When Hate Masquerades as Righteousness

The Reverend Kay Dennis, Deacon

Episcopal Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

There is a chilling efficiency to hate. It does not need to be taught—only permitted. It hides behind ordinary faces, speaks fluent language of grievance, and often masquerades as moral clarity. Yet, beneath its well-rehearsed indignation lies something far older and darker than politics, religion, or ideology. Hate, as Scripture reminds us, is not a sociological problem to be solved, but a spiritual infection to be named, resisted, and redeemed.

In the First Letter of John, we hear words as clear as daylight: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.” It is not a verse to embroider on a pillow. It cuts deep, exposing our self-deceptions. We prefer to imagine that hate belongs to extremists and monsters, not to the anxious, wounded, and self-assured people we see in the mirror. Hate, too, rarely arrives looking like evil; it slips in disguised as understanding — as the voice that validates our anger and promises to stand on our side.

The world today is fluent in hate’s dialect. Social media, politics, even the pulpit can become stages where contempt is rewarded with applause. Hate is the narcotic of the powerless and the poison of the powerful. It gives us a rush of righteousness while hollowing us out from within. It tells us we are protecting something noble—our faith, our families, our way of life—while in truth we are bowing before a false god of division.

Christ’s command to love one’s enemies is not merely sentimental advice. It is refusing to let evil have the last word. Love, in this context, is not an emotion but an act of resistance. It means refusing to return contempt for contempt, refusing to let our hearts be colonized by the very darkness we condemn. It means dwelling in the ache between what is and what could be, refusing to let hatred ease the weight of hope.

But we must be honest: love in this sense will always feel cruciform. The cross is not the place where hate is ignored or excused—it is where hate is unmasked and defeated. Christ does not meet hate with denial but with endurance. His body becomes the battlefield where divine love absorbs every blow of human cruelty and still, somehow, does not strike back.

If hate thrives on fear and false certainty, love thrives on courage and hope. And courage, the old theologians remind us, is not the absence of fear—it is acting rightly in spite of it. The church, if it is to mean anything in our fractured age, must be the community where that courage is practiced daily: where strangers sit beside one another in prayer; where repentance is not shame but freedom; where love’s light, faint though it may seem, still reveals hate for what it is—a defeated enemy.

For hate may have its hour. But love, crucified and risen, has eternity.