Bring Back Hate It's a lost virtue in a lost time

All these years later, I still remember the woman’s face. It was the early 1990s and I was working for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, a liberal activist group in Washington, DC. My branch dealt with juvenile justice issues. One day we had a meeting with the head of a DC youth services advocacy group and a member of the DC government. The woman from the youth advocacy group was incensed that, due to some kind of bureaucratic logjam, teenage girls in the district had to wait several days to get abortions. The woman practically climbed out of her chair with venom. "These girls need to get these abortions!" she cried.

I was a young, dumb liberal at the time, but I felt jolted. For days, then weeks, then months, now years, I never forgot her rage–a rage that more young girls were not killing their babies. I wrestled with the power of the emotion I felt. Today, older and wiser, I have come to embrace what I felt, and feel, as a good thing. I felt hate.

It’s time to bring back hate. To be sure, as a Christian it is important that I try to separate my hate for evil from the person pushing evil, whether it’s a morally kneecapped woman screaming for abortion, a rapist or a thief. Hate the sin and love the sinner and all that. But increasingly in our culture, the rule is, psychoanalyze the sinner and explain away the sin through socioeconomics–either that or it spills vats of hate on silly targets, like the president. We are in desperate need of the real thing, saved for an appropriate target.

Conservatives have made good careers of exposing the lack of hate in certain quarters of the country–or rather, the misuse of hate. Leftists put up websites comparing George Bush to Hitler and call his administration "the most dangerous in the history of America" (Pacifica host Ambrose Lane). Far-right activists also indulged in this kind of thing with Clinton, but were often rebuked by their own brethren (I’m reminded of a pan of a conspiracy book about Vince Foster that I recall seeing in the Weekly Standard).

Unlike conservatives, liberals can’t abide the idea that some acts are in and of themselves intrinsically evil, in every situation, and must be met with pure hate. The murder of Matthew Shepard produced well-deserved keening and hate-fueled rage at the pure unambiguous evil of it. Yet when a Catholic social worker was murdered for questioning the homosexuality of a man, there was a grim, evasive silence in the media. This isn’t simply a game about bias or lack of emphasis. It’s cowardice.

Bill O’Reilly makes a living off exposing the lack of good clean hate in America. On one memorable show, O’Reilly cornered a lawyer about her defense of a child molester and killer who had been caught red-handed. The lawyer explained that even the worst criminal is innocent until proven guilty, and that everyone deserves a defense in America. O’Reilly was shocked that she would defend such a person, but even more shocking was the lawyer’s utter lack of hatred. Her tone was measured as she gingerly kept steering the conversation away from her client’s crimes. She was, to quote an old line from M*A*S*H, a tower of Jell-o.

I dare say that even Christ was capable of hate–a hatred born of righteous anger, to be sure, and directed at sin and not people, but hate nonetheless. The most obvious example is the moneychangers, but the Lord also seemed less than sanguine when he promised "eternal hellfire" for sinners.

One of the great works of literature inspired by Christ is The Lord of the Rings, and the ubiquity of virtuous hatred in the books and films has left some people uncomfortable. Recently, the film version of The Two Towers, the second installment of the trilogy, was released on DVD. Watching it again, I was reminded of the despair exhibited by some critics. One reviewer was put off by the breathtaking scene when the armies of the West come face-to-face with the armies of the evil wizard Saruman. The good soldier Aragorn calls to his men, "Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none."

Aragorn’s army is beaten back into a corner of the castle, and his king feels all is lost. "What can men do against such reckless hate?" he wonders.

To one critic, this response was too clean and easy–and too evocative of the "hysteria" following September 11. The left has continually tried to muffle Americans’ hatred for radical Islam by equating it with racial profiling, but that hasn’t worked. Americans know evil when they see it, and all the social and economic reports from Amnesty International won’t change that.

Probably the best primer on virtuous hate is in a long-forgotten little pamphlet from 1972. It is called "A Priest for All Seasons Masculine and Celibate," and written by Conrad W. Baars, a Catholic psychiatrist who was a consultant to the Vatican. Much of the problem in the priesthood, Baars noted, is the lack of masculinity–a masculinity intertwined with a healthy hatred of evil. His ideas, he acknowledged, will sound "strange in times in which so many wish for love and fulfillment, and equate charity with not hurting other people’s feelings. Strange in times that too many priests, in seeking to promote peace and justice, seem meek in the defense of absolute truths."

He goes on: "The idea of modern man–and a priest at that–being a fighter may seem ridiculous when those to whom the welfare of society has been entrusted imagine, as Josef Pieper says, the power of evil not so gravely dangerous that one could not ‘negotiate’ or ‘come to terms with it.’ It seems that personal charity, brotherly love, and fortitude need to play only a subordinate role in a welfare society whose liberalistic world view–characterized by a resolute worldliness, an earthy optimism, and a middle-class metaphysics, anxiously bent on security–is blind to the existence of evil in the world of men, as well as in the world of spirits."

Baars then moves from this to a bracing defense of hate and anger: "[T]he feeling of hate for the nongood is necessary to move man to oppose it effectively even when it no longer constitutes a personal threat."

It will be interesting to see if we can sustain this perspective in the war on terror. It has all but disappeared in almost every other segment of American life.

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It’s time to bring back hate. To be sure, as a Christian it is important that I try to separate my hate for evil from the person pushing evil, whether it’s a morally kneecapped woman screaming for abortion, a rapist or a thief. Hate the sin and love the sinner and all that. But increasingly in our culture, the rule is, psychoanalyze the sinner and explain away the sin through socioeconomics–either that or it spills vats of hate on silly targets, like the president. We are in desperate need of the real thing, saved for an appropriate target.

Oh, say — that's good.

Dan
Biblical Christianity web site

The good soldier Aragorn calls to his men, "Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none."

To me, this was the stupidest line in the whole film. Anyone who was there at the deep already knew what the score was. In no way was there room for talk or barganing. Any Elf or free man knew the tales of old and how their enemy was created and what the result of defeat meant for them and their families.

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