In Praise of Hatred

“Hate that which is evil. Cling to that which is good.” Romans 12:9

“A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancor, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.”

Edmund Burke


Hate gets a bum rap. Here all hate is doing is being the visceral counter-reaction to all that is loved and hate gets hated on. Hate gets maligned with ideas of “hate-crimes,” and “hate-speech,” and “hate-facts.” No one ever faults love when it is invoked for lust and yet hate takes it on the chin by receiving all the bad press and that even when employed properly.

You literature fans… where would you be without hate? How could you have a five star novel without the nobility of hatred in the building conflict? Could Dicken’s, “A Tale of Two Cities” ever have gotten off the ground without building our hatred for Madame De Farge? Would you have ever read Tolkien without Gollum? What would be Beowulf without hatred for Grendel? Even in the Scriptures we keep turning the pages to finally see the Serpent’s head fully crushed.

And what of history? History would be boring if there weren’t people to justly hate. Whether it is Vikud Quisling or Benedict Arnold. Whether it is Judas or Julian the Apostate. Whether it is Pope Francis or Bloody Mary, history wouldn’t be history without a proper hatred for the proper people.

For these reasons alone I think hatred should be toasted. Love gets all the credit but without hated hatred love would just be another ho hum passion losing the ability to be repulsed by what contradicts it.

Consider, for a second, the consequences to our culture because so many have decided that hate is bad. Because we are seeking to ban hate that which fills the vacuum of its absence is tolerance. The consequence of embracing tolerance in place of a full on loving of hate is not that hate disappears but rather is subtly re-directed. We are taught hate is bad and tolerance is good with the result that we now hate ourselves all the while telling ourselves how loving we are being. We used to properly hate those who were seeking to overthrow our the values of a culture that was, at least in part, Christian. Now, we are convinced that it is horrid to hate the opposite what we used to love. It used to be noble to hate sodomy, hate abortion, hate LGBTQ’ism, hate the stranger and alien whose cultural baggage promised the overthrow of our own beloved cultural values. So, hate hasn’t gone away. It has merely changed zip codes. We used to hate the opposite of that which we loved. Now we merely hate ourselves as we tolerate that which is destroying us. We once hated sodomy but we were taught that particular hate was bad and so we replaced our hate with tolerance with the result that we ended up hating our sons as we created a culture wherein they could more easily embrace sodomy. But… hey, it’s all good because we now have the ability to tolerate our sodomite sons. We once hated abortion but we were taught that particular hate was bad and so we replaced our hate with tolerance with the result that we ended up hating our daughters as we created a culture wherein they could more easily secure that needed abortion. We once hated tattoos but we were taught that particular hate was bad and so we replaced our hate with tolerance with the result that we ended up hating our sons and daughters as we created a culture wherein they could more easily ink themselves up. Again… hatred, being an inescapable concept, hasn’t really gone away, it’s merely relocated itself so that we hate ourselves and our kin.

If the God of the Bible hates (Ps.139:22; 119:63; Prov. 6:16-19) , and if we are supposed to aspire to character of God as seen in Christ then hate should be lauded. We see the hate of our Lord Christ in the way He spoke to His enemies and in His expertise in driving out the Bankers out of the Temple. Hate, glorious hate.

Indeed Scripture presses upon God’s people to properly hate.

Ecclesiastes 3

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

8 a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

Psalm 139

Do I not hate those who hate you, Lord,
and abhor those who are in rebellion against you?
22 I have nothing but hatred for them;
I count them my enemies.

Proverbs 8:13

The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech I hate.

And yet we are still told my our clergy corps that Christians ought not to hate instead of being taught that Christians ought not to hate unrighteously and so improperly. In being taught not to hate by our Clergy what we are being taught, by force of inevitability, is the virtue of tolerance, which, as we enumerated above, merely re-locates the address of the inescapable hate so that we become self-haters.

Ironically, in the Church’s “war on hate,” as led by our emasculated clergy, what ends up happening is that Western Christians are having their auto-immune system shutdown so that everything that would have been rejected by the glorious work of auto-immune hate is now slipping through and sickening the Christian faith unto death. Instead of our hate energized auto-immune system spitting out the Aimee Byrds, Greg Johnsons, and Sean Michael Lewis instead without Biblical hate we are infected by their viruses.

No other faith system is doing this to itself. It seems that Western Christians alone have decided that Christians need to love everybody in a multicultural orgy which is promissory of the death of Western Christianity since it can no longer resist the death viruses of a border-less world, New World Order globalism, and the diminution, disappearance or enslavement of the Occidental Christian race which Christ has been pleased, as seen in history, to retain as the carriers of His faith across the world.

Another way this demented war on haters is seen is in the rabid opposition against opposition. The only thing that can be strongly opposed is strong opposition. To strongly oppose is to be “too intense,” or “not morally sensitive,” or even “Fascist.” It is just not good form or socially acceptable to bare one’s teeth at anybody or anything. It is possibly acceptable to be pro-life, pro-borders, pro-marriage, pro-truth in media, pro-just hiring practices but just try being anti-baby killers, anti-immigration, anti-sodomites, anti-lugenpresse, and anti-race quotas. Just see how the invitations to the societal soirees begin to decline. We are so afraid of rabid and reasonable opposition that we will not tolerate plain speaking and insist on circumlocutions in order to avoid being labeled (gasp) “haters.” Of course being “anti-racist,” and anti, “anti-Semite” still is considered acceptable hate and will get you a pass into all just the right parties.

Whence comes this war on hate? Let me offer a few guesses,

1.) A few days ago a friend of mine who is one of the sharpest laymen I know wrote me and reported,

Yesterday morning we tuned into the church webcast to learn that it doesn’t really matter what you know (those were his words) because all you need is LUV. He then spent 20 minutes expounding on that theme.”

I have no empirical data but I suspect that this kind of preaching is not that uncommon in Churches (conservative and liberal) across the nation. If all you need is LUV then hating hate is the preeminent virtue for any Christian.

2.) The ubiquitous conviction by dumbed down Americans that “all is well.” Despite the fact that we are living in an epoch that never called more for hatred of the best vintage we remain convinced that “all is well,” and anybody who says to the contrary is to be shunned. Dr. Andrew Joyce says it well,

Merely sharing your feelings of intense dislike, now termed “inciting hatred,” has been deemed criminal conduct in scores of Western countries. Criminal conduct! This despite the fact there has never been a point in our history more deserving of the deepest loathing, the most scathing contempt, and the most vicious hatred.”

Here we are living with effeminate Churches, chaste queer clergy in skinny jeans and sleeve tattoos, mass immigration of strangers and aliens for whom toilets are a novelty, public library Tranny reading hour, the enstupidification of America’s students, and we are being told that it is just so gauche to express the finest hatred, loathing, barbs of detest, rancor, enmity, and bitterness, that one can find within them. If there was a time for Menckenian opprobrium this is it. If ever we should marshal the sarcasm of Ambrose Bierce, this is it. Let us call down the giftedness of skewering as found in Nock, Johnson, and Chesterton. Our great love for the pure makes this properly a “time for hatred.”

3.) Post-modernism disallows us to characterizes anything as objectively bad. Nothing is intrinsically virtuous and so to be loved and nothing is intrinsically vile and so to be hated. We can handle hearing people say, “I love this or that,” because post-mondernism and deconstructionism teaches us that these kinds of value statements are person variable. However to say, “I hate this or I hate that,” we immediately recoil since that has the ring of a universal statement. How care anybody hate anything since nothing is intrinsically hateful.

4.) We hate Christ. Christ had no problem hating that which was hateful but since we hate Christ we refuse to hate what His Word identifies as hateful.

Conclusion

We have need to understand that there is an effect to this cause. When we choke off our ability to hate we, by necessity diminish our ability to love since love and hate are but the same emotion as pointed in opposite directions. We hate that which contradicts what we love and we love that which reverses or suffocates what we hate. If we cannot hate our capacity to love will be stunted and deformed. Indeed so related are love and hate that should you ever meet someone who tells you they don’t have a bone of hatred in their body, you can be sure you are talking too either a sociopath or a psychopath. Run for your life.

Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

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