David French wants you to love your enemies, sort of
I was not going to write about the latest He Gets Us Super Bowl ads but David French brought it up so here we are. You probably saw these ads, the one where a cop is washing the feet of a Black man. In his NYT op-ed, French muses that some people didn’t like the ads because they come from Hobby Lobby money and they cost a lot. But the right-wing didn’t like these ads either because they made Jesus seem too nice. He quotes Kaitlyn Schiess who, at least by French’s telling, thinks that the gospel requires you to get in trouble for having friends who are Democrats if you’re a Republican and vice versa. (This is incorrect.)
Then French offers this beautiful assessment:
It’s one thing to possess the courage to say what you believe, but it takes immeasurably more courage to truly love people you’re often told to hate — even and especially if they don’t love you back. There is nothing distinctive about boldly declaring your beliefs. Many people do that. But how many people love their enemies?
We have to love people we disagree with. He ends with the famous story that you have no doubt heard if you live within even an ear-shot of evangelicalism in which Tony Campolo throws a birthday party for a prostitute.
Meet David French. War veteran. Writer for the The Federalist. Torture apologist. Unrepentant transphobe. Anti-choice activist.
I was among the many people who were horrified, but not surprised (this is the NYT after all) to see French given an op-ed outlet. I try not to read French’s columns because I do not want to be incandescent with rage for multiple hours, which is what French’s columns induce. But it happened and here we are.
Let’s take a look at French’s career of loving people he disagrees with.
French’s seething hatred of trans folks and utter lack of care for their safety is a hallmark of his career at The Federalist. “Our culture is in the midst of a live and important dispute over the very nature of biological reality — and over the psychological and spiritual health of hundreds of thousands of precious souls — and now is not the time to abandon the field.” Yes, this David French who will not stoop to using correct pronouns: “I will not use my words to endorse a falsehood. I simply won’t. We’re on a dangerous road if we imply that treating a person with ‘basic human dignity’ requires acquiescing to claims we know to be false.” He wants to be very sure that kids like Nex Benedict know their place is in the bathroom of their sex at birth, even if that means getting bullied to death. French’s integrity is what matters most in this scenario. French’s truth, rather than the proven forms of support and care to keep trans kids alive, is paramount.
French got a pass from the NYT as one of their token conservatives due to being a never-Trumper. And French is shocked – shocked I tell you! - that evangelicals have acquiesced to Trump, surely getting their misinformation from Fox News. French is oblivious to his own role in stoking the flames of the culture wars. Even though he spent a lifetime baiting the hook he can’t believe evangelicals are getting reeled in.
French spent his life writing about why LGBTQ folks should only be granted civil marriage (changed his mind eventually to a civil libertarian conviction) and to challenging access to reproductive rights. French once declared that slavery was American’s original sin; abortion the second greatest sin. Yes, abortion and slavery linked together in one sentence. Women who seek abortions “dehumanize and destroy” (this comes from The National Review, July 29, 2019). All life is precious (exceptions noted below).
Yet, French seems to think that these decades of calling people who seek abortions dehumanizing destroyers of life will somehow produce a kinder and gentler second wave of the pro-life movement and a happy truce around same-sex marriage. If you spend your career vilifying women who need abortions, putting them in the same category as slavers, your team is not going to listen to and support women who need abortions. That train left the station. In addition, French gets to live with the ways he helped to form the moral and legislative landscape of a country where women are arrested for miscarriages and cannot receive treatment for ectopic pregnancies.
You may also be thinking, doesn’t loving people we disagree with mean, at a minimum, that we wouldn’t torture them? French used his considerable platform to take umbrage with the US report on torture. Loving your enemies does not extend to war time, apparently, when we cannot treat “jihadists” with the same respect as Americans because “we are selling American lives cheap.”
“When we create and try to enforce moral norms that provide real battlefield advantages to our enemies, we are perversely violating moral obligations to our friends and neighbors, to protect them from forces they can’t possibly face alone,” French writes. Finally, we have to use just a little torture, not a lot, if we use it at all.
Okay, so torture is fine if it’s really necessary to protect good guys (the US). But maybe not murdering our enemies? You may also know French from his days defending the Raven 23 Blackwater mercenaries who lost their cool and then committed the mass murder of Iraqi citizens. “Just another dreadful incident in a dreadful war.” Trump agreed and pardoned all the Americans involved.
I’m all for people changing their minds. French has admitted to changing his mind on quite a few things (like not trusting cops 100%). But it is appalling to watch French opine about love of enemy without addressing what are some of the most morally reprehensible judgments I have come across in a mainstream publication. At some point, you need to say, “I was wrong and my wrongness aided and abetted the destruction of others.” Touring divinity schools to talk about how awful it is that America is divided when you sowed that division won’t redeem you. Getting evangelicals in a circle to try and overcome the culture war you baited into existence won’t erase the past. This kind, as Jesus says, can only come out through prayer.