Election season, and trying desperately to love our enemies

The only thing harder than hitting a baseball is actually loving our neighbor.

The presidential election is days away in the United States, and it's exactly as horrible as I thought it would be. I can't watch the news because it makes me angry. When my wife had one of the debates playing on TV, I had to go upstairs and close the bedroom door, and even then I had anxiety just knowing it was on somewhere in the house.

Elections—at least here in the U.S., ymmv in other places—are when we all hate each other the most. This is human beings at our most divisive, when we see people who disagree with us as less than human. We see ourselves as the free-thinking people who are right, and the opposing side as the monsters who are wrong. It’s “othering” at its extreme; it’s name-calling and ad hominem attacks. We look for the voices on TV and the internet that tell us that we're right, and that we’re superior to the ones who are wrong.

Election season is when we point and scream at the mote in each other's eyes, which we can barely see past the beam in our own.

This includes me. It eats at me that I'm not able to rise above all this. Maybe you're the mythical, magical person who has transcended American politics, and risen above the fray, but I’m not. I would love to tell you that I have the solution for this, the recipe for success, but I can’t—because I just don’t have it. And that kills me.

I believe deep in my soul that we should all just love each other, but it becomes impossibly hard when we try to put it all into practice.

It’s a little bit like hitting a baseball, in that way. When I’m at home watching a baseball game, sitting on the couch and eating potato chips, hitting a baseball looks easy. Wherever the ball is, you should just swing there. I really don’t see what’s so hard about it.

But it turns out that a 90mph fastball gets from the pitcher to the batter in about 400 milliseconds. It takes your brain about 100ms to process an image, and it takes another 150ms to swing the bat. So you end up with about 250 milliseconds—roughly two eye blinks—to decide whether to swing or not, and where to swing. It looks easy on TV. But in reality, hitting a baseball might be the most difficult skill in sports.

Similarly, loving each other—and especially loving our enemies—looks easy on paper. It sounds easy when someone speaks about it in sacrament meeting, or when it comes up in a Sunday School lesson. But in the run-ins of everyday life, it’s a completely different story. How do we love those that we disagree with so deeply, who hate us and we hate them? And for those on the margins, how can they love their enemies when those enemies want to strip away their rights, deny their identity, and legislate them out of existence?

I’ve learned two things about myself, and from my own experience, that I’m trying to implement in my life during the next couple weeks of this election season (and potentially the next four years). I’m not doing so well at either of them yet. The first one is something we’ve all heard before; the second one isn’t something we talk about as much, and it’s much harder.

1. Look outward

The first is to look outward.

When we look outside ourselves, we see hundreds and thousands of people around us who are fellow children of God. Every person is the main character in their own story. No matter how hard we try to make people into caricatures, idiots who blindly believe things that are obviously wrong, each person is deeply complex, filled with emotions and conflicts and deep thoughts. The things they believe are the accumulation of their own experiences—many of which are like ours, and only some of which are different.

Our job is to recognize that—that people are complex and each built from a unique set of experiences. Instead of making assumptions about people, we gain a lot more when we are curious about them. Valarie Kaur, founder of The Revolutionary Love Project, suggests that wonder is the key:¹

To wonder is to let in a sense of awe, openness, and deep curiosity. It is to look upon the face of anyone or anything and say: You are a part of me I do not yet know. It’s an orientation to humility. Wondering about another person — their thoughts and experiences, pains and joys, needs and wants — gives us information for how to love them. It’s how we have learned how to love our partners, children, and friends. When we wonder about people we would otherwise see as strangers, and let even them inside our circle of care, then wonder becomes a revolutionary act.

What I love about this is that it’s not just a directive to wonder about why people believe what they believe, although that’s part of it. It might be as simple as wondering what someone eats for dinner. Allowing ourselves to see other people as human beings—people who wake up in the morning, who have friends and family that love them, and yes, who eat dinner—short-circuits our ability to hate them. People are hard to hate close up.

When we see people close up in that way, we are bound to find out that they are like us; they’re trying hard to do the right thing, and are generally good people. Sometimes that’s why we avoid people on the other side of the political fence: not because we disagree with them, but because we’re afraid that we don’t.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. taught this, and his voice carries more weight than mine on the topic. I can’t imagine looking hate directly in the eye the way he did, and then still believing that there is good in every person. But he did:

...within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls "the image of God," you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God's image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never slough off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.

The hazard here is that sometimes the “see the good in others” thing becomes just a platitude. A slogan. It’s a good reminder, but it’s one of those things we might have heard too often, and it loses potency. That’s why the second part is so compelling; it’s much harder, like I said, but it’s also become incredibly important to me as the political temperature continues to rise.

2. Look inward

Look again at the quote above from Martin Luther King, Jr., because it’s the key to this last bit. If we’re willing to admit that everybody has some good and bad in them, then we need to acknowledge the same for ourselves. Along with recognizing that even our political opponents have some good in them, we have to abandon the idea that we are 100% good and 100% right.

Looking inward means acknowledging that we might not be right all the time, and that our way may not always be the right way.

This is hard if you, like me, are always right (kidding. Although we can’t pretend there’s not an in-born, human-nature assumption of one’s self being right). In one sense, this is garden-variety humility. It’s being willing to admit that we might not have everything figured out, that we’re a product of our own experiences, and that our opinions are deeply influenced by the media we interact with (this is true, always, for every person, no exceptions). But it also means looking at not only what we believe—I actually don’t think God cares that much about this, politically speaking—but also how we are treating those who believe different things. The way we treat other people, much more than our membership in a political party, is at the core of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Our intolerance of others’ beliefs is just intolerance. Our hate of others’ actions is just hate. Even when we tell ourselves our anger is godly and our indignation is righteous, we’re still just angry and indignant.

And this isn’t the way. Jesus Christ is the way, and He taught us to love our neighbor. Whatever is the political topic du jour—immigration, abortion, transgender rights, the economy, healthcare, civil rights, the climate, criminal justice, education, public health, social security, gun control, etc. etc. etc. etc.—becomes insignificant compared to the Savior’s two great commandments, to love God and of course, to love our neighbor.

From Dr. King again: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”² Our hate isn’t any better than their hate, and we won’t make their hate go away by adding ours to the equation. The only way we make things better, in this election cycle and beyond, is to love the people that we think are making things worse.

To be clear, this isn’t the same as bothsidesism. This isn’t “both parties are equally bad.” And it’s absolutely not a call to allow others to use their power to abuse and cause pain. The point isn’t to agree, it’s to treat other people as human beings and children of God.

Andrew Hanauer, CEO of the One America Movement, said recently as a guest on the Faith Matters podcast:

Our aspiration should not be to tolerate people. Our goal should not be to find middle ground or all become purple instead of red or blue. I think that what Jesus calls us to is to transcend and transform conflict wherever we can.

Faith is calling people across those dividing lines to something higher. It's not calling us to be more moderate or to be to be compromising. It's actually calling us to live by a set of values that transcend politics.

It’s hard when we see people espousing policies that do not feel full of love, policies that exclude and hurt others. But we can never force others to love; we can only love them. We can only control our side of it. We can check ourselves on being Christlike, but who are we to judge someone else?

We’re all familiar with this teaching from the Savior, from the Sermon on the Mount:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

Can we actually love someone who is our enemy? I think that’s a fair question. When Jesus taught us to love our enemies, He might have been teaching us to love even those who are hardest to love. But He might also have been teaching us to take those we see as enemies, and love them until we don’t see them as enemies anymore. The very concept of having “enemies” (other than Satan, I suppose) feels contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And this isn’t Jesus teaching us to pray for our enemies to change their minds and agree with us. He isn’t teaching us to pray that our enemies will die. The Savior of all of us is teaching us to pray for those we see as enemies, to pray for them to have health and peace and safety, like we pray for our own children. To pray for them to feel loved. To feel our love, as much as we can give it to them.

The reason this works is that loving someone is something we control. It’s easy to think that someone earns or loses our love based on their actions and merits, but that’s not how it works. No one can actually cause us to not love them, just as no one can cause us to love them. Doing either is a choice. A hard choice to carry out, but a choice nonetheless.

This is how author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks describes it, also on the Faith Matters podcast:

Love, by the way, is not a feeling. Love is a decision…

When you don't feel love, love. When you don't feel it, do it more. That's the ultimate balm of Gilead. That's the ultimate thing. It's what we can really do…

That's the most transgressive Christian teaching ever, which is Matthew 5:44: Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.

He didn't say like your enemies because I don't like a lot of my enemies. So I'm going to love them and decide to love them.

That's the way that we could actually bring these ideas of happiness, but more importantly, the grace and peace of our Lord and Savior for the rest of the world.

Can you imagine? If we could each choose, for ourselves, to love those we’re most at odds with?

In a few days I’m going to vote for who I’m going to vote for, and you’re going to vote for who you’re going to vote for. It matters a lot who you vote for; you should absolutely vote and you should absolutely be thoughtful about who you vote for. Someone’s going to win the election, and someone’s going to lose, and some people will be happy about it and some people will be angry. And when we see the people on the opposite side as us, they’re not always going to look like children of God. They’re going to make us angry and frustrated. They’re not going to feel like our brothers and sisters. We’re not going to love them by default, without trying, without effort.

But we have to try.

1. Valarie Kaur, “See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love” (New York: One World, 2020).

2. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go from Here,” 1967, pp. 62-63.