I’ve had to take a breather from publishing for a few weeks while work was busy and some family was in town. I hope no one missed me too much.
It seems I’ve had love on the brain recently. Maybe that’s because it’s Pride Month, or perhaps it’s because I’ll get to see my boyfriend next week (we currently live several states apart). More likely it is just another concept that I am deconstructing and reconstructing in my thirties. If you’ve experienced anything like that you may be familiar with the way our brains can hyper-focus on something that is knotted up until it is finally detangled.
That book I’m going to write will contain a chapter that goes into this much more fully. This is just some brief thoughts while I continue working through this one.
God is love. For many families in my Christian tradition, this is the first sentence a child learns to say. Growing up a Congdon, for me and my siblings (and at least dozens of my cousins) meant reciting a Bible verse—from memory—every evening before dinner. For many, between learning to talk and about age 3, that verse was 1 John 4:8b. The whole verse would take a little longer to learn, but a toddler would satisfy the requirement with the three words, “God is love.” Of course, my first verse was actually Amos 4:12b, “Prepare to meet thy God.” I’ll think about that some other time.
The passage from 1 John in context is really quite beautiful.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Like many scriptures, this one was put to a catchy tune that helped me commit it to memory at a very young age. Before I knew much of anything else, I knew that God was synonymous with love. That would get complicated some years later. I can still remember a Sunday School teacher’s whiteboard with the words GOD = LOVE but LOVE ≠ GOD written with a marker that clearly needed to be replaced. But for a while it was simple. God loves me. God loves everyone. God wants me to love everyone. God is love.
Everything was built on the foundation of God is love. Some verses that a little Christian would add to their memory bank would expand upon this truth. Mark 12:30-31, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.”
So straightforward, isn’t it? I sure thought so for many years. I had trouble loving some of my siblings every day, but I really did hold these verses in my heart and believed that my job was to love others. And I knew what love was.
I thought I knew what love was.
As I got older and had more of the Bible (and specific biblical interpretations) taught to me, love wasn’t as clear as it seemed in 1 John 4:7-8. First of all, even though God loved everyone with a perfect love, the vast majority of the people on earth, I was certain, were going to spend forever in eternal conscious torment because of their sin. Therefore, what was loving was to tell them the Good News! Simply believe in Jesus (let’s not get into how you can’t force yourself to believe something of which you haven’t been convinced) and He will wash your sins away and save you from Hell. At some point that got messy too. Because though I knew there was nothing anyone could do to earn their way to Heaven and that we were saved only through faith, there was a subtext that basically said, “Well, if they really believe, they’ll also stop doing bad things… the things God said are bad… or at least what the people who wrote down what God told them to said… or the people who translated those words… or well, maybe the people who interpreted that translation… DOESN’T MATTER… a real Christian will knock that stuff off.” It was loving to show people their sin—even if it hurt them—because we were trying to save them.
I doubt anyone who spends any time on social media needs help to imagine what this kind of “love” often looks like. But just, you know, in case…
I spent less than three minutes grabbing these screenshots. All it took was looking at the comment section of one post from a progressive Christian and one post from a trans Christian. These aren’t even close to the worst of what I see lobbed at those two groups daily. This too doesn’t hold a candle to the things said to an audience of millions daily by the likes of Matt Walsh and Candace Owens and Steven Crowder and every other far-right Christian hatemonger. I can say without any doubt that both of the two individuals whose comments I ventured into have stronger faith than I do to still be believing “God is love” after what God’s people show them every day.
The people I mentioned and the people who comment like the ones above may have, like me, learned “God is love” as children. Today, their message is loud and clear: God hates you. And I do too.
I did say I would keep this one brief. There is so much more to detangle in this knotted-up mess of love. My own broken understanding of love and what it looks like caused me to ignore abuse for many years. I’ve been working through that for over a year now and am still re-learning what safe, healthy love from a partner looks like. What I have come to terms with though is that the same fundamentalist view that convinces Christians that making comments like the ones you saw above is “loving” can also convince Christians that being hurt repeatedly by a partner is “love.”
Christians do have a limit though; they will draw a line. Most every Christian I know would say that the members of the Westboro Baptist Church are not real Christians and they’ve gotten God all wrong. When constant hateful rhetoric from theocratic podcasters ends with a professed Christian committing an act of heinous violence, everyone is quick to say that person was obviously not following our Jesus.
Pat Robertson died today. He’ll be remembered by some as a man who preached the Bible on television, but by many more, including Christians, he’ll be remembered as a hate preacher who blamed gay people for 9/11 and blamed Haitians for an earthquake that killed 160,000+ because they “swore a pact to the devil.”
Last weekend the documentary “Shiny Happy People” was released, detailing the experiences of many raised in Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Principles, including some of his victims and some victims of Josh Duggar who was once the face of the Christian Family Research Council and is now spending twelve years in prison for possession and distribution of child pornography. Every time a pastor or ministry leader is convicted of sexual abuse or assault, if Christians notice, they typically will say that person was a wolf in sheep’s clothing and not a real follower of Christ.
When asked if a president could do something illegal if it was in the best interest of the nation, President Richard Nixon famously responded, “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
I wonder how many Christians have internalized something similar. They learned long ago that “he who does not love does not know God, for God is love” and they know they know God. Maybe the internal justification for the obviously unloving behavior many show is, “Well, when a Christian does it, that means that it is not hate.”
Bekah, I'm at ORD on my way to Jordan, and have a few minutes. Sorry I didn't reply a few weeks ago to your "Christians, don't hurt me..." I resonate with your journey of discovery re. love...you aren't alone. I recall trying to figure out 'this thing called love' years ago, and wondering if I'd ever really know. Everyone goes through this -- and alas, I'm still trying to learn about love after almost 38 years of marriage (we'll celebrate our anniversary in Jerusalem!). Love is an ever-unfolding flower, and the heat and passion of youth gives way to less self-serving (dare I say more God-like?) expressions as commitment and true intimacy develop. This side of eternity, it takes time.
Your broad-brush caricature of Christians made me cringe: The combination of bad theology (which is not rare, but still isn't something to tar-and-feather the masses with) and just plain religious arrogance (which defines some Christians, no doubt) is part of the social designation "Christian" all believers must bear (and Jesus' name gets sullied the most). But just as you would cringe if someone defined Libertarians by the worst jerks who use that moniker, so too lumping Christians under an umbrella made up of legalistic Calvinists and Westboro Baptists seems a bit harsh. At least give some props to the countless millions around the world (and I'd like to think me) who call sin "sin" without automatically condemning those who commit it to hell. As Martin Luther put it, we are iustus et pectare -- justified yet sinners. This is God's love...and when the awfulness of sin, the sacrificial death of Jesus, and the unending drawing of the Holy Spirit of all mankind to God, is fully known, perhaps we'll understand more about love than we ever can this side of eternity. You're growing in your understanding of love; keep on growing. Right there with you...