The Opposite of Love Is...

Would you like to weigh in on a little debate I’m having here on campus?

Here’s the question: What is the opposite of love?

Recently, I was discussing faith and life with a group of students along with a colleague from the College of Biblical Studies. During the discussion my colleague floated the very common formulation about love’s opposite. Specifically, he said:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it is apathy.”

I pondered that line and this week, while leading my bible class at church, publicly disagreed with it. I said something like this:

“The line you frequently hear in church is that ‘the opposite of love is not hate but apathy.’ But that’s just crazy. The opposite of love IS hate. Hate is way worse than apathy.”

Afterwards, my friend Chris, also from our College of Biblical Studies, defended the “the opposite of love is apathy” formulation. Chris’ basic contention was this:

Apathy, at its core, doesn’t even grant your existence. That is, your basic existence is not noted or recognized as worth even the most basic or moral consideration; you are, at root, “nothing,” a non-entity. Chris considered this “denial of existence” to be worse than hate and, thus, worthy of being accorded the status of “the opposite of love.”

I disagreed. True, a failure to recognize (morally speaking) the existence of the Other is a deep failure of love. But hate, at its core, seeks the non-existence of the Other, it seeks the eradication of the Other. Hate is more than holding that you don’t exist; hate contends that you don’t deserve existence, that existence should be taken from you. Hate, as I understand it, sits behind racism, lynching, and genocide. Hate is much more than apathy, it is active and morally justified (to the perpetrators) violence. I see this as much worse than apathy and, thus, place hate as “the opposite of love.”

Don’t get me wrong, apathy, as I said, is a very deep and tragic failure of love and a form of violence, but I’m sticking with hate as the true “opposite.”

So what do you think? Is Chris right? Or me? Cast your vote and I’ll let you decide:


This silliness aside, let me spend a moment reflecting on a more interesting issue associated with the “opposite of love” debate. Specifically, why is the “apathy is the opposite of love” formulation so widespread and commonplace?

Here’s what I think happened. I’ve long argued that since the Axial Age and the Enlightenment humans have, on average, particularly in nations affected by the Enlightenment, grown more moral. Charles Taylor in his book The Secular Age makes a similar argument, noting that the reforming influence in Latin Christianity led to a great emphasis on “civilizing” the masses. Public education comes to mind. By and large, although I recognize the glaring exceptions, humanistic values have taken hold in the world. The point is, hate isn’t rampant in our pews. Preachers generally don’t face genocidal audiences. What they do face are nice people. Tolerant and politically correct people.

Consequently, thundering on about hate isn’t very useful, rhetorically speaking. Hate just doesn’t speak to the moral experience of the average person in the pew.

But what does speak to the pressing moral issue in most churches is apathy. Nice people don’t need to hear sermons about hate. But they do need to hear sermons about apathy. Apathy sermons gain some rhetorical leverage on the average church audience. So, the love/hate dichotomy got reworked into the love/apathy dichotomy to make sermons more rhetorically powerful. In short, I believe that the “apathy is the opposite of love” formulation now dominates, not because it is true, but because it is rhetorically useful.

If this analysis holds it’s an interesting observation in that it suggests that popular theology is often driven less by concerns about validity than about efficacy. Personally, I think it is this dynamic (efficacy over validity) that has led to the ascendance of penal substitutionary atonement. Specifically, the penal substitutionary metaphors made for the most rhetorically powerful sermons and, as a result, led to the soteriological biases and abuses we see today. In short, the emotional connection between preacher and congregation is a source of theological pressure which nudges theological discourse in different directions.