We All Need Someone to Hate

By Phil Vischer

One group hates those who promote evil. The other hates those who promote hate. We all arrive at the same place – giving ourselves permission to hate those whom God loves.

Jake and Elwood Blues, aka The Blues Brothers, sang about it. Freddie Mercury sang about it. Our need for "someone to love." A longing for connection. But it seems there is another human impulse: the impulse to hate.

Our Christian heritage makes us uncomfortable admitting this out loud. Good, Christian people don't hate our neighbors. We LOVE our neighbors. Or at least we know we're supposed to. But...I really don't like THOSE people. They're different. Threatening. They don't share my values. Given the chance, I'm fairly certain they would happily do me harm.

So we look for justification to hate, a permission structure to say, "God wants me to love people, but not THEM." In times of social or political upheaval, the desire to hate is even stronger. We see it on both ends of the political spectrum, though the justifications are different.

Conservatives hate evil. Which sometimes translates into hating those we believe are evil. It's justified, because those people are evil. We've turned them into demons. Manifestations of pure, Satanic evil. And how could I not hate evil?

Liberals hate hate. Which sometimes translates into hating those we believe are spreading hate, or filled with hate. "I hate those who hate." "I will not tolerate those that are intolerant."

One group hates those who promote evil. The other hates those who promote hate. We all arrive at the same place – giving ourselves permission to hate those whom God loves.

And so, from the Right: "You are not worthy of my love if you promote evil." And then we define what is evil, often related to the politics of the moment and prioritized for us by our preferred religious or political leaders.

And from the Left: "You are not worthy of my love if you promote hate." And then we define what is hateful, often related to the politics of the moment and prioritized for us by this generation's activist class and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The result is a permission structure. To do what? To take Jesus' clear teaching and set it aside. If Jesus were here today, we tell ourselves, he would surely understand. He would recognize that we're in a table-flipping, whip-braiding moment. Not a "turn the other cheek" moment. As Family Research Council president, Tony Perkins, famously replied when asked about the increasingly antagonistic posture of the religious Right: "We only have two cheeks." We Christians HAVE to be angry and aggressive. We're all out of cheeks.

Of course, the secular Left and Right feel much less of a cultural or theological obligation to love, so hate is that much easier to justify. Secular Black Lives Matter activists pushed Black pastors to the side of their marches and said, "Your way doesn't work anymore." White, college-aged activists are less likely to have any connection whatsoever to the biblical call to love our enemies. "It doesn't work. It's time to eat the rich." The UnitedHealthcare CEO was assassinated? It's about time.

On the Right, white supremacists and white nationalists use Christianity primarily as a stand-in for cultural identity rather than a way of living with conformity to Christ as the highest goal. Our own president and much of his hand-picked staff embody this distortion.

In our activist far-left and far-right today, the influence of Jesus' teaching has dropped historically low. Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk or a healthcare executive on the Left, calling for "Civil War" and stocking up on ammo on the Right for when "it all goes down," a popular pastor calling for the church to relearn "the virtue of hate"... Jesus' love for enemies has gone missing in American protest. Martin Luther King has been asked not to lead the march.

The church, and Jesus' teaching, have been co-opted for much more secular ambitions: safety against our "enemies" through exercise of power. It seems Nietzsche might have killed God after all.