How To Love Your Enemy in a Polarizing World

As thousands of white men stormed the Capitol with little resistance last month, I joined many others in wondering what would have happened if all those people were black. My guess is, most of them would have been shot on the spot. Sadly, this is America: A place where white, violent insurrection is labeled patriotism, while black, predominantly peaceful protest is characterized as thuggery. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” right, Church?

But this isn’t the worst division in our nation—or the Church, for that matter. The willingness of white evangelicals to resort to violence when faced with apparent (though baseless) injustice compared with the Black Church’s nonviolent response to hundreds of years of actual injustice is an incriminating editorial on evangelical Christianity. The cross of Christ, a sign of suffering in the black Church, has been co-opted as a symbol of conquest in the white Church. Unlike our black brothers and sisters, who have historically viewed enemy love not only a necessity for survival, but the sine qua non of Christianity, white evangelicals continue to treat pacifism as a quaint appendage of the Gospel, or at best an outdated, impractical idealism. A recent study by the Pew Research Center reports white evangelicals are more likely than members of other faith groups to own a gun, and a majority of evangelicals who own a handgun carry it with them.

Violent at Heart

“The stumbling block for the white church isn’t that God in God’s divine defenselessness chose to die for God’s enemies, but that we as Christ-followers must go and do likewise.”

Growing up a white evangelical myself, I was trained by pastors and Christian organizations to be a culture warrior, an insurrectionist for Jesus. Since God was obviously violent, I could be, too. Through militant sermons by Mark Driscoll and Bringing Up Boys by Dr. Dobson, an entire generation of white evangelicals like me were formed to accept violence as the very essence of masculinity. And that masculinity was consistently linked with violence. The poster boy for this militant masculinity was John Eldrege, whose book Wild at Heart sold over four million copies and formed evangelical men to move toward a “muscular” version of faith, best expressed in combative language and lifestyle. And to this day he boasts, “Jesus was not the poster child for pacifism; he wasn’t the World’s Nicest Guy. Christianity does not ask men to become altar boys; it calls them up as warriors.” 

Turning Jesus into a warrior is not only an act of theological violence, it’s making Jesus dance a jig to a culturally appropriated version of masculinity. But violence sells, and what better way to recruit an army of Christian soldiers than to tell them God is on their side? Not surprisingly, a recent study showed that nearly 70% of individuals on active military duty in the United States are Christians, a statistic that is troubling in its own right, but more so since “when war is undertaken in the name of God, there can be no limit to killing,” to borrow the words of theologian Stanley Hauerwas. So sure, love your enemy, just right up until the point you kill him.

But Eldredge’s error is to assume that the only responses to injustice are fight or flight, that the only two options available when confronted with evil is to kill or be killed. Even Gandhi said that if the only two choices are to kill or stand idly by while the weak are exterminated by the strong, then of course we must kill. How is this possible given the life and teachings of Jesus? How, in the face of such direct commands to love our enemies, can Christians adopt a theology of redemptive violence? Thankfully, Jesus’ life provides a third way beyond both quietism and redemptive violence, but it comes with a price.

The Third Way: Loving Our Enemies

Contrary to popular belief, pacifism isn’t inaction or simply meekness in the face of evil; it is the courageous and oftentimes creative task of disarmament. As Dr. Russell Johnson says in a recent episode of Holy Heretics podcast, “Pacifists have dirty hands, too, it’s just that they’re dirty from tending wounds and tilling soil and doing the sort of work that leads to sustainable wellbeing for their group and for the groups that society or their actions may put them into opposition with.”

Check out our interview of Dr. Russell Johnson for more on the idea of loving your enemy, the “us vs. them” mindset, and nonviolence.

We see this over and over again in the life of Jesus, who was holistically and completely nonviolent. Remember the woman caught in adultery? Jesus physically stepped between the woman and her accusers, bearing the brunt of their aggression without becoming aggressive in return. He met their lethal force with an altogether different form of power, a power manifested in suffering love on behalf of the oppressed. Christ’s third way of engaging evil isn’t some negative form of passivity; it is active love in the face of injustice. “Nonviolent resistance is the willingness to take on suffering ourselves in order to right wrongs. The nonviolent resister makes a commitment never to kill, to be complicit in killing, to harm or threaten to harm anyone—no matter how great the cause,” writes Father John Dear in Our God is Nonviolent.

In this way, nonviolent resistance deals with the aggressor as God in Christ dealt with us: by refusing to allow mankind to be identified as God’s enemy. Jesus took on suffering in order to overcome suffering. The unarmed Christ disarms us all. 

Our black brothers and sisters have demonstrated their deep understanding of this truth by putting their bodies in harm’s way for decades, resisting injustice with active love and nonviolent direct action. Unlike the white evangelicals who stormed the Capitol as a direct reaction to what they perceived as an unjust election, they understand that in order to halt the vicious cycle of violence, they must be willing to undergo violence, rather than inflict it upon others. The stumbling block for the white church isn’t that God in God’s divine defenselessness chose to die for God’s enemies, but that we as Christ-followers must go and do likewise. As Yale professor Miroslav Volf points out in his book Exclusion and Embrace, “If you take the ‘love your enemy’ out of the Christianity, you’ve ‘unchristianed’ the Christian faith.” 

“Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.” (John 14:27)