Love Your Neighbor

The commandment “love your neighbor” is one of the most political commandments in scripture.

Pastors in East Africa showed me how political this commandment really is. I grew up in central Virginia, with all the usual assumptions Americans carry with us regarding a strong separation between religion and public life. When I worked in East Africa with the Episcopal Church’s Young Adult Service Corps in my early-20s, however, I encountered a different sense of political engagement. These pastors didn’t assume such separation. Most believed in separation between church and state, but not between religion and public life. Such integration enabled these pastors to see clearly that Jesus telling disciples to love their neighbors is a political commandment. They translated an ordinary Christian commitment to neighborly love into wider politics for peace, becoming feisty advocates for justice and love in public life.

Loving neighbors should engage us in public life because it involves loving people in our neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Here we can picture Christian political life working in a series of concentric circles. The center circle is our congregation, the place we gather every week to hear the Word of God proclaimed and receive the presence of Jesus Christ in blessed bread and wine. Our worship is a public thing, a group of friends and strangers gathering as a public body to praise God. The very term “church,” after all, comes from the Greek word ecclesia, a term for a town assembly. The early church recognized the public nature of its assembly gathered for worship. Christian political life begins there in our congregations.

The next concentric circle beyond our congregation is the neighborhood, a place Jesus calls us to love with special intention. Loving neighbors will inevitably draw us into public engagement, as we discover injustices and sins within our neighborhoods. A caring congregation will feed people who are hungry; welcome strangers and immigrants; look after those who are oppressed or vulnerable. These simple acts of neighborly love, these works of mercy, engage us in public life. For we should not simply feed the hungry, but ask how and why they are hungry in a society like ours that has abundant food. We should not only welcome the stranger but ask how they could find a place to belong. We should not only house those struggling with homelessness, but ask why our city or town doesn’t have enough affordable housing.

These acts of neighborly love then take us to the next concentric circle—town and city politics. Congregations should engage these politics not from partisan platforms, which tend to be abstract and formulated at national levels, but out of our own experiences of loving neighbors. In this way a congregation might get involved in a wider city’s hunger initiative based on its experience with hungry neighbors, or in housing affordability based on its experience with people struggling with homelessness. And the congregation will find that these town and city issues relate to state and national issues—hunger policy, housing policy, and so forth. The state and nation become the next circles of political engagement, followed by international politics. Tempting though it can be to leapfrog to national politics, I think it’s much healthier to start in the middle of the concentric circles—with our congregation’s experience of loving neighbors—and move outward.

In this way, feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger become political actions, because politics doesn’t just mean statecraft. Politics means the process of sorting out how a community lives together and makes its decisions. Politics is all around us—in our churches and in our workplaces, not just in Washington. That’s the reorientation I learned from pastors in East Africa. They saw politics all around them, in their villages and churches as well as in their nation-state. When we see that, we can discover that loving neighbors is the beginning of public action for love and justice. Loving neighbors isn’t separate from public life, it’s at the heart of public life.

This vision is one of spiritual wholeness, for politics proves integral to spiritual wholeness rather than opposed to it. We never find spiritual wholeness on our own—we find it with and through other people. We find it in community, and any community involves politics. When we get disappointed about community politics, politics itself is not the problem. The problem is the kind of politics we’re practicing.

We often see politics as people struggling for control or trying to dominate, but more fundamentally politics is about our interdependence and how we shape that interdependence. Politics shapes social fabric; while bad politics tears that social fabric, good politics heals it. Congregations can play an indispensable role building and reknitting the social fabric that gives wholeness to our lives. That work happens through internal congregational politics and through works of love and justice in our neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

Where does that leave us in 2025? Loving neighbors is an act of hope during dark times. Every act of neighborly love, however small, helps to shift a community in the direction of love and justice. Whether it’s feeding hungry people, welcoming refugees and migrants by ensuring they have provisions, or another act of mercy, we are building a different world. It’s happening slowly, perhaps without immediate effect in those outward concentric circles. But we are changing the inner concentric circles one act of mercy at a time.

We never know how these small actions will reverberate. Some scholars of the civil rights movement, for example, are trying to change how we see that movement by identifying its beginnings much earlier, during times when it seemed little progress was being made. In my own city of Alexandria, in 1939 four black men staged a sit-in at the Alexandria public library demanding that this Whites-only library become integrated. In Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, city leaders like John Mitchell, Maggie Walker, and many others organized a streetcar boycott in 1904 to protest segregated transportation. These tactics were taken up in the 1950s and 1960s during the most famous period of the civil rights movement, but they drew from decades-old techniques. These earlier interventions were acts of hope. In our time, we look back at those events and we see where they were heading—toward the civil rights advances of the 1950s and 1960s. But John Mitchell and Maggie Walker did not have the benefit of hindsight. They went to their graves with Virginia more segregated than it was earlier in their lives during Reconstruction. Their acts of hope were the first fruits of something greater, which they themselves did not live to see. Who knows where our acts of neighborly love in 2025 will lead.

Finally, loving neighbors can reknit our social fabric. Loving neighbors enables us to see people with whom we profoundly disagree in the fullness of their personhood. When I feed hungry people, I’ve often found myself in a soup kitchen serving alongside people whose national politics I completely disagree with. (I suspect that they feel the same way about me.) Through serving together, however, I have come to see this other person as more than someone identified with a flawed political agenda. I come to see them as someone who also cares for their neighbors. This doesn’t gloss over or minimize our differences, but it does enable me to see a bit more love and hope than I could before. It turns me into someone more able to see God’s work in the world in unexpected ways, someone more attuned to how God works in many and various ways to advance God’s work of love and justice. Rather than seeing this other person as a political enemy, it enables me to see this other person as someone who loves their neighbors and someone whom God loves.

Human beings are made to love, and we can love only in community with other people. Those communities will always be political. God meets us amid our politics, not in spite of them. Christian political engagement starts with loving neighbors.