Nothing in this world warps a man’s judgment as hatred does. Once a man allows himself to hate, he can neither think nor see straight, nor listen without distortion. Hatred is a terrible thing because it takes a man’s senses away.”
William Barclay, Daily Study Bible, John 18:20-30; 19:1-16
Many ancients viewed hatred as a demonic force capable of possessing a human being. To indulge in hatred was to invite a hostile being into yourself, one capable of stealing your volition and corrupting your soul. Only the ritual of exorcism could, by God’s grace, drive out such an evil.
Such exorcisms constitute a foundation of modern psychology. The intense interaction between an exorcist and the person fighting for control over his soul can, even today, work to break the power of certain mental illnesses when all else fails. This is because of the patient’s active participation in his own cure, and his faith in its efficacy.
Accepting hatred into one’s mind is literally an invitation to mental illness. Yet, hatred is seductive. It teases us with feelings of self-righteousness that are wholly unearned. When hearkening to it, we feel ourselves to be one with the truth and a part of every problem’s solution.
Hatred clarifies. It orders priorities. It inspires concerted action. Hatred motivates disparate people to come together. It becomes common cause and invites the obscure into transcendence.
Hatred has such power because hatred is, at its heart, the closest thing to love in this world. The opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference. Both love and hate are all-consuming obsessions that color every aspect of our lives. If God is love then hatred is anti-Christ.
Like never before, hatred has entered into contemporary American politics. Even in the most extreme moments of our Revolution and our Civil War, there wasn’t the casual and easy hatred that pervades our relationships today.
We are no longer a Judeo-Christian society. Academe, the media, woke corporations, and government bureaucrats all collude to undermine the traditions of our Judeo-Christian Western Civilization. Without a shared faith, Americans are engaging in cultic factionalism like never before. Only in our post-modern USA could masked Antifa cowards and riotous BLM thugs thrive.
On the left, committed utopians absolutely despise who they believe Donald Trump to be. They disdain “Ultra-Maga Republicans” and hold anyone who they believe “threaten our democracy” with dissenting ideas in utter contempt.
They hate us conservatives with an incandescent fervor. To them, we are not a loyal opposition, kindred Americans, or fellow children of God. Instead, we whom they call Christian White Nationalists and worse are castigated as constituting an enemy within who are ready to engage in domestic terrorism.
This cannot last! Such hatred makes it impossible for ideologically diverse people to live together in peace and freedom. Left unchecked, this hatred must either turn America into a totalitarian police state or provoke a second Civil War.
Social justice warriors relish their hatred as evidence of their own virtue. They no longer see us as we really are, instead being blinded by a false image of us that their hatred has crafted. The logical conclusion of such thoroughgoing hatred is an endless quest for the purgation of dissent and the cleansing of our body politic. There is no natural end to such a purge for total purification; just an Ouroboros-like self-consumption until literally nothing remains.
Because their hatred has stripped us of our humanity, they need never consider our notions, debate our ideas, entertain our evidence, or imagine why a good person might believe as we do. Instead, we are to be rejected without undue reflection because only stupid or evil people could possibly “threaten our democracy” with our discordant dissent and pervasive misinformation.
This is what we face, an unremitting hatred of everything about us. This will make any peaceable election nigh impossible, and it will threaten to undermine a peaceful transfer of power. Ironically, their hatred is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy that threatens the ongoing existence of our Republic.
We must not ourselves indulge a hatred for our opponents. People defined by hatred on the right must be shunned, and not abided.
The only answer to hatred is a resolute love. We traditionalists must stand up for what we believe and fight for a future America where life is worth living. We can do so with love in our hearts; love for America, hope for our future, and compassion for those who are lost.
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Gospel of Matthew 5:44 (RSV)
