friendly has not shown kindness. He has avoided an awkward conversation.

Two Anglican Answers in 2026

If this all sounds like a tidy argument for the classroom, look at what happened in the Anglican Communion this year, because it shows how hard the question is for people who love both truth and one another, and who take both seriously.

In March 2026, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) met in Abuja from the third to the sixth of the month. According to a report by Joseph Maina for Religion Unplugged, 436 delegates from 48 countries attended, and they dissolved the group’s Primates’ Council and set up a new Global Anglican Council, with Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda as its first chair. The movement had announced in October 2025 that it no longer recognised the traditional structures of the Communion as authoritative. Mbanda criticised the appointment of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury, saying that Canterbury had “chosen a leader who will further divide an already split Communion.” The wider dispute goes back to the Church of England’s decision in 2023 to allow blessings for same sex couples.

A few weeks later, on 25 March, Mullally was installed at Canterbury Cathedral, with, according to the Episcopal News Service, twenty six Anglican primates in attendance. She said she would work to “break down the walls that divide us.”

I’m not using this to settle the dispute, and I don’t think a short essay could. What I notice is that both sides believe they are acting out of love. As I understand the Abuja position, a communion that cannot say what Scripture teaches is not united in anything worth the name, and walking apart is the honest alternative to pretending. As I understand the Canterbury position, walking apart is itself a failure to bear with one another, and a family that leaves the table has given up on the one thing it was called to do. Both can quote Paul. Both have been hurt by the other. And a slogan about tolerance helps neither of them, because each side is using the word to mean something the other would not recognise.

What helps, I think, is a question that comes before the doctrine, and it’s the question the rest of this essay is about. Whatever you believe is true, how do you say it to a person you actually love?

What Truth Costs the One Who Tells It

This is where I think the usual argument turns. We’ve been asking whether Christians are allowed to say hard things, and the honest answer is yes, they have to. But the better question is whether we’ve earned the right to be believed.

Think about what we trust in ordinary life. If a doctor knows the growth is malignant and says nothing, we call it negligence. If a friend knows the bridge is out and waves you cheerfully towards it, we call it betrayal. Nobody calls either of them tolerant. And yet if a stranger leans out of a passing car to shout that you’re going to hell, we don’t call him loving either. We call him loud. What separates the doctor from the shouter is not the content of the message. It’s that one of them has been in the room with you, has read your file, and will still be there tomorrow.

The proverb has it exactly.

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.”

— Proverbs 27:6 (ESV)

The wound is faithful because it comes from a friend. Take the friendship away and the same words are just a wound. And take the wound away and what remains is a very large number of kisses, and they come from an enemy, the writer says, because someone who will only ever flatter you has stopped caring where you end up. The new tolerance is a great deal of kissing. The shouted verdict from a passing car is a great deal of wounding. Neither is what Paul had in mind when he told the Ephesians what a grown up church does.

“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,”

— Ephesians 4:15 (ESV)

The phrase is not speaking truth, and also being nice. It’s truth spoken in love, and for that you have to be there. You have to know the person’s name and their children’s names and where the pain is. You have to be willing to drive to the hospital. That is why I distrust both the church that will say nothing to anyone and the Christian who treats every conversation as a chance to score.

Stories of a certain kind get told in churches, and I’d treat them as scenes and not as records, because I can’t trace this one to a source. Picture a young man whose car breaks down at night. A teenager stops, gives him a lift, and says within the first minute that if he isn’t a Christian he is going to hell. The young man nearly asks to be dropped at the roadside, but it’s a long walk in the dark, so he stays. Years later he comes to faith, and he says the blunt question is what stayed with him. If that happened, I’m glad for him. But I’d be careful what I learn from it. For every young man who is eventually grateful to the stranger in the car, there must be many more who were simply driven away and never came back, and we never hear their side. Truth does sometimes arrive without manners and still find its mark. It would be a strange policy to plan for that.

The Sentence Nobody Can Soften

None of this lets us off the hook about the thing that makes the world most uncomfortable with us. In the upper room, the night before his death, Jesus said this.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

— John 14:6 (ESV)

There’s no softer reading of this that does justice to the words. It does not say that Jesus is one good teacher among several, or that every road leads up the same mountain. It says that he is the way. I’d rather say that plainly than offer a gentler version of it that I’d have to defend later to my own conscience.

But look at what sort of claim it is. It’s a claim about a person. It isn’t a ranking of cultures or a verdict on anybody’s grandmother. A Muslim neighbour who holds that the final revelation came through the Prophet is making an exclusive claim as well, and I would never ask him to stop, because that’s what it is to hold a faith and not a hobby. What I’d ask of both of us is what the constitution asks, that we let each other make the claim aloud, listen to the reasons, and go on being neighbours. The Christian who believes John 14:6 has no need to hate or to hurry anyone. If anything, the claim tells him he’s in no position to take the credit for any of it, because he didn’t find the door. He was shown it, and shown it by someone who was not ashamed to sit with him.

I find that this changes the tone. A person who thinks he has won an argument tends to sound triumphant. A person who thinks he has been rescued tends to sound like someone who knows what the water was like.

A Word to the Man With His Phone Face Down

Go back to the family group chat. The thumbs are still coming in, and the man at the table has been staring at the screen for a while.

I’d like to suggest that he has more options than a thumbs up or a sermon. He could write something short and warm, the way you’d talk to a person you’ve known all your life. He might say that he doesn’t agree that all religions say the same thing, that he’d love to talk about it over a meal, and that he’s not going anywhere. Or he might say nothing in the group, and ring the cousin afterwards. What he shouldn’t do is bury the conviction for the sake of a quiet Sunday, because the people in that chat are the very ones to whom he owes it.

You may be this man. If you’ve been called intolerant one time too many, I hope you can hear that the discomfort you feel isn’t a defect in your faith. Some of it is the ordinary friction of holding a belief in company that doesn’t hold it. Do not go looking for offence, and don’t be afraid of it either. Be the kind of person who is patient with people for decades, who can be trusted with their secrets and their grief, and who can therefore be heard on the day you finally say the hard thing.

Say it slowly. Say it to someone you’d be willing to sit up with all night. And if you can’t think of a person you’d do that for, then start there, because you have found the first thing the truth needs from you.

References

Biblical References

Proverbs 27:6 (ESV). The epigraph, and the verse that grounds the argument that truth needs friendship to be heard and that flattery is a kind of neglect.
Galatians 5:22 (ESV). The fruit of the Spirit includes patience, and the list contains no word for approval of every belief.
Colossians 3:13 (ESV). Bearing with one another presupposes a complaint; patience is staying in the room.
Matthew 15:12 to 14 (ESV). Jesus answers the Pharisees’ offence with a plain diagnosis; used to show that truth sometimes offends without being unkind.
Mark 6:17 to 18 (paraphrased). John the Baptist confronts Herod about his marriage.
Acts 12:2 (paraphrased). James killed by Herod; used with John the Baptist to show the cost of speaking plainly.
Luke 15:1 to 2 (paraphrased). The Pharisees accuse Jesus of eating with sinners; Jesus’ welcome as the model of patience.
Revelation 2:20 (ESV). The church at Thyatira rebuked for tolerating a teacher who led others into immorality and idolatry; read as a charge about what a church allows within itself.
Ephesians 4:15 (ESV). Truth spoken in love as the way a church grows; used to show that the two cannot be separated.
John 14:6 (ESV). The exclusive claim of Christ, treated as a claim about a person.

Other Sources

Carson, D. A. (2012). The intolerance of tolerance. Eerdmans. (Cited as quoted in Snape, 2016.)
Episcopal News Service. (2026, March 25). Anglican leaders gather for installation of Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally. https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2026/03/25/anglican-leaders-gather-for-installation-of-archbishop-of-canterbury-sarah-mullally/
Federal Republic of Nigeria. (1999). Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, section 38 (as amended). Text consulted at Nigerian Constitution. https://nigerian-constitution.com/?p=519
Maina, J. (2026, March 11). Conservative Anglicans reshape church leadership at historic Nigeria gathering. Religion Unplugged. https://religionunplugged.com/news/global-conservative-anglicans-reshape-church-leadership-at-historic-nigeria-gathering
Snape, D. P. (2016, June 7). D. A. Carson: The intolerance of tolerance [Book review]. The Pneuma Review. https://pneumareview.com/d-a-carson-the-intolerance-of-tolerance/
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. (1995). Declaration of Principles on Tolerance. Text consulted at the University of Minnesota Human Rights Library. https://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/decl-tol.html

Translation Notices

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.