The "love your enemies" thing is terribly inconvenient

I mean, what if your enemies are really bad?

A number of years ago we had a Family Home Evening with our young boys, ranging ages 0-8 at the time. The lesson was about how every person is a child of God. I had prepared a series of slides, each with a picture of a different-looking person on it; one was a person with a disability, one was overweight, one looked scary, and others were just generally people of all shapes, sizes, and colors. With each new slide, I asked, “Is this person a child of God?”’

The older boys caught on to the game immediately, recognizing that the answer would be “yes” every time, no matter how different or scary each person looked.

But their younger brother, probably three years old, saw it differently. With so many of these pictures being children of God, his tiny mind reasoned, surely the next one must not be. “How could they possibly all be children of God,” I imagine him thinking. Surely, he thought, this was going to end somewhere. Surely there was a limit.

Some of the things the Savior taught were impactful because they were countercultural, and even subversive, in Jewish culture at the time. A culture that taught that a law of proportionate retribution—an eye for an eye—was understandably baffled by the teacher from Nazareth who taught that not only should you not kill, but you shouldn’t get angry. Not only should you not commit adultery, but you shouldn’t lust. And not only that you shouldn’t demand an eye in return for losing your own eye, but that you should turn the other cheek (“a cheek for an eye” had decidedly less ring to it).

Among those teachings, arguably the most compelling—to the Jews, the Nephites, and to us in the latter days—is the Savior’s instruction to love those who have done the least to earn our love:

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;

And despite having these holy words for the last two millennia, I submit that they are just as countercultural today as they were in Jerusalem two thousand years ago.

There’s an idea floating around that we live in a post-“love your enemies” world. The premise is that things have gotten so bad, and our enemies so evil, that surely we are no longer asked to love them. We have abusers causing meaningful pain, policymakers fueled by hate, and people in positions of authority who seem to delight in suffering they cause others to endure.

Surely, this is the time that “love your enemies” no longer holds. Up to now we’ve agreed that everyone around us is a child of God and deserves to be treated that way. But not anymore. Surely—surely—that was meant to end somewhere. Surely we’ve reached the limit.

But at the end of the day, it is wildly inconvenient that these people most deserving of our distrust (at least) and our hate (at most) are all children of God. Every one of them. And Jesus taught us to love them.

If you're on the one side, it stinks to acknowledge that Donald Trump is a child of God. And that Elon Musk is a child of God. And if you're on the other side, that Joe Biden and Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are children of God. It's painful to acknowledge that Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il and Fidel Castro and Charles Manson and Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden and Andrew Jackson and Idi Amin and all the worst people you can possibly think of are beloved children of our Heavenly Parents.

This is where “love your enemies” stops being a nice platitude, a pleasant thought among many from the Sermon on the Mount, and becomes starkly real. People that were just people before are now our enemies, because of labels we’ve put on them: conservative, liberal, privileged, lazy, woke, MAGA, bigot, feminist, anti-vaxxer, pro-vaxxer, illegal, boomer, Karen, elitist, and so many more. We’ve found ways to make everyone be either on “our team” or “their team.” It’s all black and white. There is no middle ground.

I believe the Savior taught us to love our enemies exactly for times like now. Exactly for the times when it’s terribly, terribly inconvenient.

If you only love those who look like you, who think like you, and who politick like you, and you’ve drawn the line at loving those who are on the other side, then that’s literally just what Jesus told us not to do. He gives us zero credit for that:

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?

“Hating hate” just doesn’t work. Vitriol-fueled social media posts about how much we hate other people’s hate don’t accomplish anything. Adding more hate to the mix doesn’t make the other hate go away. Labelling other people as hateful to justify our own hate goes nowhere.

And getting real for a moment—if our instinct (I’m including myself in this) is to apply this only to other people, then we’re missing the point. We should be asking ourselves, as the disciples of old, “Lord, is it I?”

To be honest, it probably is. Because I think it’s pretty much all of us.

There is some nuance to this topic, of course. If you’re in an abusive relationship, this teaching from the Savior does not say to submit to the abuse. If a certain politician’s policies harm a marginalized group you belong to, the Savior doesn’t teach to just roll with it. Resistance against behaviors and ideas is another thing entirely, and is important in improving the human condition.

But the people perpetuating these horrible things, well, they chose—along with us and the other two-thirds of the host of heaven—to follow the Savior’s plan and come into this world. There’s just no way around the shared humanity, even when some people are denying basic humanity to others.

Now, of course, this is message coming from a white male, and I have just about every possible privilege afforded to me. I’m fortunate enough to not have been in positions where I was abused or even marginalized. So, to quote LeVar Burton, don’t take my word for it.

bell hooks, a Black feminist author, said that love—not anger, violence, or hate—is the only way to get any traction against oppression:

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.¹

That’s a bit subversive on its own, isn’t it? Sometimes we get so excited about the Jesus who flipped tables that we forget the Jesus who embodies perfect love. Somehow, sometimes we think that overcoming the hate of others will only happen if we hate them back hard enough. But as Audre Lorde said, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Dr. Howard Thurman, a Black theologian and a mentor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., emphasizes that hatred not only fails to move our causes forward, but it destroys us as individuals:

Jesus rejected hatred. It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. He rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, and death to communion with his Father.²

We find this message taught in the early days of this dispensation, too. Here we have it from Parley P. Pratt, who was arrested multiple times and eventually murdered:

We do not retaliate. We do not return evil for evil. We forgive our enemies and do good to those who hate us.³

The parade of quotes could keep going. But it was always going to end right back where we started, which is by quoting the Prince of Peace, the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls, who didn’t hold back.

“Love your enemies,” He said. But what about the people we hate, and who hate us? “Do good to them.” What about those who cause pain on us, for the sole purpose of lifting themselves up? What about the people who want to destroy us? “Pray for them.” Love them too, He said.

Jesus not only taught us to love everyone, He demonstrated it as they whipped Him, spat in His divine face, and nailed His hands—the hands that He reaches out to each of us—to a terrible, insulting cross. He loved even those who were in the process of taking His life, forgave them for what they were doing, and then died that those exact men might live again.

That is the example He set for us to follow. Even now.

Beth Allison Barr, author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood, puts a fine point on it:

Why would we think that God requires less of today? That suddenly putting ourselves first… is now what God wants of us? That Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan no longer applies—we don’t have to love our neighbors. That is okay for the wealthy to oppress the poor; that it is okay to act cruelly to the vulnerable; that it is okay to bully the weak.

I don’t think God requires less of us today. I don’t think the injunction to love our enemies is only for when it’s easy, or our enemies are mostly behaving themselves. I think it’s for right now, when our enemies are the most vile and our world the most divided. We are not expected to love or excuse or condone the things they do. But the idea that we can eschew evil and still love people is what both makes this teaching challenging and gives it its power.

President Nelson just talked about this in General Conference last week. Anger never persuades. Hate doesn’t work. These aren’t the things that Jesus Christ taught us to do:

Two years ago, I called upon us as covenant followers of Jesus Christ to be peacemakers. I repeat what I said then, "Anger never persuades." Hostility builds no one. Contention never leads to inspired solutions. True charity towards all men is the hallmark of peacemakers…

The present hostility in public dialogue and on social media is alarming. Hateful words are deadly weapons. Contention prevents the Holy Ghost from being our constant companion. As followers of Jesus Christ, we should lead the way as peacemakers.

We have a prophet to receive revelation to guide the Church in our day, but in this case the guidance is a couple thousand years old. As Latter-day Saints, we should lead the way as peacemakers. And as Christians, we should love our enemies.

Even the bad ones.

1. bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Milton Park: Routledge, 1994).

2. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, [1949] 1996), 88.

3. Parley P. Pratt, The Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt (Various publishers, originally 1874), ch. 50.