We Need Americans Who Love More Than Just Americans

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

These are days that test our belief systems.

I used to believe that all people were essentially the same; that across the diving lines of politics and religion, and beneath the surface veneer of native language and superficial labels that we were all really fighting for the same things.

I spent over two decades as a pastor, ministering under the assumption that we are all in this together, that we're all for one another, that at a heart level we're much more similar than we are different.

I don't know if I believe that any longer.

I'm meeting too many people right now in America who really don't seem to want the things that I want, at least not for other people: peace, safety, health, opportunity, joy.

I think they want those things for their kids as I do for mine, and so in this respect we're the same but that's about where our paths diverge.

But when it comes to those people they don't naturally feel affinity for or have obvious commonality with, it really seems like they couldn't care less. Actually, it seems they're openly hostile to them.

Last week after a speaking event, a woman talked about connecting on a relational level with people she views as her adversaries across the aisles of religion and politics.

"Deep down," she said, "all parents want the same thing: they want their kids to be healthy and happy and safe, and for them to be able to live beautiful, productive lives. So, we’re not so different.”

I knew what she was trying to say and I suppose that's likely true, but it also isn't good enough in the days in which we find ourselves. In times when those in the highest levels of government are perpetuating prejudice and trafficking in tribalism, we need to be people who love on a greater scale than that.

Most decent human beings love and want to care for their children. The desire to protect our own is a hard-wired brain feature built on millions of years of self-preservation and survival instincts. It's certainly good but it isn't all that virtuous, either.

This natural impulse explains the rising silos we find ourselves in: people hunkered down in heavily-fortified bunkers alongside those they deem "their people,” whether that distinction is based on race or religion or nation of origin or political affiliation.

This highly selective, self-preserving compassion is the very heart of America First.
It's the foundation of a border wall or mass deportation.
It's the reason someone applauds ICE raids or travel bans, or opposes free lunch programs or universal health care: they don’t want someone else to have something they have.

The cruel religion, fierce Nationalism, and rising hostility toward marginalized communities on display in America right now, is the fruit of a toxic selfishness that needs to horde resources, opportunity, and benefit for fear it will be left without. It turns national borders into battle lines, foreign people into adversaries.

And so right now, the real conflict in America isn't between good people and bad people, it's between open-handed people and closed-fisted people. It is a war to cultivate compassion or contempt for those who have less or appear different.

Poised on either sides of the debate in matters of education and healthcare and faith and immigration, aren't people who love their children and people who don't—but people who love all children, and those who care only for their own. There are people who view humanity on a global scale and those who draw stark lines between them all.

In this very fundamental way we're not the same.

Yes, I agree that most people in America want similar things for themselves and for those they see as their family, their people, their tribe.

I just believe that isn't enough.

I believe Humanity is the greater tribe we are called to care for.

My Christian faith tradition tells me that love for my neighbor is my great aspiration and calling, but it also tells me that everyone is my neighbor: not just those who speak my language or share my pigmentation or share my politics or believe in my God.

I can either see myself as a citizen of the diverse, expansive planet, or I can make my home in a gated community of people who look, think, talk, and believe like me. Too many folks right in this country right now have settled on the latter—and this is the moral civil war we find ourselves in. The phrase America First ultimately seems to really mean America only. The expansive Biblical declaration of Jesus, “For God so loved the world…” has been shrunken down to occupy a much smaller footprint than that. These realities both help explain the cruelty we’re seeing gain traction here from our neighbors to our churches to the White House.

This nation has no shortage of people who care about their kids.
It is, however, in desperate need of people who care about someone else's children with a similar passion and urgency; who want every child to be free from threat and fed well and given hope and encouraged to dream and released to be whatever that dream invites them to be.

America needs more lovers of the totality of humanity, more people whose compassion has no borders and whose love has no walls.

Loving your child is a fine and beautiful thing, America. I applaud that.

I just believe this moment asks much more than that of us.

Whether or not we're willing is another matter.