The demonization of hatred in our time has derived principally from liberalism for which toleration of nearly everything is paramount. Hatred of evil implies both the right to make judgments, as well as a belief in absolutes, both of which are anathema to liberalism. While it has some redeeming qualities, my foremost argument against liberalism is that it harbors no abhorrence or detestation of evil.
Indeed, liberals hate war much more than they hate evil, which is why Kofi Annan and Jacques Chirac were prepared to leave Saddam in power in order to avoid conflict. But with so much evil in the world, people have grown weary with those who serve as its apologists, and thus liberalism has been largely discredited, with even President Clinton deciding to abandon the term and replace it with "progressivism."
In fairness, however, it is not just liberals who have forgotten how to hate. Many of my Christian brothers and sisters mistakenly believe that God loathes hatred. They quote Jesus' teaching to turn the other cheek and his admonishment to love your enemies as proof that we dare never hate. On my radio show, many evangelical Christians have called to tell me that, in God's eyes, we are all sinners, and thus from a heavenly perspective Osama bin Laden and the average housewife from Kansas are equal. Osama must indeed face justice for his crimes, but we dare not hate him seeing that Jesus still loves him.
But this is a travesty of Jesus' teachings and would make this great Hebrew personality into someone who had contempt for his victims as he extended love to their murderers. Jesus advocated turning the other check to petty slights and affronts to our honor, not to mass graves and torture chambers. Likewise, while Jesus taught that we ought to love our own enemies, this did not apply to God's enemies. Our enemies are people who are our rivals for a promotion at work. God's enemies are those who slaughter his children.
Let not any Christian think that Jesus' sympathy was for anyone other than the oppressed and the poor. True, the Bible commands us to "love our neighbor" as ourselves, but the man who kills children is not our neighbor. Having cast off the image of God, he has lost his divine spark and is condemned to eternal oblivion from which not even a belief in salvation will rescue him. He or she who murders God's children has been lost to God forever and has abandoned all entitlement to love, earning eternal derision in its stead.
To love the terrorist who flies a civilian plane into a building or a white supremacist who drags a black man three miles while tied to the back of a car is not just scandalous, it is sinful. To love evil is itself evil and constitutes a passive form of complicity. The old saying is right: Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.
The Bible instructs us "rejoice not when thine enemy falleth" and I am not advocating that we dance in the streets when we hear about America killing terrorists in Iraq. But to extend compassion to these impenitent and incorrigible monsters is an act of mocking God who has mercy for all, yet demands unequivocal justice for the innocent. To show kindness to the murderer is to violate the victim yet again.
The pacifist will respond that fighting hatred with hatred accomplishes nothing. They will quote the old Bob Dylan song that says, "If we take an eye for an eye we all just end up blind." But the purpose of our hatred is not revenge, but justice. We do not seek to breed hatred so that it might linger in our breast, but so that it might inspire us to stop murder and bloodshed.
If you don't hate Saddam Hussein, then you will find ample reason not to topple him from power. But if watching him gas Kurdish children makes you see him for the abomination he is, then you will risk blood and treasure to put him on trial for his crimes against humanity.
How bizarre that the French and Germans today hate George Bush more than Saddam Hussein. Their efforts to prevent the United States from invading Iraq, and their treatment of Saddam as nothing more than a nuisance, speaks volumes about their indifference to bloodshed and their troubling neutrality on the subject of evil. At Sinai, God entrusted humanity with the promotion of justice, enjoining us to turn an immoral jungle into a civilized society. We seek out the Saddams of this world to prevent further genocides and establish justice. In the words of Aristotle, "All virtue is summed up in dealing justly."
Some will say that by promoting hatred of evil I am trampling on the ideas of atonement and forgiveness. I disagree. Repentance is based on recognizing the infinite value of human life. Because God loves humanity, He provides a point of return so that the individual might find his way back to the light. Since repentance is predicated on the value of life, it cannot be offered to those who undermine its basic premise by irretrievably debasing life.
For a murderer to lament his actions in public and achieve instant absolution is an affront to everything forgiveness stands for. There are those offenses for which there is no forgiveness, borders that are crossed for which there is no return. Mass murder is foremost among them.
Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people." Only if we hate the truly evil passionately will we summon the determination to fight them fervently. Odd and uncomfortable as it may seem, hatred has its place. It is time for moral people to learn how to hate again.
