Neighborly Love

Photo by Celine Sayuri Tagami on Unsplash

By Andrew Yang

I’m not surprised at how often fellow believers express to me their wish that they could hide from the news. With how exhausting and discouraging most media coverage about the state of the world is, many people just want to hide, or focus on creating our own worlds. This isn’t a bad thing, or even an unusual thing. Christians have often created alternative communities throughout history, whether we’re looking at the desert fathers, monks, or the Amish.

Repeatedly throughout scripture, God’s people are called to leave a sinful city on the verge of God’s destruction, like Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, or Babylon in Revelation. While physically disengaging from the dominant social and economic system isn’t an option for most people (I say most, because I’ve got a few friends who I’m fairly convinced are going to go live in the woods the first chance they get), I still find a number of believers in my church community who seem to think that political disengagement is an option. We might be forced to spend our money and time in ways that support the military-industrial complex, and forced to participate in social structures that perpetuate oppression, but at least we can wash our hands of some culpability by refusing to participate in the political decision-making that sustains these institutions. So the thinking goes.

I can empathize with this thinking, but I believe that it falls apart for anyone committed to loving their neighbors as Jesus commands us to. As the Apostle James states, true religion is both keeping oneself from the pollution of the world and looking after orphans and widows in their distress. Merely keeping oneself from worldly pollution fails to satisfy Christ’s commandment of neighborly love. The question therefore becomes how we engage with our society to enact that love, but also not become polluted by that engagement.

It’s easy to become polluted by politics—to let partisanship, or the love of power, or the feeling of being on the winning team drive our actions. But I think we can avoid that if we recognize that the purpose of our engagement in society—political, social, or otherwise—is to enact Jesus’ commandment of love. Politicians and laws can only get us so far, and even then will do so imperfectly. Ultimately the remaking of the world will only come with God’s love. In the meantime, what are the policies, laws, and leaders that will best help in enacting the ethic of neighborly love, and the defense of the most vulnerable?

Since it’s the most vulnerable that first bear the results of unjust and oppressive laws, it’s also worth acknowledging that the ability to separate oneself from politics is itself a sign of privilege. Just for instance, the hundreds of thousands of individuals who are facing the loss of their food stamps in the coming months due to decisions made by the presidential administration don’t have a choice to disengage from politics, and neither do my friends who are trying to help feed them. Neither do refugees, the disabled, civilians who live in places threatened by the prospect of more war, or many, many others. Those for whom politics is purely academic might want to consider the plight of people who don’t have the choice whether or not to engage in politics, for whom politics could be the line between life and death, and consider who God calls us to stand with.

Andrew Yang is an attorney and organizer in Philadelphia.