The resurgent Christianity of the past decade has been largely cultural, and so is motivated in part by a return to certain traditions and virtues. To this end, it often rejects what is taken as a given by contemporary progressive-liberal orthodoxy. A moralistic rejection of hatred is one of these components; many newfound Christian converts — especially of the Catholic or Orthodox variety — find themselves reactively, compulsively asserting that hatred is, in fact, a Christian virtue.
This is easy enough to justify with bible verses:
These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.
Proverbs 6:16-19
or,
The fear of the Lord is the hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.
Proverbs 8:13
But this kind of scriptural verse-hunting can be used by anyone, to support virtually any position:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Matthew 5:43-45
or even Proverbs again, if Jesus isn’t enough:
Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it.
Proverbs 15:17
When I wrote In Defense of Hatred, I wrote it as a Christian, and cited two specific verses defending a connection with Christianity (one of which has since been excised):
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
Psalm 139:21
and,
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die […] A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
So, how do we make sense of this? Does Christianity officially and unabashedly defend hatred?
My path to understanding on this issue began with a sort of accidental run-in with a pastor, doing some side-work transcribing videos for some extra spending money. One of the videos I transcribed was of a pastor explaining the story of Psalm 139. There, he says David begins with an acknowledgment of the omniscience of God: “Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.” He says there is almost no point in bringing my worries, complaints, joys of feelings to God, because he knows it already… yet still, he brings his inner life to God anyways, because of the value of their connection. This is “part 1” of the Psalm, and covers verse 1 through verse 18.
Part 2 — verses 19-22 — is a sudden change of tone, and reads in full as follows:
Oh that you would slay the wicked, O God!
Psalm 139:19-22
O men of blood, depart from me!
They speak against you with malicious intent;
your enemies take your name in vain.
Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord?
And do I not loathe those who rise up against you?
I hate them with complete hatred;
I count them my enemies.
What a direct and complete vindication of hatred! Or… is it? Read in the context of the first section, these angry passages take on a different tone, and sound less like holy righteousness, and more like venting. This contextualization would not be complete, however, without the third, final, and shortest part of the psalm:
Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Psalm 139:23-24
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!
The pastor summarized this final part as David saying “I’m not sure if it is right to feel this way; please, God, guide me on the path of righteousness.”
Imagine ignoring the whole of the Psalm, and simply grabbing onto verse 21 as though it condoned and justified Christian hatred!
Yet this is what all scriptural exegetical justification of hatred looks like. In order to see whether or not Christianity in its essence condones or condemns hatred, we must first have an understanding of (1) what we mean by “hatred,” and (2) the essence of Christianity, and what it seeks to create in us — or, perhaps better put, who Christianity wants to turn us into while we live on this Earth.
There are many meanings for hatred, most of which are uninteresting and not relevant to this discussion. But the hatred that is in question is — I would argue — the disgust towards mind that I gave as my operating definition in In Defense of Hatred (2017). The utility here is that it describes both the function of hatred, as well as precisely the flavor of hatred that is most politically and culturally controversial, and which many would like to erode, if not prohibit outright. People we hate are people we want either get away from or to destroy. It is beyond anger, and much more closely related to ordinary disgust than it is to anger. Like disgust, hatred is essentially a physiological defense mechanism, induced to motivate and prepare our body for the defense of what we love against forces which are not just poison or illness (as with disgust), but conscious agents.
So, what does Christianity have to say about this?
We have to start with the essence of what Christianity is. As I argued in Holy Nihilism (2019), the essence of Christianity can be found in the Bible, specifically, when someone else asks what is the most important law. When Jesus is asked what is the greatest commandment, he responded by giving two:
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Matthew 22:37-40
On its face, this presents an apparent paradox. Love requires the heart — if we love God with all of our heart, and with all of our attention, in what sense can we love our neighbor? What is left to love them with?
This apparent paradox is resolved by a very old and mainstream doctrine: the imago dei. Every human was created “in God’s image,” and bears his likeness, even through their sinful, corrupt nature. We can love God with all of our heart and love our neighbor — and ourselves — because we are not actually loving our neighbor as our neighbor, nor ourselves as ourselves, but loving the spark of the divine and the piece of God that exists in our neighbor, and in ourselves. We love God through the love of mankind.
The Christian is to love himself in the context of crucifying the flesh so as to be reborn in the spirit — our love for others is, “as ourselves,” a love of this spirit.
Any other conception of love, or of Christianity, risks omitting “the greatest commandment.”
Yet this places the Christian in a very strange position, with regards to hatred. Hatred is motivated by a desire to protect — it is tied closely to love. Yet God is eternal and unchanging. Nothing can threaten him. Who would we be to protect God?
It is said that with pure love for God, there is no room for fear:
There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.
1 John 4:18
But similarly, there is no room for hatred, since the correct, Christian object of love is beyond threat. Hatred is a symptom of incorrect love, of idolatry even.
So what do we make then of Ecclesiastes 3? Or Proverbs 6 and 8?
As it turns out, Ecclesiastes is a kind of “thought experiment.” “All is vanity” is, after all, directly at odds with the Christian injunction to maintain hope. Ecclesiastes is about imagining life without God — life “under the sun,” which is a kind of euphemism for a world without God. It is only in such a world where a man of God might “praise the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive; Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.”
The “time for love and a time for hate” comes into focus as a kind of nihilistic acceptance of seasonality and relativity. Nothing is objectively good or bad, only contextually appropriate. But to the Christian, there are transcendental goods, like the fruits of the spirit, which come from a connection to God without regard to time or seasons. Above the “world under the sun,” there actually isn’t a time for hate.
What about the hatred of evil?
One must first ask: what is evil?
The proper Christian answer is right on the edge of circularity: Goodness is God. Evil is simply separation from God.
What makes sin sin is not the nature of the act itself, but what the act does to our relationship with God. How else could the sacrifice of Isaac be holiness, and not sin? How else could the annihilation of the Amalekites be blessed by God — in fact, Saul’s sin is in not killing all the women and infants and animals? It all comes back to connection to God. Morality outside of this connection is, for the Christian, nonsensical and meaningless — “vanity” even, like chasing after the wind.
“Hatred of evil” then is simply hatred of separation from God. Perhaps we could extend this to hatred of acts which cause separation, but again, this is not because of any intrinsic nature of the act itself. And this is also not hatred of a kind similar to the disgust towards mind that is controversial in politics and contemporary moral debate. There is no room in the true Christian heart for hatred of that kind, despite the poetical use of the word in relation to sin.
