The Forgotten Christian Discipline of Loving Your Enemies

I have never met Robert Alfieri, but he is my enemy.

Alfieri is acting assistant field office director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in my part of North Carolina. For Alfieri, it’s a job. He believes he keeps people like me safe from violent criminals. But in the time that Alfieri has overseen ICE in our area, hundreds of people, mostly Latinx community members, have been disappeared at traffic stops and picked up during raids at their workplaces. At our local elementary school, children wait in administrators’ offices for a parent who will never show up. Birthday parties and baptisms are tinged with anxiety and sadness as communities contemplate the forced separation from those they love. Families scramble to make ends meet when a primary breadwinner is kidnapped at work.

In a recent round of ICE raids in Durham, a young father was picked up while packing his car for work, collateral damage among the targets set by ICE. In a nearby NICU his premature infant—born at seven months—waited alone. Maria, the baby’s mother, recovered from surgery while her spouse sat in a detention center, hoping our community could raise the $15,000 bond set by a judge. Eventually they raised $7,000, securing the rest through a loan. ICE officials “don’t have a heart,” Maria told a local reporter.

This young father, the main wage earner for his family, was in ICE detention for many reasons, including xenophobic immigration policies, decades of U.S. interventionist politics in Central America, the mythic war on drugs, and the complicity of the American public in fictive safe-keeping from their undocumented neighbors. But he was also in ICE detention, separated from his family, because of Robert Alfieri.

An unsung discipline

When someone shares with me that they have an enemy, it is often in pastoral confidence, whispered as a confession. Having an enemy, they intuit, is a botched form of discipleship resulting from failed reconciliation. The language of enemies is seen as the end of a conversation—or the end of relationship.

We assume everyone is doing their best, or failing on some things but not everything, or that people are cogs in a complex machine over which they have little control. We let systemic oppression be the problem. When we see others hurt, when we encounter people enacting terror on their neighbors, we assume they are simply misguided.

Yet Christians follow scriptures in which enemies are named with clarity and vigor. The third chapter of Luke begins by naming the names of the tormentors of the Jews of the first century: Emperor Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, and Herod. Right up front we are introduced to the full swath of political actors who oppress and terrorize the common people of Judea.

Tiberius was the emperor known for his extreme paranoia and wrath that spread like a disease across his territories. Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judea, executed political enemies without trial and was infamous for his bribes and insults. Herod Antipas imprisoned and executed his enemies over personal slights.

Luke sets the scene for the gospel in a tyrannical, volatile, and oppressive political climate. And he wants us to know who is in charge, who makes this repression possible. He doesn’t reduce the problem to “good people who do bad things.” He doesn’t blame systems. He names enemies.

Rightly having enemies is an unsung discipline of the Christian life. More often than not we abandon the task before we get started; we wrongly assume we should not have enemies. But the expectation of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that we will have enemies. We know this because Jesus gives us a command to love our enemies. And in order to love your enemies, you first have to know who they are.

Held up by people

Often people outside the church tell me how they are drawn to Jesus, meek and mild. This caricature misses out on the actual Jesus of the Bible, who lashes out against the religious teachers whom he calls false prophets, blind guides, whitewashed tombs, and hypocrites.

Those stories of Jesus lounging with children and lambs leave out that in the next breath Jesus told onlookers that it was better to tie stones around their necks and throw themselves into the sea than deliberately bar the way for children who want to come to him. They leave out that Jesus’ anger drove the money changers from the temple with a whip.

This Jesus teaches us that there are right and wrong ways to have enemies. When we look at Jesus’ life we see that enmity is born when we recognize that the structures of terror and injustice are held up by people.

Oppression is enacted by individual human beings, who collectively wash their hands of the matter. Without the participation of people—individuals doing the work—these systems would collapse.

Without Robert Alfieri directing ICE agents into our community, taking a salary to destroy families, and showing up every day to an office that determines if children will live isolated from a parent, a grandmother, a sibling, an uncle—the system could not sustain itself.

Robert Alfieri is my enemy, but not because we disagree. Enemies are not the people we dislike or those who are different from us. In the gospel, enemies are those who make camp on the far side of the line that is justice. And God is beckoning us—all of us—to join God among the oppressed.

Armed with love

In this way Jesus reorients our way of having enemies. We do not arm ourselves with weapons to coerce or threaten enemies of God’s liberation into submission. Instead we create the world we want. In Durham this means creating a fund to support families like Maria and her baby in the NICU. It means that strangers sign up for shifts to check on reports of ICE activity in the area. The world we create is one in which religious communities open their doors for temporary sanctuary if a person without papers is afraid to go home. It means we check on our neighbors in ways we did not before. We carve out a life of community amid the terror. It is a life of joy amid destruction. And it is the life into which we invite our enemies.

But this begins with first having enemies. It’s easy to observe the complexities of human life and psychology, of nature vs. nurture, and throw up our hands, assuming things are the best they can be. Or we can do the careful work of putting ourselves in spaces to hear from those who experience oppression and making their enemies our own, an act of solidarity as we rightly name the world. That won’t untangle the messiness, but it will change the way we think about friends and enemies.

The enemy within

In December 2018, Jakelin Caal Maquin died in El Paso, Texas, 2,000 miles from the home she fled in Guatemala. She and her father were detained at a remote border crossing in New Mexico. We have yet to see anyone take responsibility for her death. Instead, individuals and agencies wash their hands of Jakelin’s death.

But there are many individuals who contributed to Jakelin’s death. Doris Meissner is the enemy of Jakelin. She is the commissioner who signed off on the 1994 plan to strategically push migrants into remote parts of the desert, making the desert a weapon.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower is responsible for Jakelin’s death. He oversaw the 1954 coup d’état in Guatemala orchestrated by the U.S. to overthrow the democratically elected president and install a puppet administration.

The architects of the Central America Free Trade Agreement that decimated the Guatemalan economy are responsible for Jakelin’s death.

White House staffer Stephen Miller is responsible for Jakelin’s death, by whipping up anti-immigration sentiment in the U.S.

The border guards who refused to respond to her father’s cries for help are responsible for Jakelin’s death.

Because these were Jakelin’s enemies, they become my enemies: my life for her life, my tears for her, my work in the world in her honor—for the life she should have lived.

We cannot hope to be called out of enmity, to call others out of enmity, until we are ready to do the work of seeing rightly, of making Jakelin’s enemies our own. We cannot be former enemies until we first name our enmity, both that we have enemies and that we have been the enemies of others. This is why the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in post-apartheid South Africa began with confession. There could be no hope for forgiveness unless enemies were named first.

To love your enemies is to call them out of the world of denial and oppression, of despots and executioners. To love your enemies is to help them see the truth about themselves and show them something else is possible. To love your enemies is to tell them the story of how once we too were enemies of God and that through the love of God who lived, died, and rose among us, we are now called friends. We have enemies because we hope that one day we might call them friends.

There is nothing emotional or psychological about this change. To turn from enemies to friends means our lives must change. And sometimes this means our jobs, how we make money, how we act in the world must change. If we are serious about making our enemies into friends, committed to loving them well, our churches will begin to mobilize to help people leave their jobs with ICE. For decades peace churches such as the Quakers and Mennonites organized efforts to help people leave or avoid military careers. The American Friends Service Committee provides resources for counter-recruitment among economically vulnerable people who find very little career opportunity outside the military. Mennonites and Quakers offer advising on “alternative service” to provide pathways to careers outside the military.

If the church is serious about loving our enemies, we’ll apply this same form of organizing to people recruited for the jobs of kidnapping and deportation for ICE. We’ll commit resources to job transition, loan repayment, and community support. We’ll stand outside ICE recruitment offices just as Quakers and Mennonites stand outside military recruitment offices. We’ll mobilize to offer job retraining and placement for former ICE agents. And we’ll do this because we know that the work to destroy our community is a wound on the soul of those who enact oppression just as it is for those who are its victims.

If Robert Alfieri, my enemy, is ready to leave behind the work of destruction, I am waiting here to help him along the way.