Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of

unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

And perhaps no one's in a better position to challenge the reductive notion of love being mere tolerance than someone

who has gone through the whole experience of what's called detransitioning.

At our most recent Lighthouse Voices event, a collaboration between Focusing the Family and the Colston Center,

Laura Perry Smaltz addressed the idea that in the name of tolerance

Christians should use a person's preferred pronouns and only say and do that which would never offend them and should be superficially sensitive.

The temptation to reduce love to only those actions and words that steer clear of offense is like all lies rooted in a half truth.

In 1st Corinthians 13, Paul describes love as being patient and kind, not arrogant or rude, not

irritable or resentful.

He also exhorts in another place, if possible, as far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

And yet, while love isn't less the mean kind and peaceable, it certainly is more.

Love requires that we tell the truth.

In that same 1st Corinthians 13 passage, Paul tells us that love does not insist on its own

way.

In other words, it insist on God's way.

And more clearly, Paul states that love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

In fact, once the foundations of truth and morality are brought into the equation of what love means,

it's clear that the constant pressure these days to be

tolerant, which as many have pointed out is ironically intolerant, is just really

a pressure to conform to the world, something else that Paul warned against.

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