What if we brought love into politics?

I sympathize with not wanting to hear a story like that. But what if we have a responsibility to hear it? What if there exists some obligation to pay attention to the news we don’t want to hear? Not because it’s our job as patriots to be informed, or as voters to gather data — but because as humans, it’s our responsibility to love one another.

I know, I know: Love is not a word we tend to utter in public venues. Love, we reason, is a private word, which individuals share in intimate settings. It’s not a word we toss around when it comes to describing our feelings about lots of other people. But why not? We have no issue with hating strangers — what’s wrong with loving them?

Let’s start with a definition. To love someone, as St. Thomas Aquinas eloquently put it, is to will their good. We can go a little further here — to love someone is both to will their good and to be emotionally caught up in what happens to them.

Do we really need the word “love” to describe this kind of emotional stake in other people’s lives? Aren’t words like “compassion” and “empathy” good enough? I don’t believe they are. These words already routinely feature in our public rhetoric, and yet no one can reasonably claim that we’ve cultivated a political culture where we all will one another’s good and care about how our neighbors’ lives turn out. What we need is new vocabulary to reimagine our ways of being together. “Love” might do the trick.

So what is a politics of love and how can we put it into practice?

Here we can turn to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke about love — and especially love for one’s enemies — with conviction and moral clarity. In a sermon he delivered in Montgomery, Ala,, in November 1957, King differentiated among three Greek concepts of love: the passionate, emotional love called eros; the reciprocal friendly love called philia; and the transformative love called agape. Agape is not an emotion but “the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them.”

King preached that this kind of love “will save our world and our civilization.”

The two practical questions he wanted to answer were the how and the why. How can we love our fellow citizens, especially the seemingly unlovable ones, and why should we even bother?

As to the how: People are not reducible to their political positions. What King would tell us is to work at separating the person from her political ideas. This is admittedly difficult, especially when so many political positions are odious and seem to impugn the character of their supporters. A politics of love, however, is curious about how it’s possible that a good person might have come to be seduced by cruel ideas. What fears and anxieties and desires are motivating someone to adore a politician who embodies unloving qualities? People who are held mentally and emotionally captive by their fears deserve sympathy, not loathing.

A politics of love is grounded in curiosity about those who approach the world in ways different from our own. Rather than writing off someone sharing news clips you find despicable or wearing a hat of a certain color, begin to cultivate wonder for their humanity: What has happened to them that they think this is an acceptable way to be?

And most important, what will have to happen to them to get them to change? What if you are the answer? What if you are the person who has the chance to win them over to goodness? Don’t blow it. Calling them names or insulting their education level will probably not convince them you actually believe that “love is love.”

When you ground your interactions in a sense of wonder, you will likely discover a quiet goodness in your interlocutors. After all, someone loves them, right? So they aren’t inherently unlovable. Love grows from attention. So look carefully and tenderly at the people you want to look away from.

We could also stand to take a good look at ourselves. When we do, says King, we discover we’re a little less good than we had assumed. We’ve got our own blind spots and biases. Might our political adversaries have legitimate frustrations with us and the policies we support? Have we been too dismissive of some legitimate concerns of our fellow citizens, who may also be struggling to put food on the table and keep on the lights? Have we become too tribal, creating the same structures of exclusion that we’re ostensibly against? As King said, once we realize that in the best of us there’s some bad and in the worst of us there’s some good, it becomes a little easier to love people we find loathsome — maybe because we come to realize they find us equally loathsome.

Next we come to the why: Why love? If the problem is the amount of hate in the world, putting more hate into the world will only exacerbate the condition. Love is a transforming, creative force. Love is capable of responding to hate without retaliating against it. You can’t outhate hate. But you can throw it off its game by loving a hater so hard that he starts questioning his own biases, motivations, and actions. The goal, after all, is not to defeat your enemy but to befriend him. That in fact is the only lasting way to get rid of an enemy.

I don’t mean to suggest that love will solve all our political problems. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that our public love will not be returned. In fact, people might respond to our love with hostility or even take advantage of us. Unlovableness has become almost a required characteristic for anyone wanting to make it in politics. Many of our politicians seem to revel in cruelty and meanness, and plenty of voters eagerly cheer them on.

That suggests to me that the love revolution won’t be waged by the politicians. This is on us. Maybe what we do is normalize public love to such an extent that any politician violating this norm fails to get their campaign off the ground.

I’m a gay Catholic theologian teaching Catholic theology in Catholic institutions. I’ve spent much of my life in conservative spaces. So in my everyday life, political love often takes the form of simply extending a little graceful curiosity to people who hold antigay biases. I’ve received more than enough hate and meanness to last me a few lifetimes — not from colleagues in the institutions where I’ve worked but from people on the outside who have strong opinions about what should be happening on the inside. This isn’t to say I’ve always lived up to my own ideals of love; it’s just that when I have, I’ve left open the door to genuine relationships. Which is really the only way we can influence another person.

How this works out in your life will depend on the situation. If a 6-year-old is in the news for being shot, loving him means learning about what happened, allowing yourself to be moved, and feeling that with this stranger’s death, your world was darkened. But it might usually look less dramatic. Perhaps you just don’t bother to pile on outrage about that meme your old high school pal posted on Facebook, or you choose to hold the door for someone wearing a MAGA hat.

My proposal isn’t really radical. All I’m hoping for is that we will goodness for one another and be emotionally invested in one another’s lives. We’re already nailing the second part — we’ve mastered the art of being viscerally moved by our fellow citizens. On social media in particular, that emotional entanglement is usually negative. Love will just take our entanglements in a positive direction.