One of the most central commands given by Jesus of Nazareth in the Bible is to “love your enemies.” But if this is true, why does it seem like we seldom see this in practice among Christians, especially those who actively articulate their faith in terms of culture war and Christian nationalism? Dan tackles these issues in this episode, decode Christian understandings of what “love of enemies” does, and doesn’t mean, for the Christians who appeal to it.
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Hello and welcome to the podcast series "It's in the Code", part of the podcast "Straight White American Jesus".
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm a professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am your host.
And as always, Straight White American Jesus is offered in partnership with the CAP Center, UCSB, We thank them for their support.
Thank all of you who listen.
Those of you who support us financially.
Those of you who support us by suffering through all the ads.
Those of you who support us by emailing us and contacting us and giving us feedback and great ideas for topics.
Before we dive into today's topic, I want to just remind folks, take a look around at the Denver event we have coming up here in just a little more than two weeks now from the time of this recording.
Great lineup looking at Christian nationalism, and especially in the aftermath of the elections that will have taken place by then.
We've been plugging this on the podcast.
We've been plugging this on the series.
I don't want to repeat all of that, but just to remind folks, If you can't be there in person in Denver, you can certainly be there virtually.
We're going to be live streaming the event.
People can also access it after the event.
So just want to let people know that that is an option.
So please check that out if you're able.
So diving into today's topic, I wanted to hit a theme, another theme that a lot of people reached out to me about over time.
And again, this is a series that is driven by you.
This is a series that is driven by people contacting me and saying, here's something to talk about, or here's something that bothers me, or here's something that drives me nuts, or whatever it is.
And reaching out, and please keep doing that, danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com is how you can reach me.
And again, I'll keep doing this series as long as people find it useful, as long as I hear from folks saying that it is resonating with them, as long as people keep the ideas coming.
So please do keep those coming to me.
What I want to tackle this time is another theme that, again, people have reached out to me about, but I think it may be sort of more pressing as we come to election time.
Maybe this is why I feel like there's been sort of an uptick in interest.
And basically, it's the Christian command to love your enemies.
And this is on the mouth of Jesus of Nazareth in the New Testament, the command to love your enemies, understood by many to be sort of one of the most fundamental teachings of the Christian tradition.
And I guess the question that I get from people is, why, if this is maybe one of the only Christian teachings that everybody knows, right?
Not just Christians, not just people who read the Bible, not just people who believe the Bible is quote-unquote literally true or whatever, but people of all stripes know this, and they will say, why is it that Christian seems so judgmental and that politically culture war and Christian nationalism plays such a role built on xenophobia and Islamophobia and queer and anti-trans animus and all this other stuff.
Why Why?
Just why?
If they're commanded to love their quote-unquote enemies, why is this not something that we see more of?
And I also hear from people who have years worth of sort of anger built over this.
People, again, who grew up in the church hearing this command but seeing something different or hearing evasions of this command.
We're going to talk about those.
Or, you know, people who have left and they left because of this, because they were angry that there was this fundamental teaching of Christianity that in their experience just wasn't lived out.
And so I wanted to tackle this.
And in this case, you know, we talk about, obviously, the series is called It's in the Code.
We talk about decoding certain Christian language, and we're going to do some of that today.
But in many ways, this is one of those that's less about getting to a hidden code, than it is understanding the evasions that very often structure Christian experience and practice that allow people to avoid this command.
So, the first thing to think about as we started this, as we dive into it, is that this is a really long historical pattern.
This is nothing new.
In fact, this is one of the most defining features of, certainly, Western Christianity.
When I teach students about global religious traditions, I often emphasize that there's always a kind of gap between, say, the textbook description of the traditions and the way that they play out in practice.
And a great example of this is Buddhism, which the sort of popular conception of Buddhism is that it's peace loving and it's all about compassion and so forth.
And there are certainly many, many, many, many, many Buddhists who practice in this way.
But it can lead to a disconnect when we look at something like, for example, what has gone on in Myanmar and the effects of Buddhist nationalism in the extreme violence undertaken against Muslim minorities.
And I often Bump into students and other people who experience real confusion about this.
How can a tradition that says it's built on compassion and so forth possibly support these kinds of things?
And the short answer is that you have to look at what traditions actually do, not just what they purport to teach or what their scriptures say or something like that.
We find the same issue within Christianity.
Early in its history, relatively speaking, right?
A tradition that's over 2,000 years old.
Early in its history, Christianity becomes an imperial religion.
It becomes the religion in the West of the Roman Empire.
And it never looks back.
Western Christianity has, since that time, been the religion of those in power.
And from that time on, I think most outside observers would say that the command to love your enemies If we're talking about the sort of meta-level, the big level, the church-at-large, church-as-imperial-power, states operating as quote-unquote Christian states and so forth, I think we can be safe to say that the command to love your enemies, the practice of loving enemies, has hardly shaped the tradition at all.
It really has not been a prominent theme.
And one reason for this is that it's in the code of Christianity itself.
To focus on quote-unquote eternal salvation, to focus on the saving of souls.
We've talked about this a lot in the podcast, the main podcast, but the notion that for most Christians in most of history, there's been this idea that yes, all humans have equal spiritual value before God, and salvation is about saving souls.
But when it comes to this world, the material world, physical embodied world, There's sort of a dual order, and so there's not necessarily a disconnect between what we do to people or how we think of people here and now versus the kind of relation we might have to them in eternity when our souls, our disembodied souls, are all living together with God and so forth.
There's also a logic that can make the fighting of enemies a kind of purifying endeavor, something that's done for their own good, like a sense of disciplining them or correcting them, paradoxically bringing them to God through conquest and so forth.
And if that idea sounds strange to you, I would just say just Read the Bible.
The Bible is full of images and commands for violence against the enemies of God, often for ultimately redemptive purposes.
So, that logic serves the interests of imperial and state power very, very well.
So, the typical Christian pattern, historically speaking, Has not been to show quote-unquote love of enemies, but to exercise violence against the perceived enemies of Christianity.
Now, have there been exceptions to that?
Yes, obviously.
Have there been counter traditions within Christianity that contest that approach?
Yes, certainly there have.
But the dominant pattern is, it's a very human pattern of violence against one's enemies.
And I would argue that those exceptions stand out as exceptional precisely because of that typical pattern.
Okay, so we've got that.
Great, Dan, that's cool.
That's interesting.
Thanks for putting your professor hat on.
What about Christians today?
What about the Christians I'm going to run into today?
What about the Christians I'm going to see on the internet when I'm catching up on the news and I see them decrying the open borders or screaming in the face of Black Lives Matter protesters or storming the Capitol on J6 or whatever?
What about them?
Okay.
The first thing to note, and this is an obvious point, kind of relates to the other one, the point we just made, is that hate or animosity aimed at those that we consider to be not like us, to be our quote-unquote enemies, it's not limited to Christians.
Unfortunately, it's a fundamental human trait, and it is present across party lines, across national lines, across religious traditions.
Part of being human is defining who is like us and who is not like us and perceiving the people that are not like us as a threat in the construction of enemies.
That's a human trait.
But here's the issue.
Not all people are commanded to love their enemies within their religious tradition.
So let's turn to the Christians who are commanded to do that, whose self-understanding would say, Jesus of Nazareth commands us to love our enemies.
The first thing to note, and I want to be really clear about this, it is not only conservative evangelicals who demonize and oppose their enemies.
This is a pattern that runs across American Christianity.
And for a good view of this, see PRRI's recent American Values Survey.
Public Religious Research Institute, PRRI, puts out these American Values Surveys periodically and kind of looks at pressing issues.
And this one looks at issues like views toward views about religious pluralism and diversity in the U.S.
and different issues like this.
And what it finds out is that within American Christianity generally, and especially among white Christians, There are negative attitudes toward non-Americans.
There are negative attitudes about increasing diversity within the U.S.
There are negative attitudes about religious pluralism.
They are all pronounced more among white Protestants than any other religious group within the U.S.
Okay?
So it's not just conservative Protestants.
It's also mainline Protestants.
It's also Catholic Protestants.
Okay?
But within those, They are more pronounced among conservative white Protestants.
That's not just me saying this.
It's not just me wanting to attack conservative white Protestants or evangelicals or whatever.
There are mountains of social scientific data that show that these kinds of exclusionary or hostile attitudes are more pronounced among white conservative Protestants than they are any other religious group or oftentimes any other segment within the American population.
So, let's think about what that means for just a minute to put that into context.
And you can go back and listen to other episodes in this series for background on some of what I'm about to say, but it means that those Christians who are most likely to claim to be biblical, and again, go back, check out the series on what it means to be quote-unquote biblical,
Those Christians who are most likely to claim to be biblical, those Christians who are most likely to quote scripture, those Christians who are most likely to claim that they're following the teachings of Jesus and the teachings of Jesus should fundamentally shape society and so forth, they are the most likely not to exercise love of enemies or to affirm a love of so-called enemies.
And again, I'm not making that up.
Go look at the American Values Survey, right?
It will support what I am saying, and it's not just that.
There's lots and lots of other data, okay?
So, when we talk about this, we are talking about American Christians generally.
More specifically, we're talking about white American Christians, and even more specifically than that, we are mostly talking, or to a greater degree, we are talking about conservative white Protestants, okay?
So, what about these Christians today?
How is it That they have this central core teaching of their tradition that seems not to affect what they actually do.
OK, so let's imagine that you've got Thanksgiving coming up and you're sitting at the table and Uncle Ron, our hypothetical Uncle Ron, is going off about what he sees as the problems of America.
And all the Americans who supposedly hate their country because they protest against it, or all the foreigners who are here, or all the non-Christians who are taking away our country, and so on and so forth.
And you pose the question to him and say, Uncle Ron, how can you say that?
How can you express this kind of animosity toward these people, hatred toward these people, when Jesus tells you you are commanded to love your enemies?
Okay?
What can you expect in this hypothetical conversation?
How's it going to go?
Let's game it out a little bit.
Well, the first thing is—and I'm convinced of this, and I argue this in my academic work.
I argue this in discussions.
A lot of people, I think, disagree with me, and that's okay.
But I'm absolutely convinced that Uncle Ron and Christians like him, when you counter and say, but aren't you commanded, Uncle Ron, to love your enemies, I believe that Uncle Ron and Christians like him experience no contradiction between the command to love their enemies and their actual attitudes and feelings.
And I think it's hard for outsiders to understand this because if you're not a part of that tradition, if you are not in that code, let's say, The contradiction seems self-evident, but if you are, it is not.
I think that millions of Christians actively hate lots of different kinds of people and experience exactly no contradiction between that and the command to love their enemies.
And so the real issue, if we're going to sort of decode this, if we're going to understand how Christians evade this command, is to understand why would that be?
How can we explain that?
How is it possible that somebody doesn't experience a contradiction between these?
And I think it has to do with other elements that are in the code of American Christianity, especially conservative white Christianity.
And I've got a few issues about this.
The first is individualism.
Americans generally were very individualistic.
That's how we conceive of ourselves.
But notions of individualism are more pronounced for politically conservative, excuse me, politically and religiously conservative Americans than they are Americans at large.
And so what I think part of what happens is that when conservative Christians hear a command to love your enemies, this is a command for them individually or personally, right?
It's love your enemies.
It's experienced as a command not to love everybody who's not like us.
But to love what we might call our sort of proximate enemies, the enemies closest to us.
It's experienced as a command where we are called to love those who are closest to our actual lives that we don't like or that we experience conflict with.
So I think for a lot of Christians, you say, well, Jesus tells you to love your enemies.
They say, hey, man, I'm doing my best.
That coworker I don't like, who always steals my lunch from the refrigerator, won't admit it's her, but I know it's her.
I'm called to love her and show compassion to her.
The next door neighbor that I argue with all the time, whose dog crosses the lawn and poops in my yard all the time, and I've asked him over and over and over not to do it, I really don't like that guy.
Jesus commands me to love him.
I need to have some compassion.
I need to pray for him, right?
The next-door neighbor, our pain-in-the-ass brother-in-law, the other family members that we're going to see at Thanksgiving.
It's experienced very much individually.
It's a call for me individually to care for and love and put up with the difficult people in my life, in my most immediate proximity.
But I think that for many Christians, the idea that that would extend beyond that circle doesn't register.
It doesn't register as part of the divine command because of this very individualistic way it is interpreted.
So there's no experiential gap between the Christian command, again, to love your enemies in actual practice because I am loving my enemies.
My brother-in-law who drives me nuts, that my parents, that neighbor, whomever it is, I'm trying to show that love and compassion to them, right?
This isn't about stuff at the border.
This isn't about accepting gender diversity or ethnic diversity or anything else.
This is about me in my daily life being nice to the people that I most immediately confront, okay?
The second part of the American Christian Code that I think this hits on, and it's really, really closely related to this prior point, is what I'm calling the spiritualization within American Christianity.
And it's the argument, and you might hear this from Uncle Ron.
If Uncle Ron's a little bit sophisticated, he'll come back at you with this and say, well, that command, it's a spiritual command.
Not a political or social command.
When Jesus says, Love your enemies, He says He's forming a spiritual kingdom.
He's telling us that within the spiritual community we're called to love our enemies, That this is a vision for within the church, within the church community.
It's to be a space where we love our enemies.
He's going to say that it's not a command for society at large.
It's not about politics.
It's not about international relations or something like that.
It's a command for, you know, just within the church of being kind to our brothers and sisters in Christ.
And folks, I grew up hearing this in sermons.
I read it in books.
I heard it on Christian radio, the argument that this notion of loving your enemy should really, it's not about social ethics, it's really about the life within the church.
So we create this nice, convenient wall between a community of people who are enough like us that we can love them without too much trouble and a quote-unquote world outside the church that is not subject to that same command on our part.
And then another issue that comes up within the code is what I'm going to call the biblical whataboutism.
And what I'm getting at is it's the simple fact that the Bible doesn't present one unified, loving vision of relations with non-Christians, right?
And if you need to push back on anybody on this, it might be sometimes the liberal Protestants who kind of have this notion that the Bible is just full of, you know, love for everybody all the time.
There are lots of Bible passages that do not enjoin love of enemies.
And when you confront Uncle Ron or any other Biblicist Christian with this, he may well respond with something like, well, you know, but what about the places where the Bible also says, and then go on to rattle them off?
Maybe it's the Hebrew conquest of the promised land in the Hebrew Bible, or Within that, stories like the conquest of Jericho.
Maybe it's the end of the book of Revelation where it talks about Jesus coming back and putting all of his enemies into a wine press and trotting on until the blood overflows.
Violent imagery where God takes vengeance on the enemies of God and God's people.
So, you may be countered not with an actual response to, well, what about when Jesus says this?
How do you respond to that?
But deflections of, well, what about this?
What about, what about, what about?
Biblical what about is, okay?
And then the final issue is just this, that at some point we do come up against the fact of just straightforward inconsistency.
Humans are not rational calculators who seek to live without contradiction.
We like to think of ourselves that way.
That's not what we are.
In one domain, the same Christians who insist that Jesus is only making a spiritual command to love our enemies, they're also going to be the same Christians that are calling to institute a Christian society.
The same ones who say that biblical values should be the law of the land and so forth.
At some point, we just run into that fundamental cherry-picking of which commands we're going to take as merely individual and spiritual, and which ones, if we're infected with Christian nationalism, we think apply socially.
And you can highlight those.
Highlighting those inconsistencies to Uncle Ron might allow you to make some headway.
But it's more likely that you're going to run into further evasions and shifting rationales.
Yes, we're called to love our enemies, and instituting a Christian society is how we love our enemies, because our goal is eternal salvation and a moral society here on earth, and eternal salvation after our time here on earth.
That's the way to say it.
Instituting a Christian society, therefore, is the way to love our enemies.
And we can bring all of these things together—the spiritualizing, the Christian nationalism, the legitimizing of undertaking actions against the so-called enemies of God—all paradoxically in the name of God's love.
So, love your enemies.
Basic, fundamental Christian command—the radical command on the lips of Jesus and the Bible.
For some Christian groups and some periods of Christian history, including many in the present, it has been socially and politically transformative.
For most of Christian history, right up to the present, it has had little discernible effect on Christian practice and self-understanding.
At least that's my take.
And I think these are some of the reasons why.
It is, as we say on this series, in the code.
There are elements of both the historical Christian code and also the contemporary American Christian code that make it so that this command that seems so transformative is often blunted or disregarded entirely.
I need to run.
We need to wrap this up.
I want to thank everybody, as always, who listens, who supports me, who supports this series, who supports the podcast.
Please keep the ideas coming.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Love to hear the ideas.
Love to hear the feedback.
Can't do it without you.
Please keep them coming.
And in the meantime, be well until we meet again in this strange virtual format.
