Truth is relative. Only narrow-minded bigots believe in absolute truth!

There is a decent instinct underneath this, since people who talk about absolute truth have sometimes used it as a club. But the sentence as written destroys itself, and it does so in a way that is worth walking through slowly.

1. Stated absolutely, it refutes itself. If truth is always relative to the person, then the claim that truth is relative is only true for the person saying it, and the rest of us may disregard it. If instead it is meant to be true for everyone, then it is an absolute claim, the very thing it denies. Either it is a private preference or it is self-contradictory.

2. Everyone already lives by absolutes. Two plus two equals four. A statement cannot be both true and false in the same sense at the same time. You cannot deny either without using them in the denial. So the real question is not whether absolute truth exists. It is which truths are absolute, and that is a discussion worth having.

3. The insult is itself an absolute. Only narrow-minded bigots believe in absolute truth is a universal moral verdict on an entire class of people, delivered with total confidence and no hedging. It is an absolute claim that absolute claims are bigotry. The sentence is doing precisely what it forbids, which suggests the rule was never meant to apply to the person stating it.

4. Relativism cannot condemn real evil. If morality is only cultural preference, then slavery was not truly wrong. It was merely unfashionable, and the abolitionists were not righteous but merely on the winning side of a taste change. Isaiah pronounces woe on those who call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). Most people, including most relativists, find that conclusion intolerable, and the instinct is worth trusting.

5. Tolerance is a moral absolute too. What relativism usually means in practice is be tolerant, which is a universal rule about how everyone should behave toward everyone else. Relativism has no universal rules, so it cannot ground the one rule its defenders care about most. The ethic survives only by borrowing from the absolutism it denies.

6. Conviction is not coercion. Being convinced something is true is not bigotry. A doctor who insists on a diagnosis is not being narrow-minded. What makes an act wrong is how we treat people, not how confident we are. You can hold a belief firmly and still listen, admit what you do not know, and treat your critic as a person rather than a target. Peter's instruction is to give a reason for the hope in you with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15-16), which is a command about method, not about lowering your confidence.

7. Truth is a person, not a power. Jesus says, I am the way, and the truth, and the life (John 14:6), and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8:32). On the Christian view truth is not a club for subduing people. It is the thing that releases them, which is why the New Testament ties it to love rather than to victory.

8. Moral reform needs a standard above culture. The movements that ended slavery and segregation argued that the old order was actually wrong, not merely different. They appealed to a standard their own culture had not yet accepted, which is exactly what relativism forbids. It is no accident that the great reformers of the West were, in the main, religious believers.

9. The objection is often morally serious. People who say truth is relative are frequently reacting to genuine arrogance, to religious people who used absolute claims to wound others. That complaint has force and Christians should hear it rather than merely refute it. The remedy for bad use of a truth claim is better use, not the abolition of truth.

Relativism as a slogan is unlivable and self-defeating: it cannot condemn atrocity, it cannot ground tolerance, and it exempts only itself from its own rule. The choice is not between certainty and humility. It is between claims you are willing to test and claims you are not.

Sources: Gregory Koukl and Francis Beckwith, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air; C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Stand to Reason.

Related challenges:
• So I’m to believe in a God who is one and three at the same time, with one of the three killing another of the three and then sending another of the three to console humans about how to go on in the absence of the other two!? Why not just Allah instead?
• If I were raised in India, I’d most likely be a Hindu. You would be a Muslim if raised in Saudi Arabia. Is it ‘fair and just’ of God to have billions of people’s eternal destinies determined by “God’s Divinely ordained” place of birth?
• How do Christians respond to eastern systems of thought such as Buddhism and Hinduism?