Unpublished Work on Love

The book begins with an exposition of the second love command—“love your neighbor as yourself”—which I take to be the heart of Jesus’s ethical vision. I argue that the command is concerned with shalom—the condition of a community in which the safety, sustenance, freedom, and dignity of all in the community are secure; the command, so I say, is an injunction to seek neighbor inclusion in shalom community, putting pursuit of that on a par with pursuit of one’s own inclusion in shalom community. I then take up the question of what sort of normative ethical theory is suggested by the command, investigation of which yields the book’s focal love ethic.

This in hand, I turn in chapter 2 to the question of how to think about violence from the standpoint of our ethic. On their face, Jesus’s teachings seem to endorse nonviolence: “You’ve heard it said an eye for eye, but I say don’t violently resist an evildoer.” I argue that things are as they seem here: Jesus’s teachings imply a radical nonviolentism.

In chapter 3, I consider how practitioners of our love ethic should orient themselves toward the modern state. States are extremely violent institutions, perhaps the most violent institutions on the planet. How should a practitioner of our love ethic posture himself or herself toward these institutions? I’ll argue that love either outright prohibits or enjoins attempts to minimize most types of participation in the state: voting, taxes, jury duty, military service, police service, holding office. I defend a version of “come-outerism,” à la nineteenth-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who urged withdrawal from involvement in the state as a means of avoiding complicity in its support of slavery. I then argue for a version of “Christian anarchism” on which there is no such thing as political authority—the power to promulgate laws in such a way as to generate obligations to obey those laws and the right to deploy violence in service of their enforcement. I urge, though, that practitioners of love should seek to cooperate with state authorities in various ways in service of the common good, and that they should aggressively engage the state by traditional methods of nonviolent direct action aimed at encouraging policymakers into more just and loving treatment of the vulnerable.

In chapter 4, I investigate the bearing of our love ethic on the use of walls by states to keep people out and to keep people in. More exactly, I’m interested here in state practices that keep people locked into prisons and locked out of state borders. Both sorts of practice by states are causes of enormous misery, enormous destruction of shalom for millions of people. Both sorts of practice are taken for granted in the modern world. Both sorts of practice, I claim, are radically at odds with our love ethic: The love command, I’ll argue, requires both prison abolition and open borders. I suggest ways votaries of love—those seeking to order their lives and treatment of neighbor in accordance with the love command—can seek to resist dehumanizing prison and border practices current in most contemporary states.

In chapter 5, I take up the question of how to think about economic marketplaces from the standpoint of our ethic, arguing that most market activity—buying, selling, et cetera—in developed, capitalist markets like the United States is morally unjustifiable, and that the upshot of all of this is that capitalism is a morally unjustifiable social practice. I consider how votaries of love can position themselves vis-à-vis markets in light of these arguments.