The Tolerance Trap.

How the myth of moral neutrality is ruining America

We’re all religious. We just aren’t all honest about which religion we follow.

Some bow at the altar of Christ. Others at the altar of self. But everyone (consciously or not) organizes their moral life around something. And the refusal to admit that doesn’t make you more neutral. It just makes you less honest.

In modern America, the dominant religion may no longer be Christianity. If we are being honest, it is probably expressive individualism, the belief that your desires define you, and that moral legitimacy is found in living “your truth.” A world where we no longer believe in limits on desire.

But here's the problem. That world does not exist in real life. We may pretend to be limitlessly tolerant, but every society draws lines. We all have moral boundaries. We all declare some things right and others wrong.

You Can’t Govern Without Drawing Lines

Try it. Try building a society that claims to be morally neutral, completely untethered from any religious vision of right and wrong. Now explain why people shouldn’t be able to use any drug they want. Or marry seven people—or themselves. Or walk into a clinic and ask to be euthanized on demand. What will you appeal to?

Once you reject all moral authority outside yourself, the best you can offer is: “it just feels wrong.” But feelings change. And if that is the only boundary, then everything becomes negotiable–bound to change with every person.

That’s why the question isn’t whether we draw moral lines. It’s where, why, and on whose authority.

We All Draw Lines—And We Keep Redrawing Them

These lines are far from fixed. Competing moral ideologies have reconfigured them multiple times in just the past few decades:

• Marijuana: Is it a medicine, a vice, or a right? We can’t seem to decide.

• Alcohol: If it’s not a drug, why restrict it? If it is, why is it celebrated? And how young is too young?

• Pornography: Adult free expression or something to be restricted and kept away from children?

• Transgender ideology: Is it liberation or is it irreversible mutilation? Do children need protection, or affirmation?

• Abortion: Is this about bodily autonomy or are we ending a human life?

• Marriage: Once a covenant between a man and a woman, now redefined to mean almost anything or nothing at all. Is divorce a tragedy or just a reset? Is adultery morally relevant to fault and custody or a private matter of free expression?

• Euthanasia: In some states, you can already request to die “with dignity.” We’re now debating how far society must go in helping you do it.

Far from sliding smoothly forward into progress. We’re convulsing. Being tossed back and forth between instincts we inherited and ideologies we barely understand. As you can see, just in the span of our own lives, the moral lines have moved dramatically.

That’s the point: We’re not a culture that has figured out right and wrong.
We’re a culture that’s still arguing about it and changing our answers in real time. And every time a line is erased, someone redrew it. Every time a boundary is lifted, someone’s vision of morality won the day.

We Derive Our Lines from Somewhere

Some people draw their lines from the Bible. Others draw them from the latest activist movement, their therapist, or friend group. But no one is living without lines. And no one comes up with them in a vacuum.

What you believe about morality is deeply shaped by who (or what) you worship.
That’s why expressive individualism isn’t neutral. It’s a religion. It demands adherence, penance, and sacrifice. And it punishes heresy, sometimes with child sacrifice. Don’t believe me? Take Colorado for example: parents can now lose custody of their child if they don’t affirm the child’s chosen gender identity. Think about that. The state has decided that misalignment with its new gender creed is justification for taking your child. You don’t get more dogmatic than that.

You’re Eating the Fruit But Denying the Tree

They say hypocrisy is vice’s nod to virtue. Nowhere is this more evident than with the people who reject religion but try to cling to its social leftovers. They appeal to “human rights” and “equal justice” but don’t want to ask where those ideas came from.

I hate to ruin it for you: they came from Christianity.

From the founding of this nation to nearly every righteous rights revolution from abolition, to child labor reform, to civil rights, protections for the unborn, and the pushback against gender ideology, the engine of moral reform has been explicitly Christian.

It was the doctrine of Imago Dei, that all people are made in the image of God, that broke the back of slavery and has long grounded the idea of human dignity. You won’t find that in the evolutionary record. And you won’t get there through sentiment alone.

When you remove that foundation, you’re not “progressing.” You’re eating the fruit of a moral system whose roots you’ve severed.

The Ghost of Rome: Walls Still Standing, Morals in Ruins

Augustine’s City of God warned of a people who had inherited greatness but failed to recognize its source. As the Roman Empire crumbled, the world watched in sorrow. “Even the eastern nations bewail your ruin,” Augustine wrote, “and powerful states in the most remote parts of the earth mourn your fall as a public calamity.” But the Roman people didn’t mourn they crowded into theaters, obsessed with entertainment, and blind to their decline.

“He did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals are in ruins. … Depraved by good fortune and not chastened by adversity, you desire not the peace of a just commonwealth, but the impunity of your own vicious luxury. … You have missed the profit of your calamity; you have been made most wretched—and remained most profligate.”
—Augustine, City of God

The warning could not be clearer: a society can inherit something beautiful and squander it in a single generation. When we forget where our values came from, when we refuse to acknowledge the moral and spiritual inheritance that built our institutions, we become like Rome in its final days. The walls may still stand. The symbols remain. The holidays are observed, the language preserved, and the institutions still bearing the old names. But inside, the soul is gone. Hollow and dying.

This Isn’t Theocracy. It’s Moral Alignment.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” - John Adams

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a call to force belief or mandate worship. It’s an appeal to acknowledge a simple truth: that no free society can survive without shared moral commitments. Freedom, in the American tradition, has never meant moral chaos. It has always assumed some degree of moral consensus, some grounding in truths that do not change with every cultural whim.

You don’t have to share my faith. But if you want to live in a nation that works, one that protects the weak, restrains the powerful, upholds justice, and fosters human dignity, you do have to live in alignment with the values that made such a society possible in the first place. These values are not random. They didn’t arise from emotion or evolve out of instinct. They were taught, practiced, and passed down, by explicitly Christian families, churches, lawgivers and teachers who believed that truth was something to be discovered, not invented.

Every society runs on a moral operating system. The only question is which one we will choose. Will we embrace a vision rooted in restraint, sacrifice, truth, and service? Or one that honors the self over everything else? A culture that elevates appetite, demands entitlement, and encourages everyone to become their own moral authority.

Only one of those visions can hold a society together. The other will eventually tear it apart.

So Let’s Be Honest

You are not tolerant. You have your lines. So do I.

You may not trace yours to a pulpit or a creed, but it came from somewhere. You didn’t invent it. Whether you recognize it or not, your views on justice, dignity, human worth, and harm were shaped by traditions, stories, and beliefs handed down before you.

The real debate is not whether we bring morality or religion into politics. That has always been part of public life. The debate is about whose moral framework will guide us. Whose values will shape our laws. Whose vision of the good will be taught, defended, and passed on.

If we remain silent (if we are too afraid to name what we believe to be true) others will not hesitate to name their truth. And they will enshrine it in policy, in courts, and in culture.

There is no such thing as neutrality. There never was.

- Josh