Progressive "Love" Isn't Love

Ukraine, et al.

Love is at the heart of everything we do. So, we had better know what it means and how to apply it because, if we aren’t careful, “love” can become the most destructive force in the world.

Perhaps you’ve heard progressivism and conservatism explained as a spectrum of love and truth. The farther you go toward the progressive end, the more you become too focused on love at the expense of truth. And, on the other side of the coin, over-doing conservatism means that truth has begun to outweigh love. As one progressive said, “I’d rather err on the side of love.”

The problem is, it just doesn’t work that way.

You can have truth without love (1 Corinthians 13:1), but you can’t have love without truth. Love is not a mushy feeling, or a general sense of “niceness.” It is a genuine desire for the other person’s ultimate best interest. That raises the question: how do you calculate someone’s objective best interest without truth?

Anything that presents itself as love that lacks such truth will not only fall short of being truly loving—it will lead to serious harm.

There is nothing deadlier—in the most literal sense—than a progressive Christian's "love.”

Because they talk so much about love, we tend to think of them as loving people. But when you look at the fruits of the love they espouse, it’s not possible to continue seeing them that way. This is what John wrote about in 1 John 3:17:

“Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.”

There are numerous points where this can be seen

The classic example is with abortion and LGBTQ issues

By taking a soft tone on these cultural sore spots, the progressives aim to position themselves as the ones who show Christian love. And the propaganda works—just look at how instantly defensive many Christians get when these issues come up, always having to add the caveat that we don’t hate these people just because we strongly oppose their actions.

But of course we don’t hate them. We aren’t the ones who are “loving” them into continuing to kill their children and heap up tremendous psychological damage on themselves, or to enter into a life of sexual deviancy, riddled with increased likelihood of drug and alcohol abuse along with domestic abuse and self-harm.

The most loving thing we can do for these people is to show them how destructive their decisions are and how Christ demands their repentance. Why is that considered unloving?

Most recently, it has been with regard to the Ukraine war

The war between Russia and Ukraine is obviously a complicated situation that I’m not going to hash out here. But it’s been strange to see my anti-political progressive friends roll out the blue and yellow, #standwithukraine posts with demands that seem compassionate but, if implemented, could lead to millions of more deaths or even World War III.

Again, it’s a complicated issue. But framing it as an argument between the loving and the selfish is not just unfair—it’s dangerously wrong.

The examples are endless, though

Women leadership in the church, gentle parenting, making worship about visitors, the Covid/BLM debacles of 2020, avoiding controversial truths, soft-pedaled evangelism… the list could go on. In some way or another, all of these have a side that stakes its claim as the loving option, yet in practice results in harm.

The spirit of the age says that love means accommodating people’s whims and never making them feel uncomfortable or telling them they’re wrong. In a word, this kind of love is not love—it’s cowardice. As The White Stripes once sang, “You don’t know what love is, you just do as you’re told.”

As our Lord taught us, fruits are the true measure of a teaching. Christ-like love blesses people. Fake love curses people.

So, we have to be in the habit of looking at a destination and not just the on-ramp. If somebody claims to have love on their side, the road they point to might look awfully heart-warming and sound super Godly. But look where that road leads.

On the other hand, true love entails being willing to be called hateful and unloving for pointing to someone’s best interests. No amount of PR spin will give this road the warm fuzzies of the other path, but its end is where we want people to be.

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Notes

• We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about this week’s Think Deeper Podcast episode on the theology of church hymns and which ones we’d drop from the book. Head over to Focus Press to check it out!

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