Pray for Your Enemies

God loves awful people, too

My last post was a pretty feisty takedown of the state of higher education, as well as institutions generally, in our post-quality era. But as fun as it was, it left me feeling that a follow-up essay was needed — something more personal, maybe more positive. So today I’m writing about why you, I, and everyone we know should should pray for our enemies. I mean this non-ironically. Literally, you should sit right down and pray for the very people you would most enjoy seeing chased into lava by Apache helicopters. Doesn’t sound very hip, I know. But the moment I was baptized in the late-night darkness of the Holy Saturday vigil almost six years ago, I’ve known that my hipness card was expired. And praying for your enemies is powerful mojo. It breaks the pattern of hatred and violence in the very place where it matters most: your own deadbeat mind.

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As we collectively live through compounding crises in higher education, the economy, and national and world politics, many of us feel surrounded by creeps who want to destroy the world. This is perfectly true. Who the creeps are differs by perspective. Maybe you’re livid at globetrotting WEF leftist elites who want to force the plebes to eat insects and move to tiny houses. Or maybe your bogeyman is populist Trumpists who see The Handmaid’s Tale as an instruction manual, not a warning. Or it’s campus antisemitism. Or it’s Zionist aggressors. Whatever your beef, you’re probably tempted every day to conclude that bad people with malign intentions are driving us all to the brink of catastrophe.

Again, you’ll get no disagreement from me on that account. A Christian view of human nature assures us that, in fact, bad actors really do regularly turn the world from a potential Eden into a third-rate motel in a slum district. You could easily spend all your time stewing in rage at other people. Some probably deserve it.

We call these people enemies.

You Have Enemies

Bracing words, I know. The very concept of enmity is practically taboo for those of us who were raised in the Coca-Cola era, whose optimistic vision of world progress depicted a cheery, multicultural group of attractive young people holding hands and singing on a hillside somewhere. The idea was that liberalized trade would bring out the cooperative, harmonious inner interest-maximizer in everyone, eventually melting us all into a contented, globalized mush with “nothing to kill or die for,” as John Lennon put it (before somebody shot him).

Lennon’s untimely death by lunatic is a pretty apt illustration of how the Coca-Cola vision in general has turned out. Getting along with others is great, and we should strive for it. But somewhere along the line, naïve globalists started implicitly assuming that liberalism could magically align the interests of all the world’s people by getting everyone rich and running anti-bullying ad campaigns. From this perspective, conflict wasn’t real; it always boiled down to misunderstanding or confusion.

But that’s a pack of lies. Conflict is real, even if you’re rich. If you love living in New York but your spouse dreams of relocating to Belize, that’s a real conflict. It doesn’t have to be an insuperable conflict. But if you blindly insist that, deep down, your disagreements are illusory because you’re both such good people, you’ll probably get nowhere except the Land of Screaming Kitchen Fights.

A scaled-up and much more fraught example is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I believe has been in the news a bit recently. This isn’t a case of mere misunderstanding, a mixup that could be solved if all parties just sat down, cracked open some brand-name soft drinks, and vulnerably shared their feelings. It’s two separate people-groups who both want the same land, which happens to be just about the only fertile strip in a vast and otherwise almost uninhabitable desert. That’s a real conflict. Substantive as all get-out. World trade is not going to solve it. (In fact, it might solve world trade.)

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is actually more apropos to the question of praying for enemies, because it involves conflicts between groups, which is always where enmity is sharpest. It’s also inevitable. The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson pointed out that reaching maturity invariably means joining coalitions, groups, teams. You marry into a specific family, for instance. Different families then take different, often competing positions that are aligned with their distinct interests. Conflict results, maybe the intractable kind. Liberal-modern culture doesn’t believe in intractable conflict, but it happens anyway.¹

So if you’re a grownup, you have enemies — people and groups you disagree with deeply, who get under your skin, whose agendas are opposed to your own. If you don’t have enemies, then you haven’t grown up, which is an even worse problem, especially if you’re in your 40s. Or you’re a saint. For the bulk of normal adults, though, enmity is a fact of life.

The question is what you do with it. You could, as I mentioned above, stew in hatred. Or you could join Xitter or whatever and find lots of other people to share your hatreds with, amplifying them across the internet like waves in a pool of sludge.

Or you could go into a small room, close the door, and talk like a crazy person to the invisible Creator of the universe about how good it would be for nice things to happen to the jerks who drive you mad.

God Loves Claudine Gay

My last essay took aim at several people with whom I strongly disagree and who happen to occupy positions of outsized influence, making it possible for them to, speaking carefully, ruin the world. Claudine Gay isn’t president of Harvard anymore, but she’s still a full professor (with a $900,000 salary to boot) at what remains, for now, the most prestigious university in the world. And she’s always used her platform at Harvard to advance what I think is a vapid and destructive incarnation of the DEI paradigm. As a dean, she punished academics who didn’t toe the left-wing party line, including a black social scientist whose findings were politically inconvenient for progressives. Another of her main priorities was renaming buildings and pursuing other changes to rid Harvard of as much of its white, male, colonialist legacy as possible.

Trust me, I get that “male and pale” equates to “puppy murderer” in many circles these days. But, see, I’m a white male, and I’m actually rather attached to the legacy of thinkers, writers, and statesmen that DEI apparatchiks like Gay would like to scour from our cultural memory. I even nurse a lingering pride in the United States, which I know is terribly wrong because the US is, after all, an imperialist genocidal settler-colonial tyranny whose only mission is to stamp out indigenous cultures, LGBTQ+ people, and the polar ice caps.

But I can’t help it. My ancestors helped to settle and fought to found this country. They made terrible sacrifices and endured unfathomable discomforts, such as creeping across the Great Plains in covered wagons with no air conditioning or decent cupholders at approximately one-half mile an hour for literally months until, upon arriving in the Mountain West, they realized they had nothing to eat. There are Wood family stories of watching the post wagon come tearing into Denver when it was only a trading village, bristling with arrows. (Delivering the mail was serious back then.) At least two ancestors were scalped. My ancestors suffered all these things and slowly built Colorado into a state so that you can fly into into Denver International for a ski trip to Breckenridge and get miffed that the airport Starbucks is out of peppermint mocha.²

Please understand: I don’t blame the Kiowa for shooting arrows at my ancestors. I’d probably be pretty ticked off at the invasion of my ancestral home by hordes of violent outsiders, too.³ But when push comes to shove, well, my people also gave birth to a remarkable country that became the envy of the world. I’ll stick with being proud of that, thanks.

So the bureaucratic DEI push to rid places like Harvard of names and statues that evoke the colonial past is a personal insult. It’s also an example of Eriksonian group conflict. The group of people who positively identify with the history of America finds itself at existential odds with the group that wants to impose DEI on our 21st-century institutions. Claudine Gay is an almost pitch-perfect avatar of the latter group, so my dislike for her isn’t just personal. Instead, she becomes an easy stand-in for an entire worldview that I oppose.

Okay, so much for my gripes. But now for important part.

Claudine Gay a human being. A real one. As Thomas Nagel described it in his famous essay about bats, there is something it is like to be her. An inner world that only Claudine Gay can experience.

As a human, she’s got a family and (I assume) daily routines and aspirations and fears and griefs and hopes and all the rest of it. She probably even has a favorite color. Maybe she likes dogs. I don’t know. But what I do know is that, despite being my “enemy” (in that she’s pursuing an agenda at cross-purposes with my own), she’s a child of God, vulnerable at her core, loved by her Creator, a fathomless mystery with no bounds to her intrinsic worth. I might not like Claudine Gay, but God, according to the Christian tradition I’ve signed up to follow, is nuts about her.

So I’ve been praying for her. Seriously. As often as I can remember to do it. And let me tell you, it’s been super easy! My heart just opened right up and bang, all my petty resentments melted right away, like the Grinch coming to love the cute little Whos down in Whoville! I’m now considering inviting Gay to have a Coke with me on a hillside somewhere.

God, Please Don’t Smite My Enemies, I Guess

Haha. I’m just kidding, of course. It’s not easy and probably shouldn’t be.

I’ve never met Gay and likely never will. The closest we’ve ever gotten, Gay and me, is that my wife and I drove past her house — the Harvard president’s mansion — each Sunday en route to church while she was in charge of Harvard. Now that the school is looking for a new leader, I guess we’ll be driving past another big kahuna. But you wouldn’t call this a very interactive relationship, per se. I don’t think Gay ever even waved at us once.

As a result, I don’t know what’s going on for Gay, what she needs, what her innermost hopes and fears are. But I’m pretty confident she’s had a lousy couple of months. A very public implosion like being canned as the president of Harvard University for massive plagiarism (!) has to hurt your professional confidence. She probably feels ashamed, jerked around. Emotional whiplash. You’re the first black president of Harvard one day, then a crisis erupts, a bunch of conservative activists launch into rabid attack-dog mode, and within a few weeks you’re out. You’ve attained the very pinnacle of an academic career only to be cast down the mountainside. And you’ve probably gotten very nasty emails from people you’ve never met.

I wouldn’t enjoy that. I bet she hasn’t, either.

So I pray for Gay to have resilience. To be encouraged. To have good evenings at home with her husband and kid. To have — sorry, this is pretty squishy — moments of beauty each day: a view of the sunset over the buildings of Harvard Square, the sight of a hawk riding the wind above the Charles. What could that hurt? Like all people, Claudine Gay needs regular reminders that the world isn’t all bad. I pray for those reminders to do their work.

Importantly, what I don’t do is pray for Gay to have a dramatic conversion where it suddenly strikes her that she’s been working for the bad guys all these years, that DEI is a giant scam, and that Anglo-American political traditions of liberty and self-governance are precious and worth saving. It’d be great if she did, of course. I’d love to see Gay to go on network television and sheepishly admit that she’s been part of the problem all along, then announce a new commitment to teaching students basic emotional self-regulation so that they can handle encountering non-progressive ideas without having TikTok meltdowns.⁴ That would be, as they say, rad.

But if you’re praying for your enemies to come around to your side, or to realize the pernicious errors of their ways, or to accidentally fall into vats of lukewarm glue (not fatal, but unpleasant), you’re doing it wrong. The point is to pray for their well-being, precisely because it’s probably not what you most crave. What you crave is vindication. Conquest.

Tough. While you’re praying for the bad guys, the deal is that you have to pray for them, not against them. And even the most unsympathetic enemies, such as terrorists and war criminals and — ugh — spam cell phone callers, have inner lives and needs and wishes and hopes. You can always pray for them to have meaningful moments with loved ones, a good dinner with their families, and physical health. If all else fails and you can’t think of a single nice thing to wish for them, you can always ask God to give them whatever he thinks they could use. Hopefully, that won’t be command of a special operations team whose purpose is hunt you down. But if it does, at least you’ll know you held up your end of the bargain. You prayed for those who persecute you.

And come to think of it, compared with spam callers, Claudine Gay is practically a saint. Maybe it won’t be so hard to pray for her after all.

Taking One (or Several) for the Team

Ultimately, praying for your enemies isn’t just for their sakes. For all you know, your prayers just end up in slush piles in Central Processing until a low-ranked intern angel skims them impatiently and tosses them into the “Reject” bin.⁵ But whether anyone answers them or not, those prayers do something for you (and everyone around you): they turn you into less of a jerk.

The natural tendency is to dehumanize those we don’t like; we literally attribute fewer mind-like qualities to out-group members, viewing them more as automatons than agents. Praying for enemies counters that dehumanizing tendency, placing you in a stance somewhat like the reader of a novel. You start to sympathize with the characters.

Just so. As I’ve prayed for her, Claudine Gay has transformed into something like the hero of a novel I can only read a few pages of, but which I find strangely compelling. I’m rooting for her, sort of. Not that she’ll get her way in terms of eliminating white guys from Harvard’s sprawling statuary collection, but that her life will turn out well. Those things don’t necessarily have anything to do with each other. Maybe they’re even incompatible.

The point is that prayer is a kind of practice for humanizing other members of our insufferable species. The more you see your enemies as sympathetic characters, the slower you’ll be to judging people right in front of you. Pray for your enemies more, sneer at your spouse less.

Ultimately, then, prayer turns enemies into non-enemies. It’s almost as if we’re tracing a parabola: as innocent, globalized, liberal democrats, we don’t believe in enmity at all. Then we get mugged by reality; we grow up, choose our teams and our spouses, and realize that you can’t get along with everyone. Now we’re surrounded by enemies. Ugh, midlife, am I right?

But then, if we actually do as Jesus says and learn to pray for those we can’t stand, the enmity slowly reveals itself to have been a stubborn illusion all along — just not in the Coke-commercial way. We’re never going to all sit down on a hillside and sing Kumbaya this side of the grave. We’ll always still have our teams, our cross-purposes. We’ll always have opponents. Just not enemies. Opponents are human. Enemies, the Christian tradition has always taught, aren’t.⁶

Tame Your Loon

Maybe this entire discussion embarrasses you. Maybe it seems absurd to sit in a closed room and talk to an invisible Creator when you could be out doing actual things, solving problems and fixing stuff. Okay, fine. But we all do absurd and embarrassing things every day. You probably still obsessively wonder how you could have delivered a better comeback to that jerk on the bus in high school. If you have time to relive a meaningless conversation with a someone you haven’t seen in decades, you can spare a few minutes to chat with Someone you haven’t seen at all. Nobody has to know. You’re in your own room.

If you do start praying for your enemies (or opponents), you’ll find that it’s the ultimate antidote to the social media–induced moral frenzy that’s turned us all into absolute loons and goobers since about 2015 — maybe especially those of us who read a lot as kids, since the lifelong habit of poring over written content transfers well to the internet realm. What used to be our greatest strength as nerds has somehow transformed into a giant, world-historical societal liability. To undo that contortion, we should sit down like dorks to pray for the truly impossible people whose very faces seem to be icons of walking evil.

Lots of Kiowa weren’t so keen on my pale-faced ancestors, after all. Enmity is a two-way street. Praying for each other in a big mutual circle of infinitesimal, reluctant, but self-reinforcing forgiveness may seem silly, but it’s a lot more feasible and inspiring than gathering all of humanity on a hillside for a Coke and a corporate rock concert. (Not to mention a lot better for your teeth.)

I might be wrong about my opinions; maybe Claudine Gay is the good guy and I’m the bad guy. That doesn’t change what I should be doing. In fact, praying for your enemies is orthogonal to who’s right and wrong. You pray for your enemies because they’re people, not because one of you is righteous and the other is a worm.

Doing so reintroduces the Imago Dei — the idea that all humans, everywhere, are made in the image of God, and that even thinking nasty private thoughts about them is tantamount to desecrating something unfathomably holy — at exactly the moment in history when we need it most. We’re facing an election this fall that promises to bring the civic temperature right up to boiling. Wars are breaking out or threatening to break out worldwide in a way we haven’t seen since the 1930s. Beat the crowd and start praying for your enemies now. You’ll be glad for the head start.

1. “Intimacy with one set of people and ideas would not be really intimate without an efficient repudiation of another set.” Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, p. 135. A valuable insight, and also a sobering example of how social science prose is like Kryptonite for poetry.

2. You’re welcome.

3. In fact, the southern border situation is helping me understand this in all sorts of new and exciting ways.

4. Also that she’s converting to, say, trad Catholicism. Hey, I’m already dreaming.

5. DISCLAIMER: This statement has not been approved by theologians or the Pope or your local evangelical pastor or even your mom and should not be taken seriously or even read all the way to the end.

6. If you get my drift.