Some thoughts on tolerance, judgment and pants at church

Judge Not That Ye Be Not Judged


Christ said don’t judge. But don’t judge what? This isn’t obvious. He clearly didn’t mean don’t judge anyone or anything. Such a statement would preclude us from judging whether he is Christ, which leaves us in a sort of liar’s paradox. So what can we judge? Ideas? Policies? People? Actions? Distances (note that half my family has lost an eye, and this gets rather tricky)? We can clarify this with some definitions, starting first with tolerance.

Relation Between Tolerance and Judgment

Judgment is to tolerance what covetousness is to theft. Pure judgment, like covetousness, is a mental exercise. But tolerance, like theft, is action; it’s the manifestation of the mental exercise. In other words, you can’t be passively intolerant, because doing nothing is the very definition of tolerating something.

This distinction is useful because we can see that intolerance is always the harsher manifestation of judgment. So if it’s okay to be intolerant of something, it’ll be okay to cast judgment on it. So we’ve reworked our question into, “What is it okay to be intolerant of?” To answer that, we have to define tolerance.

Defining Tolerance

Because tolerance is a question of action, I define it to mean allowing something to exist without hindering it, or, in other words, not fighting against it. So our original question—what can we judge?—is answered by asking what should we tolerate, which is another way of asking what should we fight against. This makes the issue much more clear. Of course we can and should try to stop bad ideas. We can also fight against bad policy and bad arguments. But what about bad people?

Christ was pretty clear that we should be kind to each other, which is hard to reconcile with the idea that we should fight each other. But people aren’t so clear cut. We sometimes say we aren’t fighting against the person, just the person’s attributes or just his actions. So let’s tackle that.

Intolerance of Attributes

There are two types of attributes: those you can change and those you can’t. Those you can change includes how well you play the piano and how rude you are. Those you can’t change includes things like your race and your birthplace.

It seems obvious that we shouldn’t fight against someone’s unchangeable attributes. Your fight will never end with them changing those attributes, so in addition to being cruel, you’re picking a losing battle. In short, if it can’t be changed, tolerance is necessary.

I see no problem fighting against changeable attributes. The trick is that this fight will be misaimed and ineffective if it's percevied as targeting the person. So while there's nothing wrong with fighting these attributes, or being intolerant of them, it's a fine line to walk if you take that route. It becomes more tricky because it's often difficult to delineate between an action, an attribute and a person.

Intolerance and Judgment Revisited

This is why you're probably better off attacking these things in the abstract, rather than when they are applied by a given person. And while it's okay to fight against meanness, we err if we think that allows us to judge someone as mean.  At that point, we're judging the person again.

You shouldn’t attack someone for being mean, rude or, my favorite, judgmental because you don’t actually know whether they are. You may be misreading the situation or you may be seeing an unrepresentative sample of their behavior. For example, in the first case, someone that cuts you off on the freeway may not be rude, but may instead be delivering a baby in the backseat. Likewise, it wouldn’t be accurate to call the world’s most courteous driver a rude person because he cut you off once. So because we don’t know the full story and because we don’t have a large enough sample, we can’t judge someone’s attributes. So Christ’s commandment not to judge is a practical way to avoid sticking your foot in your mouth by speaking based on incomplete information.

Pants!!!

In short, I don't care if you wear pants to church, but I think the idea of protesting at church is stupid, and that doesn't make me judgmental in any bad way. If it's not a protest, but a show of love to those that feel isolated, I wonder if we'll have more women in pants than women doing their visiting teaching this Sunday, and I wonder if we aren't just reinforcing divisions.