What to Hate and What to Fear

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Recently, I had my 8th grade students responding to self-selected quotes from the book I Am David. I love this book; so do most of my students. The protagonist has grown up in a communist concentration camp and knows nothing about his own background or about the “real world”. But his limited life experiences have instilled in him a strong (yet somewhat misguided) sense of justice and morality, which is demonstrated in this quote from David that one of my students pulled from a chapter:

“You must hate what is bad.”

And here was my 8th grader’s reaction:

“This is a good example of trying to stay pure with the mistake of accepting hate as a good thing.”

(Y’all. This boy is thirteen.)

I usually fly through these assignments as I grade, but this remark stopped me dead in my tracks. It made me think. I should have given him extra credit for that.

“Trying to stay pure . . .” I’ve lived a whole lot of life with friends from the extreme fundamentalist limbs of the body of Christ – and yes, most of these people were very loving, gracious human beings. But for many, their words and deeds both spoke to the primary goal in their lives of staying pure: keeping themselves – and even more so their children – from being polluted by the world. An awful lot of the homeschooling community is motivated by this. Not entirely . . . hear me well, naysayers. There are many good, solid, valid reasons to homeschool your kids (I’ll gladly delineate them all for you sometime).

But the desire to just cocoon yourselves and your children away from the evils of the world is not valid, solid, or good. It’s dumb. And I don’t even think it’s biblical. When Jesus talks in John 17 about our not being “of this world”, he also specifically says he’s sending us into the world.

In any case, it seems that when some of the most extreme of those fundamentalists realize that they can’t really get away from this world’s filth, they try to create some separation by publicly denouncing it. Loudly. Vociferously. With many words and many scripture references and many, many arguments. And they seem surprised when this technique doesn’t decontaminate the place. So they get frustrated. And angry. And afraid.

And then they start to hate.

And that hate feels good, people! It feels right. Because it’s hatred of wrong . . . hatred of evil . . hatred of sin . . . but all too quickly, it evolves into hatred of people. And it's not just my fundamentalist friends -- my extreme liberal friends go there, too.

They make "the mistake of accepting hate as a good thing.” Hate is never a good thing.

I don’t need you to throw scripture at me here promoting the idea of hating the sin and loving the sinner. I understand that concept. I’m not sure we’re capable of doing that – there’s a slippery slope there that we arrogantly think we can steer clear of. God may do that; I’m not convinced he calls us to do it.

But I’m absolutely positive we’re called to love people. Good people, bad people, powerful people, dumb people, people who build us up, and people who drag us down . . . love ‘em all. For love is of God. We should always err on the side of love. Read the gospels, folks. Jesus touched the lepers and ate with sinners. He did not pontificate about their uncleanness. He showered them with love. And that’s how they got cleaned up.

I think some of us are too afraid of being impure. We should be more afraid of being unloving.

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