Works of Love

If Your Religion Teaches the Obvious, Then It’s Not Much of a Religion

So a certain elected official in the U.S. recently claimed that it is a “Christian concept” to first “love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community,” and then to continue dwindling downward, as if love were a singular sort of thing, available in a diminishing quantity.

This was a silly statement, made by a decidedly un-serious politician, but even sillier were the arguments back and forth that resulted.

Yes, it’s obvious that human beings have preferential feelings for certain other people with whom we share blood or some other bond. So, if one actually believes this to be a “Christian concept,” then one must think Christianity a very obvious sort of religion. And if, as a religion, it points us to act only in obvious ways that align with natural instincts, then what, pray tell, would be the point of following that religion?

Of course, this is not a Christian concept at all, because Christianity (as described in the New Testament, as opposed to the “Christendom” that developed and still exists) is not as stupidly obvious as all that.

Perhaps if this particular politician’s party were as enamored of the New Testament’s Beatitudes as they are of the Old Testament’s Ten Commandments, he might have paused to remember a certain someone (alleged to be of central importance to the politician’s claimed religion) saying, “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?”

It’s sad proof of the paganism of American Political Christianity that “conservative” pundits have rushed into the breach to “defend” the primacy of a preferential love (which all humans instinctively feel, and thus needs no defense) against the love to which Christ calls us all — the love of neighbor (which runs counter to all natural human instincts).

Neighbors, after all, are not people in particular, but people in general; your neighbor is not the person you live next door to, or the person in the next room, or the person on your television set offering views with which you agree, but literally anyone. And it is the idea that God is commanding us to love, not just the people we want to love, but anyone in general, which means anyone in particular — even your enemies! even smug, not-terribly-bright politicians! — well, this is the very radical difference between Christianity and paganism.

As Kierkegaard points out in Works of Love, preferential love is not in and of itself a bad thing, but it is not “the highest” of loves, because “erotic love and friendship … contain no moral task.”

It’s good fortune to fall in love, good fortune to find a friend, good fortune to have a family, which is why it’s nonsensical to suggest that it’s your task as a human being to find a lover, find a friend. What is the point of a Christianity that tasks you to do something that a) you want to do anyway, and b) is literally dependent on pure happenstance?

But our culture is utterly obsessed with preferential love; it’s why so much digital ink is wasted on “the epidemic of loneliness” … why online communities are forged in the fires of anger shared by people who feel they’ve been denied the “right” of sexual companionship … why American Political Christianity is stupefyingly fixated on an idea of “marriage” that is as un-Biblical as the indulgences that led to the Reformation.

Note that I’m not even choosing to discuss this particular topic because I want to weigh in on the specific policy matters on which this politician was pontificating. This is not a matter of one political side being right and the other wrong. After all, the policies in question, which are being upended and argued about, were not created in the first place out of any sense of morality or “neighbor love,” but to support the interests of the state, and its various administrations in and out of power.

What offends me is that this particular Vice President — an adult convert from one form of Christianity to another, no less — has such a weak grasp of his professed faith that he believes directing people to “Google” ordor amoris is sufficient to support his statement — which it wouldn’t be, even if were somehow representative of a settled theological argument. (Someone please tell First Things that “charity begins at home” is as Christian a statement as “God helps those who helps themselves,” which is to say, not at all. Oh, on second thought, don’t bother.)

Unfortunately, many of this particular politician’s opponents are not on any sturdier ground. Certainly there are organizations and ministries devoted to the service of migrants and the following of Christ’s commandments; those people can only be commended, and I like to think they will continue their missions no matter the government policy.

But then there are all the people clamoring online in (rightful) opposition to this politician’s statement, but not because they are filled with a zeal to follow what is, in real life, an incredibly awkward, difficult, if not downright impossible commandment, to love the neighbor; but because they clearly believe that supporting a particular party or policy position is really all that they have to do to fulfill the task Christ has given us all.

I wish it were that easy.

How to Make Things Harder (And Maybe Better)

There’s an election of some alleged consequence barreling toward us in a couple of days, of course, and though I am trying very hard to keep any mention of external “news” out of this blog, I can’t help but feel like I have to say something, or allude to something, anyway.

My instinct is to find a way to make this whole season easier to get through, but that is probably beyond my capabilities, and besides, it wouldn’t be helpful anyway. The easiest thing to do is, as usual, the worst thing you can do: immerse yourself in “news” coverage, stress about the closeness of the polls, live in perpetual anxiety about what horrible thing might happen should the other side win the election.

That feels hard, but it’s not. It’s so easy, in fact, that it doesn’t require you to do anything: just let the culture do to you what it wants to do, which is to foster stress and outrage and anxiety.

Our culture wants us to believe that “paying attention” to things that we can never control is not only entertaining (yes, if you can’t turn your eyes away, and you can’t stop thinking about it, even if what you’re thinking is how awful it is, that means you’re being entertained), but somehow, in some way, important — like feeling outrage or anxiety is your responsibility as a citizen. Seriously, most consumers watch cable news, or scroll through news feeds, and actually feel like being “informed” means they’re “making a difference.”

Well, they’re not.

Look, cast your vote on Tuesday, certainly — I still cling to the quaint notion that this is a citizen’s responsibility, perhaps the only one — but what in the world is the point of worrying about it beforehand, or after?

I’m not suggesting that the right approach is to go skipping and whistling down the lane, or — more likely — watching reality shows, boxing matches, slasher films, Hallmark holiday movies or anything else the culture offers that feels less anxiety-inducing than the literally-endless, conflict-without-catharsis, movie-without-a-plot we call “news.”

Instead, perhaps the right approach would be for us all to choose, not something easy, but something hard.

Lots of folks now are talking about the need for tolerance toward your political “opponents” (as if ordinary people having particular, differing opinions are somehow your “opponents”), and hand-wringing while pleading for everyone to just be more civil to each other, for God’s sake — but few of them, it seems, are talking about these things in anything more than the most generic of ways.

Tolerance? Civility? I think we ask for these things because they also sound easy, and being human beings, we tend to assume that other human beings are not actually capable of all that much.

What if we asked people to do something difficult, instead? How about, instead of asking them (or ourselves) to be civil to our neighbors, we ask them (or ourselves) to … love our neighbors?

It’s no coincidence that I happen to be reading Kierkegaard’s Works of Love right now, and what makes it feel actually life-changing is exactly how impossible it seems.

Kierkegaard’s approach, even in this work that is designed to be more “direct” than his pseudonymous books, is not to offer summarizable explanations of exactly how he thinks you should live. (“Love your neighbor!”) That’s because he knows that sort of thing doesn’t actually work. (The reason that a self-help book industry exists today is that self-help books are repetitive consumables. You don’t buy just one.)

I think that Kierkegaard’s goal instead is to change the way each individual reader thinks, because the only way to change how someone lives is to first change the way they think. He does this by parsing words and phrases, carefully and expertly, in such a way that they get turned inside out, and the reader starts to think: This sounds impossible, but maybe it isn’t impossible.

After all, what does it mean to love your neighbor? A couple of weeks ago I heard someone say, referring to a well-known person, “I can love him, but I wouldn’t invite him to dinner.” Well then, what does it mean to say that you love him? Is this just another example of the way we reduce everything hard into something easy — in this case, turning love into some sort of vague well-wishing?

Perhaps the only way to change the world is not to watch the “news” or to be “informed”, which obviously doesn’t change anything. And it’s not to tolerate people, or be civil to them, because those are unrealistic and vague things to ask of people — and most people, in everyday situations, already are civil and neighborly toward each other; it only feels like they aren’t when we pretend that online interactions are real.

No, all we can do is stop trying to change the world, and instead learn how to love — actually, honest-to-goodness love — our neighbor, which is whoever is there right in front of us, and in their totality,not just whatever seems most lovable about them. We should not do this in order to change the world, and certainly not to change them, and not even to change ourselves — not even to do anything at all, other than to love.

But that sounds a lot harder than the whole well-wishing thing most of us imagine neighborly love to be. It sounds simply impossible to say, “Don’t be civil to your neighbor, don’t respect your neighbor, don’t try and persuade your neighbor — love your neighbor!” I think that we can make it start to seem a little less impossible [sic] by looking inward and asking: Just what the f*** is love, anyway?

Like I said, Kierkegaard defies summarization, so I’m not going to extend this already-too-long-and-rambling blog post by trying to answer that question with some bullet points from Works of Love.

But here is one thing I’m going to try and remember during the craziness of this election — and I would encourage the same for anyone who thinks it is their responsibility to “stay informed”: As stated in 1 Corinthians, knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.

Kierkegaard wrote:

“Love builds up by presupposing that love is fundamentally present. Therefore love also builds up when, humanly speaking, love seems to be absent and where, humanly understood, the first and foremost need is to tear down … To tear down is the opposite of building up. The contrast never appears more clearly than when the discourse is concerned with love as building up: for in any other discussion about building up there is a similarity to tearing down — it means to do something with another. But when the lover builds up it is the very opposite of tearing down, for the lover does something about himself: he presupposes that love is present in the other person — which is quite the opposite to doing something about the other person.”

So instead of to trying to make the craziness of the next week easier, I will actually make it harder, and challenge myself (and maybe you, the single individual) to think before and during every interaction: Am I tearing down, or building up? Am I trying to do something about this person instead of doing something about myself?

It’s a start, anyway.

(Also, read Works of Love.)