Love finally asks much more of us than justice or fairness; it asks us not only to respect and negotiate rights but to regard other human beings as our brothers and sisters with the potential to become like Heavenly Father and live with him eternally. Whereas fairness addresses the complexities of our mortal situation, love is the bond of a celestial eternity.
Both of these thoughtful and faithful young Latter-day Saints were effectively falling in with the “Love Wins” mentality, not out of any particular enthusiasm for sexual liberation or revolution in family structure, but according to the logic of universalism, inclusiveness, which indeed seems to be a defining gesture of the Gospel, and especially of Paul’s letters. Similarly, when an account of Elder Holland’s recent address at BYU Education Week, which included a strong warning against the rising tide of secularism, was published in the Deseret News, the first online comment that appeared chastised the apostle for erecting “walls” when he should be “building bridges.” It seems to me, though, that there is a pretty simple logical problem with this movement of thought: universalism is by itself empty and meaningless: there must be some content, some substance, to be universalized, something to be shared. A bridge must be from somewhere to somewhere. Every outreach presupposes an affirmation, every extension a center, every movement of compassion some understanding of the good, of what it would mean to heal. The enthusiasm for inclusiveness or the movement of compassion without regard to content is not only religiously suicidal but logically incoherent.
No distinction is admitted between desires for good eternal outcomes and bad ones, because any deliberate pursuit of goals is considered a denial of God’s grace. We are supposed to let go of what we think we want and simply be open to whatever God gives. There is no room in such a radical philosophy of grace for a plan of salvation or a “great plan of happiness” (Alma 42:8) – since planning itself is inherently sinful.
The counterfeiting of “love,” the central ideal of Christianity, for purposes directly contrary to basic Christian morality is a beguiling argument because it seems to allow an individual to avoid the hard choice between the Church and the world, the Tree of Life and the Great and Spacious Building.
If “love” can be reduced to “non-discrimination,” then one can be a true Christian by abandoning the burden of traditional Christian morality and embracing the ethics of a relativist society.
Unfortunately, this debasing of the idea of Christian love has proved attractive even among Latter-day Saints, including prominent voices in LDS higher education, who have every reason to know better.
The prospects for a respectful “pluralism” obviously remain dim as long as “civil rights” is interpreted to imply the absolutism of a “non-discrimination” in which sexual minorities, unlike religious minorities, are considered a favored class. That is, if people of traditional religious beliefs regarding sexual morality and the meaning of marriage are necessarily classified as intolerant, sexist and homophobic, then appeals to “religious liberty” will count for nothing against the exacting justice of “non-discrimination.” The appeal to “fairness” presupposes some minimal agreement on justice, and that is what increasingly appears to be lacking.
What is the thrust of these images, these appeals? What they imply is that there is no difficult question of constitutional law or political philosophy to examine, nothing to debate regarding moral and social purposes of the natural family or the ethical principles that underlie our social compact: the simple word “love,” and the feeling it is supposed to evoke, are held to have settled all such questions. If you are not against love, then you cannot oppose the indefinite expansion of “rights” protecting sexual expression and affirming diverse lifestyles. And who can be against love?
Progressive liberalism claims the authority of reason and of openness to a “diversity” of views and ways of life. But the Love Wins mantra reveals the sacred dogma that underlies the pose of open-minded rationalism: “love” understood as boundless acceptance and empathy, excluding all moral judgment, is the new, unquestioned standard of moral judgment. And the prestige of this secular love, impatient with all boundaries and standards, is clearly a residue (however distorted and misapplied) of the very Christianity that secularism must overcome. Secularism is the secularized residue of Christianity. And this residue, in the form of the ideology of “love,” wields amazing dogmatic authority in our supposedly free-thinking secular age.
Question every authority, progressive liberalism entices us, but do not even think about questioning “love,” meaning absolute acceptance and non-judgmental empathy, as the sole standard of human goodness. Never in the darkest of Christian “Dark Ages” did an ideological authority envision such a total domination over the human mind and heart as that asserted by the post-Christian humanistic religion of “love.”
One way of separating love from morality that is popular among LDS critics of the Church’s teachings on sexual morality and the family is to use the language of humility to set aside our moral principles while elevating “love” (now severed from definite moral principles) as the whole substance of religion.
Thus the counsel of Church Leaders is turned on its head: rather than standing up for an unpopular truth, we are urged, in the name of “humility” and of a “love” severed from commandments and eternal purposes, to consider all opinions as equally uncertain.
...If we have no reliable access to truth, then all views are mere individual “preferences” – and so why should any preference for one lifestyle or another be favored?
The essence of the Love Wins strategy is contained in this formula: the imperative to spread the message trumps any content of the message.
Our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, are the ultimate Givers. The more we distance ourselves from Them, the more entitled we feel. We begin to think that we deserve grace and are owed blessings. We are more prone to look around, identify inequities, and feel aggrieved—even offended—by the unfairness we perceive. While the unfairness can range from trivial to gut-wrenching, when we are distant from God, even small inequities loom large. We feel that God has an obligation to fix things—and fix them right now!
“Fairness,” at least under conditions of fundamental disagreement, is not the application of a clear shared standard, but an ongoing social and political process of realistic sensitivity to competing claims of rights. To participate productively in this process, we must “try to view others through a lens of fairness.”
Our “lens” of fairness is ultimately shaped, though, not by the complexities of our current cultural and political situation, but by our understanding of our relationship to Heavenly Father who “loves all of his children equally,” and who has commanded us to “love one another, as I have loved you.” It is this relationship that makes it possible, as Elder Rasband counsels us, to be “unyielding in right and truth yet still reach out in kindness.”
Above and beyond the challenge of fairness in a complex and indeed threatening social, political and cultural environment, there is, President Uchtdorf reminds us, “the first and great commandment” to love God and our fellowman. And this love is inseparable from obedience to God’s commandments: “it is those who obey the commandments who truly love God.” It is not the word “love,” or a mere feeling called “love” that fulfills the great commandment. Rather, “true conversion to the gospel of Jesus Christ and its values and principles will be witnessed by our actions in our daily lives.”
“In one of the Savior’s final lessons to His disciples,” Pres. Uchtdorf teaches, “he spoke to them of the final Judgment. The wicked and the righteous would be separated. The good would inherit eternal life; the wicked would be delivered to eternal punishment.” In being “fair” to those who reject the very distinction between righteousness and wickedness, we must never forget the reality of eternal consequences. Love must not be defined by the political complexities of “fairness;” rather, true fairness must be understood in the light of the only true love.
Love finally asks much more of us than justice or fairness; it asks us not only to respect and negotiate rights but to regard other human beings as our brothers and sisters with the potential to become like Heavenly Father and live with him eternally. Whereas fairness addresses the complexities of our mortal situation, love is the bond of a celestial eternity.