New Evangelizers Post: Loving Your Enemies in the Internet Age

I have a new article up at NewEvangelizers.com.  

“Love your enemies,” is one of the most shocking and important moral precepts that Christ gave us. It is the complete inversion of all of our fallen instincts of revenge and even our natural instincts of justice. But Jesus calls us to be more of Him than of the world.

There are many ways to demonstrate this, as the great martyrs did in Ancient Rome or the way missionaries enter into hostile territories to preach the Gospel. For today’s reflection, I thought it would be good to look at how we can do this online.

Being nasty online can be incredibly easy. The internet often gives us a sense of anonymity. It is like a mask we can wear to avoid consequences for the words we put up there. This is especially true of social media like Twitter.

We can begin with the obvious idea that we should only place things on there that we would be proud of even if we were not anonymous. That has been one of my guiding principles online, even under my current pseudonym. Would I be okay with my employer, my pastor, or my students seeing any of these words?

But I would like to take it a step further today. We often fail at loving our enemies online even before we chime in with our own thoughts. It begins with the spirit in which we receive news about those we do not like.

In matters like these, I always go to my great teacher, CS Lewis. Even though he died decades before the internet, his insights can be most helpful here. He wrote in Mere Christianity, “Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

You can read the whole article here.