-Yi En
In today’s culture, words like tolerance, respect, and diversity are often treated as society’s highest virtues. And to be fair, these ideals have played an important role in human history. They have helped societies confront racism, sexism, class discrimination, religious persecution, and other systems that wrongly treated certain groups of people as inferior or less worthy of dignity.
Yet Satan’s strategy has never been to oppose every good thing outright. More often, he takes something good and pushes it beyond its proper boundaries.
That is the danger we face today.
Tolerance can become indulgence. Respect can become moral indifference. Diversity can become the belief that every claim is equally true. Increasingly, we are moving toward a worldview in which no one is allowed to be wrong—and therefore no objective truth is allowed to exist.
The Counterfeit Light
Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).
Because truth leads people to Christ, Satan’s greatest fear is that people would come to know the truth. His strategy, therefore, is not always to attack truth directly, but to obscure it with a convincing substitute.
The Bible warns that “the ‘god of this world’ (Satan) has blinded the minds of unbelievers” (2 Corinthians 4:4). People may sincerely believe they are pursuing justice, compassion, and progress, while failing to recognize when truth itself is being sacrificed.
What we increasingly see today is a demand not merely to respect people, but to affirm ideas regardless of whether they are true. The expectation is no longer, “Treat others with dignity,” but rather, “Accept every claim as equally valid.” Those who refuse are often labeled intolerant, hateful, or discriminatory.
The result is a culture that confuses kindness with agreement and compassion with the abandonment of truth.
When Truth Is Asked to Bow
A widely discussed example occurred at the 2025 Cherry Blossom Open fencing tournament in the United States. A biological male athlete who identified as female competed in a women’s division. Female fencer Stephanie Turner refused to compete, arguing that the category was intended for women. She was subsequently disqualified.
The Bible warned long ago that such a generation would come. “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3-4)
To many observers, the controversy was about more than sports. It reflected a deeper cultural conflict: whether objective reality should yield to personal identity claims.
Regardless of one’s position on the issue, it highlights a growing trend throughout Western society. Similar debates are emerging in schools, media, public policy, and cultural institutions. Increasingly, people are being asked not simply to tolerate differing viewpoints but to affirm them as true.
For Christians, this raises a fundamental question: Can love exists without truth?
Love and Truth Are Not Enemies
During a public debate, Charlie Kirk was asked whether making people feel comfortable and respected should always be the highest priority.
The response he gave was——the way you see the world is through making people comfortable. The way we see the world is through right and wrong, morality and immorality, justice and injustice. We are not concerned with making people comfortable; we are concerned with what is right.
Whether one agrees with every aspect of that statement or not, it highlights an important principle: comfort is not the same thing as love.
If a friend is unknowingly walking toward a cliff, genuine love does not remain silent out of respect for his feelings. Genuine love warns him. Genuine love calls him back.
In the same way, Christians believe that speaking honestly about sin and calling people to repentance is not an act of hostility but an act of love, because eternal realities are at stake.
The Church’s Calling
The Christian faith is built upon the conviction that truth is real because God is real.
God’s holiness, righteousness, and justice are not social constructions or personal preferences. They are objective realities grounded in His character.
When the church abandons truth in the name of acceptance, it loses its God-given identity. Scripture calls the church “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). Its mission is not merely to comfort people but to faithfully proclaim what God has revealed.
A good physician does more than reassure a patient. He diagnoses the disease and provides the necessary treatment. Likewise, Christian love involves both compassion and truth. One without the other is incomplete.
In an age increasingly suspicious of moral certainty, Christians are called to speak the truth humbly, courageously, and lovingly—not because they consider themselves superior, but because they believe God’s truth is life-giving.
The Light Cannot Be Overcome
Darkness has always sought silence truth.
Yet Scripture declares: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
That light is Jesus Christ.
Human beings may reject the truth, mock it, or attempt to suppress it. But truth does not cease to exist because it is unpopular. Light does not stop shining because darkness refuses to acknowledge it.
The hope of the Christian faith is that God’s truth remains unchanged, regardless of cultural trends or public opinion. And that is why Christians continue to proclaim it.
Our world is not without truth.
Our world has truth.
And that truth is found in Jesus Christ.