The Law of Love

Last night Christian McBride and I played in Kansas City, birthplace of Charlie Parker. In the hotel we stayed, they were playing Wynton Kelly Trio, Bobby Timmons and Coltrane in the lobby sound system while we waited for our rooms. Things can’t be all bad!

It’s been tough to see what’s happening in my country though. I don’t mean in an abstract political sphere, but on the ground in the cities Christian and I have visited so far on our tour. In Minneapolis a few days ago, I walked by many people caught in the net of opioid addiction, using intravenously on the streets. In Burlington, VT, our uber driver described how many murders there have been of late, as a result of drug-dealing and crime. I’ve seen this in San Francisco and Portland, and other cities I’ve played in, over the last few years. Something is broken in my country. Lots of people are hurting.

There is a striking dissonance for Christian and me, between the sympathetic audience that greets us, and this almost dystopian scene close at hand, just outside the doors of the venue. I have taken to sometimes remarking to the audience that, yes, we are in a bubble. We are in a bubble for the next hour and a half, so let’s acknowledge that. I feel grateful that I have this bubble, but still uneasy. The nature of a bubble, in any case, is that it pops. It’s temporary. That’s what we have, as musicians now. Please don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying that it’s not “enough”, and there should be something more that I’m doing right now. I’m not saying that, because I don’t know what that would be, in terms of being a musician on a stage. In any case, I’m not imagining I will save the world with a really good solo on a Cole Porter tune.

The unwarranted military presence in several cities in the United States is an awful parallel development. I am unsettled and feel a sensation when I read about these events that is something like fear. But my fear, as a Caucasian man in my present fortunate circumstances, is not direct – not yet, anyways. By “direct fear”, I mean the terror I imagine that people felt when their homes were broken into recently in Chicago by federal agents. They were not read any warrant, and the majority of them were U.S citizens. They were handcuffed and detained for hours with no explanation. Christian and I will perform in Chicago tonight.

I feel bad for those people, just as I feel bad for the drug-addicted, homeless and mentally ill people I’ve seen on the streets in other cities where Christian and I have been performing. That reads perhaps as a rather naïve sentiment, but there’s a point I want to make.

The current administration assaults us continuously with pugilistic us-and-them messages. One of its favorite bylines is that compassion, itself, is a phony “liberal” virtue. Trump and his henchmen and women are pushing the idea that caring about the welfare of others who are less fortunate than you are is weak, misguided, or even immoral. They justify this by painting a dark, fearful picture of America, in which there is no room for such sentiment. (They do not, and have never, described a vision of my country that I recognize.) In place of compassion, there is an argument - if one could call it that, if one considers it coherent – for strength, for a strong unified front against a common enemy. The enemy is widespread: it is foreign; it is “radical leftist”; increasingly, it seems that the enemy is simply anyone who disagrees with Trump’s authoritarianism.

Compassion, though, is not an exclusively liberal, leftist, or progressive virtue. I’ll now use another word for compassion – for that principle, for that spiritual force. It’s a very old-fashioned, simple word: Love. The biggest failure of Trumpism is that it forsakes love as a value. This is why it will never “win” in the long-term, because it runs on the fumes of hatred and fear. You do not need to be a bleeding-heart liberal, a progressive, a socialist, or anything else, to believe in love, nor to give and receive love. Love is universal. Hatred may be universal as well, but it is secondary. It might win in the short-term, but hatred is parasitic to love. Love is primary. Every great accomplishment in humanity proves that, perennially, no matter how long it takes.

Love underwrites the political framework of a democracy. That is not pie-in-the-sky thinking, and it’s not a new idea. It also has never been easy to actualize, as we know. You could argue that it’s impossible to actualize, but that we should never give up. The reason why love will always be difficult to actualize in a democracy, even as it sustains some of its most cherished values, is that it cannot be obligatory in any political sense. It can only be a voluntary act from one to another, from all of us to each other. This tension between a call to love and a call to freedom in a democracy is as great a challenge as it’s ever been.

In another setting, though, there is indeed a law of love. It’s the one that Christ gave us when asked which is the greatest commandment in the Law:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22.37-40)

Christ’s words are as radical now as they have always been, because he names love as a law. His words remain, necessarily, in the domain of religion and not the political sphere, but they are there for us, as a guide, if we wish.

I invoke Christ’s second Great Commandment here in particular, the call to love our neighbor as ourself, because I want to bear witness and say: When you call yourself a Christian, and you support and sanction the Trump administration’s hate and fear-mongering, you are not following that commandment. You are not following your own professed ethics.

Charlie Kirk called himself a Christian, but his words repeatedly maligned The Great Commandment. He did not have a message of love. Furthermore, intellectually speaking, he was pint-sized. He was a young man and didn’t know much. He had a collection of unoriginal, incoherent ideas with little grounding in the philosophical and theological tradition he was haphazardly citing. He was not well-read. If he was, he would have demonstrated that it in his ideas. If this sounds snooty or mean-spirited, I do not apologize, because ideas count, and learning counts. I am not happy that Charlie Kirk was murdered, but I do not have intellectual respect for his ideas, and whatever legacy they will leave. A nuanced and learned understanding of history, the history of ideas and the way they play out, is necessary for any meaningful debate – especially if you are going to invoke history, and theology.

In the locus of discourse for Charlie Kirk and others like him, this understanding does not come into play. Their game is a rapid-fire gotcha kind of exchange, and it appeals most directly to a juvenile, testosterone-stoked audience. It is indicative of the intellectual vapidity of the MAGA movement. If we enter into an exchange with MAGA, we are confronted with an opponent who holds no accountability for the clarity and logic of their ideas, and sees no need for it. There is no obligation on their part to critical thinking.

Critical thinking does not refer to highlighting the inconsistency of your opponent’s view, which is a feature of any debate. It means acknowledging the inconstancies in your own view. That requires humility, which Charlie Kirk did not demonstrate. He was smug. Critical thinking, by its nature, will accordingly not furnish a black-and-white answer in a thirty-second YouTube short. It can and must be a feature of any substantive analysis or debate, though. Acknowledging, and even welcoming the “grey” in an argument is the duty and legacy of liberal thinking as I understand it, and there is no need to apologize for that impulse, just as there is no need to pander to an illiberal impulse to shut down discourse through coercion.

The other failure of Trumpism is the foolish idea that compassion is a kind of weakness. Love is not weak. The strength of love prevails, and it is strongest when it is challenged by hatred. This means that we have to resist the actions of the current administration. This is not a call to violence. Trump is the one inciting violence, and disregarding the rule of law, just as he incited the violence that led to the treasonous January insurrection, through lies. We need to stand in unity against that. As the great Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis wrote, in order to combat militant fascism: “You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.”

C.S. Lewis also reminds us that it is possible to practice the law of love and still hate. This is what it means to be human and to have a moral conscience in a time of conflict:

For a good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. (from Mere Christianity)

Whatever your relationship to religion is, whatever feelings you have about that word, “sin”, it seems to me that Lewis’ admonishment is the right one. Otherwise, you will get caught in the same kind of destructive wrath as the person you’re judging. We can allow ourselves hatred – but not at a person directly. If we give into hating the person directly, we are forfeiting the law of love. We have to somehow still love them, as a fellow human-being. It’s a paradoxical but unavoidable element of Christian ethics.

And what about when the wheels hit the pavement, when abstract ethics meets the emotional reality, and translates into an action? Well, we have the figure of Christ himself, preserved in all the gospels, storming the temple which has turned into a marketplace. He behaves violently, one could say – turning over tables, whipping the merchants and money changers with a cord. We may ask: In that moment, did Christ himself feel direct hatred towards them? How does that square away with his Great Commandment?

Really, though, we’re invited in this account to ask that question of ourselves, to measure our own hatred. Populism, and a slide towards authoritarianism, is not only American. I live in Europe now and see its hue there. There is a broader discussion about how we’ve gotten here, about where decades of neoliberal policy have led us, and there is all the finger-pointing that ensues. The American expression of this historical impasse, though, gets me thinking about our relationship, as Americans, with our old-time religion. I do not speak of someone’s personal beliefs, or lack of. I refer to this fine line between righteous anger and hatred, and how that plays out in our society, right now.

St. Augustine identified the original, most pernicious sin as pride. Pride, unbridled, can lead us towards idiot hatred. Pride is diabolical, because, unchecked, it employs one’s very faculty of reasoning in the service of mindless violence. Whatever your ethical orientation, you have to square away with your motives. If you’re going storm into the temple, is that only based in wrath, the desire for vengeance? Or, is it still governed, however uneasily, by the law of love? This is the question many of us might ask, as we consider a way of resisting the actions of the Trump administration, with its free-fall into authoritarianism.

It is hard, I admit, not to feel direct hatred for so many of the odious figures in Trump’s circle. It is hard not to feel hatred for the masked ICE troops we see. It is hard not to feel hatred for Trump’s loudest supporters in the populace. It was hard not to feel contempt (a form of hatred, tempered and mediated by pride, by feeling superior) for Charlie Kirk, when I would hear him speak. He displayed the kind of self-satisfied glibness, where I would just think, “What a prick.” For someone else attracted by him, that was his holy fire, I suppose. When YouTube clips of him appeared in my feed and I watched them, it led nowhere – except to my own hatred. Then I would be aware of that base emotion, and walk it back. I would chide myself, and say, “Are you really getting pulled into this?”

At the age of 55, it is embarrassing to get caught up in the fervor. You want to think that you’ve moved beyond that. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that I’m saying that I want to shut my eyes to what’s happening. But I don’t want to get stuck in the righteous indignation too much, because it if it gets ramped up, it turns to hatred, hatred towards the person directly.

One might say, “This is the point. They are trying to stir up your hatred.” There is no doubt some truth to that. But here is the problem. I’m then into “us” and “them”. I am assigning an intention to a large group of people, and I am denying them their individuality. That is also a facet of hatred that I want to avoid – dehumanizing people, making them a mass. We know how that plays out in history.

How can we measure the intentions of people we don’t know directly? Trump himself clearly delights in stirring up hatred. It is for him as intentional as it is instinctive. We know this person by now. But what about the others, doing his work? Stephen Miller seems fueled by some poisonous resentment of his own. He is less intentional in his hatred, even as he is calculating. Then, there is J.D. Vance – more intentional, an opportunist with emotional distance who stays cool in the fire, playing the long game (probably for the presidency). And then, there are the grifters on the sidelines – incoherent, burlesque, spouting conspiracies. Their only goal is to win the day and stay at the front of the line in online visibility.

It’s a rotten bunch. I admit that I give into hatred towards them more than I wish, and I try to hold to the principle of hating the sin and not the sinner, in my own more agnostically minded version. This means, though, squaring away, at least provisionally, with the notion of sin. In Judeo-Christian theology, sin is elemental. It depends on the prior existence of evil. The story of The Fall is unequivocal in that regard, but it also gives us the problem of evil. Why, if God is omnipotent, did he allow this evil to fold itself into our genesis?

The answers from the theologians often rest on our free will: God allowed evil just as he allows us free choice to give into its temptation, or avoid it. This has never been satisfying to me because it seems like an amendment, written in afterwards, to explain something that’s essentially unexplainable. Nevertheless, the Fall story is so powerful because it’s open-ended. On the one hand, it tells us that we are already damned, born into sin. On the other hand, it presents us with something undeniably humanistic, telling us, “You are allowed to choose. Make your own decision.”

My faculty of choice is uniquely human, but I can’t let it go to my head. There is this call to make the good choice, the one that preserves my humanity. My humanity rests not only on my free will, but on that law of love. If I lose that, in my heart, I’ve lost everything.

Brad Mehldau, Oct. 10, 2025

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