My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. … So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. For judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.
— James 2
I get what Adam Kotsko is shooting at in this post — “Stop saying ‘love’ when you really mean ‘liberal tolerance‘” — and that general point is worth remembering. Vague appeals to “Christian love” in support of some vague liberal idea are unlikely to be persuasive and shouldn’t be treated as a rhetorical trump card. They fail to respect the nature of the disagreements they are intended to resolve — which is that conservative/liberal or intolerant/tolerant Christians often are not disagreeing over whether or not one should be “loving,” but about what love demands or entails when such Christians encounter various sinners, unsaved outsiders, benighted heathens, witches, etc.
Or, in other words, when I invoke “love” to mean that I think the outcome of Obergefell v. Hodges was desirable, some other Christian might hear that word “love” and take it to mean they should “love the sinner, but hate the sin,” and thus display “tough love” by sending their gay son off to reparative therapy boot-camp.
We can’t assume that everyone hearing our appeals to “love” will understand that concept the same way we do. And when we implicitly argue that love requires “liberal tolerance,” we should be careful not to thereby imply that such tolerance is all that we mean by “love.”
In arguing that, Kotsko emphasizes this point: Love ≠ “liberal tolerance.”
That’s not wrong, but it’s misleading. A more accurate form of the equation might be this: Love > “liberal tolerance.”
Love and “liberal tolerance” are not the same. The former is greater than the latter. But the latter is a necessary prerequisite for the former. What Kotsko here describes as “liberal tolerance” refers to basic structural and procedural equality — what the second chapter of James describes as impartiality. It’s a bare-bones, bare-minimum expression of basic fairness. Without such basic fairness as a starting point, love becomes irrelevant and impossible.
Put another way, “liberal tolerance” is not a sufficient condition for love. But it is a necessary condition.
Such basic fairness or impartiality is not the only necessary condition, but take it away and love ceases to be a possibility. As James argues, partiality precludes love. It makes us “judges with evil thoughts,” rather than loving neighbors.
That’s a relatively minor quibble with Kotsko’s argument. Here is a relatively major disagreement: The mangled Hobbesian perversion he misrepresents as something like subsidiarity.
Further, does “love” mean supporting government policies to impersonally help someone? If my sister became homeless, I don’t think my go-to solution would be to write my Congressman and demand greater funding for shelters. And if you are trying to goad people into taking radically self-sacrificing actions on behalf of the homeless, or illegal immigrants, or whoever, I would remind you that love has degrees, and you may well learn that the person has enough on their love-plate with their day-to-day obligations to their own family.
Subsidiarity — what the scripture calls “an inescapable network of mutuality … a single garment of destiny” — is the form and expression of universal responsibility and universal relationship. Kotsko seems to have just invoked some garbled form of it in order to deny responsibility and circumscribe relationship.
This, too, is a way of precluding the possibility of love.
Now, to be clear, I gather that what he’s presenting here is not his own argument, but rather an illustration of the warped way that someone — some Randian Trumpvangelical, perhaps — might reinterpret a liberal Christian’s vague appeal to “love.” But since he provides such a compelling illustration of that, and then just leaves it hanging there uncorrected, we’re going to need to address why this anti-subsidiarity abomination is also expressly anti-love.
So let’s take that atrocious paragraph one sentence at a time:
Further, does “love” mean supporting government policies to impersonally help someone?
That is a question. It’s a question asked and answered by 2,000 years of Christian teaching. And the answer is “Yes.”
Again, “supporting government policies to impersonally help” others is not the only thing that love means. It is not the whole of love or a wholly sufficient expression of love. But it is a necessary element demanded by love. In the absence of that, love is absent.
This is where Christian social teaching talks about solidarity — the refusal to regard “others” as “impersonal” or unrelated/unconnected to ourselves. And more importantly, it is where Christian thought talks about subsidiarity — the shape and structure of our differentiated responsibility all-for-all.
The sleazy move here is the way Kotsko (i.e., his impression of the Randian Trumpvangelical) deploys the words “go-to solution” to imply a kind of zero-sum situation. It’s an either/or — do this or do that, one or the other. And that makes a complete mess of the idea of subsidiarity.
If my sister became homeless, I don’t think my go-to solution would be to write my Congressman and demand greater funding for shelters.
That either/or implication is disastrous. It tells us that responsibility is never complementary, and thus that our exclusive responsibilities are in competition with one another. That means you don’t have to help a homeless person unless it’s your own sister. And it means that no one else has to help your sister, or to help you help your sister. So you’re all on your own, and we’re all screwed.
A person becomes homeless. Do you bear some responsibility for that? Yes. Always and absolutely, yes, whoever “you” may be and whoever they may be. We all do, all for all. Our shared, complementary responsibility is determined by the particular nature of our particular situations in relation to that particular person. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” This differentiated responsibility — its directness or indirectness — varies for each of us based on proximity, role, and relationship.
I am a sibling, a son, a parent, a spouse, a congregant, a writer, a reader, an employee, a neighbor, a U.S. citizen, a Pennsylvanian, an Extonian, a passing motorist, an Earthling. My relationship with the homeless person in question may be shaped, directly or indirectly, by any one or several of those roles and identities. Each bears a different form and priority of responsibility, but those overlapping responsibilities do not preclude one another.
Kotsko’s libertarian character correctly suggests that he would bear a brother’s responsibility for his newly homeless sister, but it’s not correct to imagine that exempts him from also bearing a citizen’s responsibility — for her and for everyone else in a similar predicament. By arguing that his obligations as a brother exempt him from his obligations to anyone else — as a neighbor, a citizen, a professor — he’s actually making things much worse and much harder, both for himself and for his sister.
In other words, by saying that his responsibility as a brother precludes his responsibility as a citizen, he fails to meet his responsibility as a brother. Why? Because he’s attempting to remove himself and his sister from the inescapable network of mutuality that both he and his sister require to bear their weight. He wants to help his sister without the help of anyone else, and that’s impossible. That will fail.
The next sentence again references subsidiarity in a way that further distorts and deforms it:
… love has degrees, and you may well learn that the person has enough on their love-plate with their day-to-day obligations to their own family.
Welcome to the jungle.
That person over there “has enough on their love-plate with their day-to-day obligations to their own family” and thus cannot be asked or expected to bear even an indirect responsibility for anything more or to anyone else. And, therefore, no one else should be asked or expected to bear even an indirect responsibility for them or their family. Their employers, for example, cannot be expected to pay those folks a decent living wage or to maintain safe working conditions, because those employers, you know, already have enough on their love-plates with their own direct nuclear family obligations. Their neighbors cannot be expected to sustain quality schools. Their governments cannot be expected to maintain public safety, or public health, or the basic safety of food, water and air. Etc.
In such a world, no one bears any responsibility for writing their members of Congress about anything because either: A) the matter involves a direct kin, and so the “go-to solution” involves doing something other than seeking better laws and governance; or B) the matter does not involve direct kin, and so they have “enough on their love-plate” already without being obliged to do something about that too.
The same would be true, in such a world, for members of Congress themselves. Should they support policies that might help homeless families? Only if the families in question include their own sisters. And perhaps not even then.
Take away all indirect responsibility — mock and dismiss it as “writing my Congressman to demand greater funding for shelters” — and all of our more direct, more proximate responsibilities become enormously more challenging. If we begin to treat those direct responsibilities as exclusive — as precluding all of the indirect responsibilities — then we’re soon going to find that it’s impossible to manage them. Without the network of mutuality, we’re on our own for everything — which is to say, we’re screwed.
Screwing over ourselves, our neighbors, and our homeless sisters is not an expression of love. It is not compatible with any expression of love.
Again, that doesn’t mean subsidiarity is the same thing as love any more than “liberal tolerance” is the same thing as love. But the denial and rejection of either produces a Hobbesian nightmare in which love becomes an impossibility.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In