The Duties of a Neighbor: Liberty Cannot Survive Among Strangers - Love Your Neighbor
A Weekly Devotional from The Founders' Quill: Reclaiming America's Judeo-Christian Heritage through Spirit and Truth.
For the last several weeks, we have been close to home. We have considered the government of the self, the discipline of our appetites, the strength of the household, and the responsibility of one generation to form the next. We have spent considerable time, figuratively speaking, around the family table because a nation of self-governing people must first be formed in places where character is learned long before politics enters the conversation.
But eventually someone must get up from the table and open the door. Across the road lives another family. Perhaps they worship where we worship, perhaps they do not. They may vote as we vote or cancel our vote every election. Their ancestors may have lived in America for generations, or they may have arrived only recently. They may have more money than we do or considerably less. They may become trusted friends, remain casual acquaintances, or occasionally test our patience. Yet Christianity gives that person a remarkably simple name: neighbor.
When Jesus was asked which commandment mattered most, He answered first that we are to love God with all that we are. Then He joined to it another: “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Mark 12:31 NIV). The command is familiar enough that we can easily miss its implications. Jesus did not tell us to love only neighbors who share our convictions, customs, politics, social class, or temperament. Neighbor-love does not require agreement, but it does require that we refuse to forget the humanity of the person standing on the other side of our disagreement.
That command is essential to Christian discipleship. It also carries profound consequences for a free society. A republic cannot be held together by laws alone. It requires people who have learned to belong to one another.
Liberty Creates Obligations - Love Your Neighbor
Modern Americans tend to speak of liberty primarily in the language of rights. That language is necessary. The protection of individual rights against improper coercion is one of the great achievements of the American constitutional tradition. Government must have boundaries precisely because human beings possess dignity that government does not create and therefore should not be free to violate at will.
But rights are not the whole story of liberty. Christianity presses the question further. Paul told the Galatians that they had been called to freedom, but immediately warned them not to use freedom merely to indulge themselves. Instead, he instructed them to “serve one another humbly in love” (Galatians 5:13 NIV). Christian freedom therefore never means simply, No one can tell me what to do. It asks what a free person ought to do with the freedom he has been given.
Freedom asks what I am permitted to do. Virtue asks what I ought to do. Love asks what I owe my neighbor.
A healthy republic needs citizens capable of asking all three questions. If we know only the first, liberty eventually shrinks into competing demands for personal autonomy. Every person insists upon his rights while fewer people consider their responsibilities. We become highly skilled at identifying what others owe us and increasingly uncertain about what we owe one another.
The Founders designed a government that would protect liberty, but no constitution could force citizens to become good neighbors. Laws can restrain violence, protect property, punish fraud, enforce contracts, and establish boundaries for public conduct. They cannot make us visit the lonely, care for the sick, teach a child, help a struggling family, forgive an offense, join a local cause, volunteer at a church, or cross the street to introduce ourselves to someone whose name we ought to know. Those things occupy the enormous territory between the individual and the state. Much of American life was built there.
The Habits of Association
A generation after the Founding, a young Frenchman arrived in America and noticed something remarkable about the people who inhabited the republic. Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 and eventually published his observations in Democracy in America. He was not one of the Founders, and we should not make him one. His value for our purposes is different: Tocqueville was an outsider observing the kind of society the early American republic had produced.¹
Among the characteristics that fascinated him was the American tendency to associate voluntarily with others. Citizens formed organizations for political purposes, certainly, but also for religious, charitable, educational, commercial, and community purposes. Americans did not imagine that every common problem required either solitary action or direction from a distant government. They repeatedly joined together to accomplish things they believed needed doing.²
This habit mattered because associations taught the practices of self-government. A person who joins with neighbors to establish a school, support a church, care for the poor, improve a road, assist a widow, organize a charitable society, or address a local problem must learn skills that cannot be acquired merely by casting a ballot. People must listen, persuade, contribute, compromise where compromise is appropriate, stand firm where principle requires it, keep commitments, share responsibility, and work beside people who may not agree about everything.
That is citizenship practiced at human scale.
Churches and families were joined by countless other institutions that stood between the solitary person and government. These relationships gave people places to belong, responsibilities to carry, and neighbors whose needs were difficult to reduce to abstractions. They also created a crucial buffer against the concentration of too much responsibility in either the isolated individual or the centralized state.
There is common sense here worth recovering. When the space between the individual and government becomes empty, something will eventually fill it. Sometimes loneliness does. Sometimes dependence does. Sometimes government does. A healthy society therefore needs strong families, strong churches, strong neighborhoods, voluntary associations, charitable institutions, local organizations, and ordinary citizens willing to give time to things that provide no immediate personal reward.
The strength of a republic is not measured only in Washington. Much of it can be seen on an ordinary street.
The Disappearance of the Neighbor
The irony of our age is difficult to miss. Never have human beings possessed so many tools for communication while finding it so easy to live among strangers. We can know within minutes what a person hundreds of miles away posted online this morning while remaining unable to name the person who has lived three houses down for five years.
Technology did not create every division in American life, nor is technology itself the enemy. It has given us extraordinary ways to communicate, learn, maintain relationships, and organize good work. But digital life can also train us to encounter human beings primarily as categories. Conservative. Liberal. Christian. Atheist. Rural. Urban. Rich. Poor. Native-born. Immigrant. Each label may communicate something real, but none communicates the whole person.
Once a human being becomes primarily a category, contempt becomes easier. This is particularly dangerous in politics. A neighbor whose political sign irritates me is still the man who may help push my car from the snow. The woman whose opinions I strongly reject may still be the nurse who sits beside my mother's hospital bed. The family whose religious beliefs differ from mine may still bring dinner when tragedy comes to our home. Real life continually confronts us with something the digital world allows us to forget: human beings are more complicated than the categories into which we place them.
Christianity refuses to let us stop with the category. It gives the person a name—neighbor—and then commands us to love him.
That does not mean pretending that serious differences are unimportant. Truth matters too much for that. Some ideas are false. Some behaviors are destructive. Some policies are unjust. Some cultural movements should be opposed. Love does not require the abandonment of discernment, and civility does not require moral surrender. Jesus never confused love with indifference toward truth.
But neither did He give His followers permission to strip opponents of their humanity.
There is a difference between opposing an idea and despising the person who holds it. There is a difference between moral conviction and contempt. There is a difference between courageous disagreement and learning to enjoy the humiliation of those we consider wrong. A Christian seeking to recover a culture shaped by Christian moral truth must pay close attention to those distinctions.
We Cannot Hate Our Way Back to Virtue
Many Americans are deeply concerned about the moral direction of our culture, and there are substantial reasons for that concern. The weakening of families, confusion over basic moral realities, the loss of biblical literacy, loneliness, addiction, political hostility, declining trust, and the disappearance of shared standards cannot simply be wished away. Christians should not respond to serious cultural problems with silence merely because speaking about them may be uncomfortable.
But there is another danger for those of us who recognize the problem. Righteous concern can slowly harden into anger, and anger can quietly mature into contempt. Before long, we may discover that we are trying to defend Christian civilization while behaving in ways that bear little resemblance to Christ.
We cannot hate our way back to virtue.
We cannot rebuild civil society by despising half of society. We cannot lament that Americans no longer know how to live together while refusing to speak respectfully about anyone who disagrees with us. We cannot defend the dignity of human life in one argument while treating the human being across from us as though his dignity disappears when his politics become objectionable.
This does not mean becoming timid. There will be moments when love requires a firm no. There will be ideas that must be confronted, injustices that must be resisted, children who must be protected, institutions that must be challenged, and truths that must be spoken even when speaking them carries a cost. Neighbor-love is not weakness.
The question is whether we can stand for truth without surrendering the humanity of the person hearing it. That is difficult. It is also Christian.
Perhaps one reason our public discourse has become so poisonous is that we increasingly conduct arguments at distances that conceal the person. It is much easier to write something cruel about “those people” than to say it while looking across a kitchen table at someone whose story we know. Community places limits upon caricature because community continually reminds us that the people with whom we disagree are still people.
The answer to America's division will not be found merely in learning better arguments. We must relearn how to have neighbors.
Seek the Good of the Place Where You Live
The prophet Jeremiah offers a surprising picture of what faithful engagement can look like. God's people had been carried into exile in Babylon. They were living among people whose religion, values, and national identity were profoundly different from their own. We might expect God to tell them simply to withdraw and wait for deliverance.
Instead, He told them, “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7 NIV).³
They were not told to become Babylonians in their worship. They were not instructed to surrender the convictions that distinguished them as God's people. They were told to remain faithful while seeking the good of the place where they lived.
There is wisdom there for Christians who increasingly feel estranged from portions of contemporary American culture. Our choices are not limited to surrender or withdrawal. We can practice faithfulness without isolation, conviction without contempt, and service without surrender.
We can seek the good of our community because our neighbor's flourishing matters even when our neighbor does not share our worldview.
That begins closer to home than most national political arguments. Learn your neighbor's name. Notice the elderly person whose yard has become too difficult to maintain. Help the family facing illness. Volunteer somewhere that needs you. Participate in the life of your church rather than merely attending its services. Support local ministries that feed, shelter, teach, counsel, and care. Join something worthwhile. Attend the meeting. Coach the team. Mentor the young person. Invite someone to dinner. When disagreement comes, speak to the person rather than merely posting about people like him.
None of these actions will trend on social media. Most will never be noticed outside a few blocks.
That may be precisely the point.
Republics are not preserved only by great speeches, presidential elections, Supreme Court decisions, or acts of Congress. They are also preserved in thousands of places where ordinary people decide that the wellbeing of their neighbors is partly their concern.
One More Chair at the Table
For two weeks we have returned repeatedly to the image of a table. We have considered the family gathered around it and the inheritance passed across it. Perhaps there is one more question to ask before we leave that table behind.
Is there room for another chair?
One of the simplest acts of civilization is making room for another person. The stranger becomes known. The category receives a name. The political opponent acquires a story. The lonely person discovers that someone noticed. The young person finds an older person willing to listen. The struggling family learns that it does not have to struggle alone.
Something happens when people begin belonging to one another again.
Citizenship is more than voting. Community is more than geography. And a neighbor is more than the person whose property happens to touch ours.
The Founders could establish institutions of self-government. They could draft constitutions, divide governmental powers, protect rights, and create mechanisms by which citizens would choose those who governed them. But no constitution could make Americans love their neighbors. No statute could manufacture generosity. No election could produce virtue in citizens unwilling to practice it.
Government can restrain certain evils. It can protect rights and administer justice.
But only people can build community.
So before we ask what Washington should do, perhaps we should walk outside our own front door. Before we condemn the condition of American society, perhaps we should look down our own street. Before we ask why nobody is rebuilding the institutions that once held communities together, perhaps we should ask where we have invested our own time.
The question is uncomfortable precisely because it is so close to home:
If everyone treated his neighbor the way I treat mine, what kind of republic would we have?
Spirit & Truth
Thom H. Paine
Notes
Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States with Gustave de Beaumont in 1831. His observations became Democracy in America, whose first volume appeared in 1835 and second in 1840. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. James T. Schleifer, ed. Eduardo Nolla, 4 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).
Tocqueville devoted significant attention to Americans' use of voluntary associations in both political and civil life, regarding the practice of association as an important feature of democratic society. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, especially vol. 2, pt. 2, chap. 5.
Jeremiah 29:7 NIV. The command was addressed to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, instructing them to seek the welfare of the city of their exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf.
Bibliography
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by James T. Schleifer. Edited by Eduardo Nolla. 4 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010.
The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.
The Founders’ Quill seeks to recover the spiritual and moral foundations that shaped the American experiment in ordered liberty. By returning to Scripture, history, and the wisdom of those who came before us, we are invited not merely to admire our inheritance but to become people capable of preserving it.
Comments