Hate fills the air as “Christian” America fights over values, social issues, race and sex. An increased rage punctuates our communication.
Hate crime and hate speech are mutually charged to MAGA and the Democrats. Both sides tear through news reels and social media for the “once and for all” living proof that hate and violence come from the other side.
Our inability to agree on what hate is may be an indicator of our spiritual condition. This disagreement follows in the wake of our inability to know the meaning of evil and what constitutes inhumanity.
For example, FBI Director Kash Patel accuses the Southern Poverty Law Center of being a hate group. The irony here is poured in concrete.
Why do we hate?
Since reading David Livingston Smith’s Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, I have been unable to escape the darkness hanging over American Christianity. Why do we hate?
Remember the lyrics from the musical South Pacific?
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year
It’s got to be drummed
in your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught
Smith calls our dark evil something even more sinister than hate — dehumanization: “Dehumanization is the belief that some beings only appear to be human, but beneath the surface, where it really counts, they aren’t human at all.” They are demons, rats, monkeys, gnats, dogs, vermin.
“The road leading to hate is a slippery slope.”
The road leading to hate is a slippery slope. Enter the passageway with name-calling, demeaning labels and horrific insults and you are downhill straight to hating.
What is hate?
The dictionary defines hate as an intense feeling or passionate dislike of another person. Hate also is a systematic and especially politically exploited expression.
How are we able to hate one another with such passion and with equal passion swear we don’t hate anyone?
People who should know better, and probably do, are on the slippery slope to full-blown hate. They have constructed three tricks designed to hide the rapid descent into hate: Accusing, denying and redefining.
FBI Director Kash Patel points to a poster showing alleged accomplishments of the FBI this summer during a press conference with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office October 15. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
The strategy of accusing shows up in the comment of Patel that the SPLC is a hate group.
“So the Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” Patel told The Daily Signal in a statement. “Their so-called hate map has been used to defame mainstream Americans and even inspired violence.”
Patel, influenced by MAGA evangelicals, is referring to the 23 Christian groups on the list. Of particular disdain for Patel is Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s organization.
The SPLC described TPUSA as a “well-funded, hard-right organization” that promotes “authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions.”
“Turning Point USA’s primary strategy is sowing and exploiting fear that white Christian supremacy is under attack by nefarious actors, including immigrants, the LGBTQ community and civil rights activists,” SPLC claims. “TPUSA exploits complicated feelings of insecurity and anxiety to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order.”
A look at the SPLC “hate map” reveals KKK groups, Neo-Nazi groups, white nationalists, racist skinheads, extreme antigovernment movements, militia movements, sovereign citizen movements, conspiracy propagandists, neo-Confederate, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and a variety of lesser groups. MAGA evangelicals detest being lumped with these fringe movements.
Embedded in MAGA accusations is the strategy of denial. Its defense shield is denial. The strategy has worked well for President Donald Trump. He has survived endless charges by denying them all. MAGA denies the charge of racism and the charge of hatred. Yet hatred feeds on racism; without racism, it probably couldn’t exist. As a result, they have produced an alternative definition of hate.
Redefining hate as love
MAGA responds to the charge of “hate” by insisting they love others. Love is a necessary component of hatred. Without love and its redemptive framings, we would recognize hatred for what it is: an emotional and physical state of violence that produces a sense of threat that is sustained by social and economic practices.
“Evangelicals have learned to mask hatred by framing their transgressions as love.”
Evangelicals have learned to mask hatred by framing their transgressions as love. Hate is love by another name.
In this sense, love-hate is the foundation of American culture. Too many Americans have learned to justify hatred as misguided affections. As Kumarini Silva, University of North Carolina communication scholar, puts it, love-cruelty is “an active and animating force for both political machinations and civic life.”
Love is a common theme in fascist organizations. Here’s one example from the Aryan Nations’ website:
The depths of Love are rooted and very deep in a real White Nationalist’s soul and spirit, no form of “hate” could even begin to compare. At least not a hate motivated by ungrounded reasoning. It is not hate that makes the White workingman curse about the latest boatload of aliens dumped on our shores to be given job preference over the White citizens who built this land. It is not hate that brings rage into the heart of a White Christian farmer when he reads of billions loaned or given away as “aid” to foreigners when he can’t get the smallest break from an unmerciful government to save his failing farm. No, it is not hate. It is Love.
Origins of hate
Why do people who less than a decade ago were fellow brothers and sisters in Christ now hate one another with such one accord? The ties that bind have been broken.
Sara Ahmed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, says hate generates its object as a defense against injury. MAGA conservatives claim they have been injured. The single cell that evolves into full-grown hate is a sense of threat.
“The single cell that evolves into full-grown hate is a sense of threat.”
Hate develops slowly, unconsciously across different levels of signification. Ahmed calls this the “rippling” effect of emotions: “They move sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures and objects) as well as forward and backward (repression always leaves its trace in the present — hence ‘what sticks’ is bound up with the absent presence of historicity).”
Haters congregate around alleged enemies deserving of their hate. The hate “sticks” to them like a yucky, slimy, poisonous chemical.
Boogeyman artistic installation in Piazza dei Priori, San Giminiano, Tuscany (Shutterstock)
This production of hate is not related to personal relationships with immigrants but with the idea that the immigrants are “illegal,” “criminal” and “dangerous.” The immigrant is painted as the “boogey man” — an almost invisible figure who is also a “horde” and a “caravan” that stalks the nation.
Immigrants have become the American version of the “boogey man.” Southern whites once frightened a white culture with visions of the strong, virile, animal-like prowess of the male slave raping white women. Now, we frighten an entire nation with the same mythical character in the immigrant.
MAGA retains its childlike fear of the mythical boogey man. Every culture has such a creature. Dutch children are taught that if they are bad, Santa will put them in a sack and take them to Spain. I was taught the devil would fill my mind with dozens of little demons. But I only believed this as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.
According to MAGA logic, the nation has the right and the obligation to deport immigrants (by any and all means, even extralegal ones), who as criminals are trying to steal something from the nation, otherwise the nation itself will be overrun. This frames hate as patriotic love for the nation.
Hate wrapped in the flag and sold as Christian love becomes the costume of MAGA.
Here’s the conundrum: In a gathering of anger, outrage, frustration, fear, threats, disgust, revenge, disappointment and agitation (the ingredients in hate), MAGA swears on the Bible they are not haters and claim to “love” immigrants, gays and minorities by wanting to be rid of them.
Hate’s emotional grip on the American soul shows no signs of abating. Not only can hate be taught, but accusing, denying, and redefining hate are rhetorical tricks easily acquired. These tricks may it possible to avoid the reality that too many Christians are now known by their hate.
Rodney Kennedy
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.