Are Christians Capable of Love?

After two thousand years of Advent, we still fail at the Great Commandment.

Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash

I had no intention of writing about Advent this month. On December 1, I set out to write about a dream that I had. Only after I submitted the post did I realize that it was about the theme of the first week of Advent: hope. So I kept going. Two weeks ago, I wrote about peace. Last week, I wrote about joy. And now today, here I am writing about love. Well, what I’m really doing right now is stalling. Because I don’t want to write about love.

I don’t want to write about love after the followers of Jesus re-elected a White supremacist, sexual predator, and career con man to the presidency.

I don’t want to write about love as the descendants of one of Abraham’s sons wages genocide against the descendants of the other.

I don’t want to write about love as America’s love of guns keeps costing children’s lives.

I don’t want to write about love as a supposedly “Christian country” is preparing for mass deportations of the foreigners that scripture repeatedly warned God’s people to care for.

I don’t want to write about love as oligarchs create economic crises that drive up the cost of housing and groceries, leaving more people homeless and food insecure than ever.

I don’t want to write about love because I am convinced that most Christians know or care little about it.

As much as we throw the word around, many of us have been poorly discipled in the meaning and practice of love. We come from families and churches where love is conditioned upon our conformity, where love is doled out with an unhealthy dose of control, criticism, and even violence. The type of love that we have experienced makes us fear abandonment, on the one hand, and fear commitment, on the other. Which is to say, it’s not really love at all.

When I think about love and the people of God, I hear Musiq Soulchild’s voice singing, “Looooooooooove….so many people use your name in vain.” I envision Halle Berry’s character in Boomerang sticking her finger in Eddie Murphy’s forehead as she proclaims, “Love should have brought your ass home last night.”

I want to stick my finger in some folks’ foreheads and say, “Love should have made your ass vote differently. Love should have made your ass not reject your gay or lesbian child. Love should have made your ass tend to the needs of the immigrants in your community instead of advocating for deportation. Love should have made your ass demand that your government fund healthcare, education, and social service programs at higher rates than it funds the military and war. Love should have made your ass wear masks during the height of the pandemic so that we wouldn’t have lost over 1 million people. Love should have made your ass more concerned about Amazon workers having fair wages and benefits than about your earth-polluting Christmas presents getting there on time. Love should have made your ass mad that we spend more money to incarcerate poor, mentally ill, and drug addicted people than it would take to provide the wraparound services that prevent poverty, addiction, and crime.”

It could be said that the greatest failure of Christianity is that it has not taught us to follow Christ’s most fundamental command – to love, rather than fear, our neighbor. It has not taught us to desire good for our neighbors, not just the neighbors we know who live in our same communities and share our same economic brackets and drive the same type of cars and maybe even share the same political allegiances, but to also desire good for the neighbors who live in their cars and under highway overpasses, who live in refugee camps and under military rule, who live in places being bombed by Israel and Russia, who live in countries plagued by violence over the minerals that are used to build our electric vehicles and smartphones, who live in communities polluted by the supercomputers that power AI. It has not taught us to desire good for the neighbors whom we think are least like us: our political adversaries. All of that would seem to point to failure.

But maybe the problem is not that we have failed the Great Commandment. Maybe the problem is that we refuse to take seriously how difficult the commandment is. Maybe the problem is that we think that love of self, neighbor, and God should come naturally when, in reality, it goes against our intrinsic nature to be concerned primarily with our own survival and comfort (which is not necessarily the same as loving ourselves rightly). Forming and maintaining a posture of love seems like a simple command, but it is the hardest thing that any of us can ever do. That’s why at any given moment, we are all failing at it in some way. That’s why Jesus had to command us to do it as the greatest act of faithfulness.

Two of my favorite thinkers on love are Erich Fromm and bell hooks. In The Art of Loving, social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm argues that love is an art (rather than a sentiment) that requires both skill and action. He identifies four elements that are common to all forms of love: (1) care, that is, “the active concern for the life and growth of that which we love”; (2) responsibility, the sense of voluntary accountability for the well-being of another; (3) respect, awareness of the other person’s unique individuality and a desire for their self-actualization; and (4) knowledge, the capacity to see the other person in their own terms. bell hooks built upon Fromm’s work in her book, All About Love, where she articulated a love ethic based upon the principles of clarity, justice, honesty, commitment, spirituality, absence of greed and domination, community, mutuality, romance, capacity to endure loss, healing and redemption, ethical living, and divine destiny.

Fromm and hooks together articulate what it means to love someone in a way that is more complicated than what many of our churches and families teach us. They show us that love is not just about having warm feelings. In fact, it may not involve warm feelings at all. Love is a way of being and acting that requires intentional formation, the type of formation that our families and churches often lack.

But here’s the good news: every so often, though, the love command breaks through our self-centeredness and we do some amazing things, not just as individuals but as the collective body of Christ. For example, Christians essentially invented adoption because we decided that familial love was not limited to blood and marriage relationships. Hospitals, public education, orphanages, homeless shelters – all of these institutions began as movements by Christians who were trying to live more fully into Christ’s love command by caring for the poor, the parentless, and the sick. We may not have figured out how to actualize love for our neighbor on a regular basis, but if we look closely enough, we can see evidence of our capacity.

As we enter the final week of Advent – a month before the inauguration that many of us fear is the beginning of a season of policies based upon hostility, exclusion, and fear – let’s resist the temptation to fall into despair, apathy, and hatred. Let’s train our hearts to notice love at work. And let’s be intentional about cultivating our capacity to love ourselves, one another, God, and all of creation.

Where are you struggling to love right now? What are you doing to cultivate your capacity to love in a more robust way?