Nietzsche: 'I will not deceive, not even myself'; and with that we stand on the ground of morality.

Anita Bryant - "Paper Roses"

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'I will not deceive, not even myself'; and with that we stand on the ground of morality.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

This sentence captured my attention about twenty-five years ago when I first read it, and it has stuck with me ever since. It is a radical departure from my earliest moral training. As a small child, I was taught that we were supposed to love our neighbor. Love is the cornerstone of Christianity, and many Christians put a great deal of effort into trying to love others. But I think because love in the Christian religion has so often been proffered as a commandment rather than a worthy but sometimes unattainable goal, it has lead to emotional dishonesty. And this is why I immediately noticed a disconnect between the Christian morality that I was brought up with and the morality Nietzsche was advocating.

I have met many real and genuine people who identify as Christian, but nearly all of my life I have felt a special kind of dread of a specific kind of Christian. When I was younger, I couldn’t quite explain why certain Christians disturbed me, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but eventually I figured it out. And no, I’m not talking about the hellfire and brimstone variety--although they can be most troublesome, too. It’s the smiley face Christians who make me feel intensely awkward, the ones who never admit to having negative emotions. They are never true, and when talking to them, I can’t help but hear false notes all over the place. Because they believe they are commanded to love, they can’t bring themselves to admit they fall short from day to day. They turn love into something that’s plastic and phony. I guess they think they can fake it and no one will notice, but I notice. I think that many of them have faked it for so long they don’t really know what honest love is.

I suspect that many gay Christians are susceptible to being sucked into “ex-gay” therapy because they were raised to lie about their emotions. To be “ex-gay” is to pretend to be something you’re not. To be “ex-gay” is to convince yourself that you can ignore your real emotions and substitute them with emotions you think you should have. For those who believe they’ve been commanded to love and are loath to admit that they fail in this task, pretending that they’ve overcome your homosexuality is just more of the same.

This great pretense of love can cause people to be passive in the face of injustice. I have seen how certain Christians will turn a blind eye to some terrible things, especially when those things are done by fellow Christians. I have also seen how some rationalize their hostility by defining it as love. If you’re an outsider caught between these two types of Christians, then God help you. On the one hand you have the passive, phony ones who offer you platitudes and large grins that mask their true feelings, and on the other, you have those who will gladly lash out at you and ignore your pleas for mercy and call what they do love. These two groups are part of a mutual admiration society. They have a vested interest in pretending to love when they don’t.

I don’t mean to lump all Christians together. As I’ve already stated, there are real and genuine, emotionally honest Christians, and I’m sure their numbers are great. They do not go through their lives fanatically insisting all they feel is love and everything they do is an act of love. But for others simply misapplying the word is good enough.

It might be a fine thing to aim to love your neighbor, but you always have to start where you are. Cheating will not help you get to your destination any faster. If you are in, say, Knoxville, and it’s your desire to stand on the coast of Oregon and lick the salty waters of the Pacific from your finger tips, it just won’t do if you only travel so far as the puddle in the road in front of your house and claim you have arrived.