The Christian Solution

Secular Pluralism posits that people are essentially good who simply need to be educated in order to live a life of tolerance. Christianity asserts that people are broken--that relationships with God and with people and with the stuff of our lives has all gone wrong. So of course, the Christian solution to the problem is not just education but reconciliation, which leads to love.

The Scriptures capture the essence of this reconciliation wondrously in many places, but this one particularly sings:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. -1 Corinthians 5:17-21

This reconciliation, the restoring of right relationships first with God and secondly with everyone and everything else, is the universally necessary work that is available to all. It does not negate the need for or value of education, but it does supercede it. It is the first and most important work.

The Spirit of Activism and Justice is at work to make relationships right, to reconcile relationships anywhere and everywhere they have become broken, disfigured, maimed and then systemized in laws, customs, cultural norms.

It is this reconciliation that restores right relationships in every direction that then frees people up to love one another. And love is a higher virtue than mere tolerance.