Christian confusion about the meaning of neighbor love spills over into confusion about how we should view our nations. Faithfulness to God obviously trumps all else. Nations are earthly goods, just like families are. But they are not for that reason to be dismissed as nothing more than sources of evil or idolatrous temptation. The Christian must love God even more than he loves his family and must be willing to stand against his family if it would tempt him to do evil.

The oft-repeated biblical command that we love our neighbors (Lev 19:18; Matt 19:19; 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27; Rom 13:9; Gal 5:14; James 2:8) is a favorite political prooftext of progressive evangelicals. It is often taken for granted that loving our neighbors means supporting any and every cause with some vaguely altruistic intent, from open borders, to a large welfare state, to lenient criminal sentencing. There is much that can be said about the scripture-twisting and logic-chopping required to come to such conclusions, but in this article I will make a simple point: the command that we love our neighbors cannot be set against the demands of divine justice or God’s creational design. In particular, loving our neighbors cannot lead to a government pursuing policies that will destroy families and civil society, and lead to national disaster. For some reason, this is a very difficult idea for many evangelicals to grasp: one of God’s commands can never contradict another; it cannot be the case that one is called to love his neighbor while pursuing aims that will lead to evils elsewhere. This is not even to mention the fact that many Christian claims about what loving our neighbors requires do not even consider the actual damage done to the majority of those around us by misguided governmental policies.

In many places in Scripture, God’s people are called to love their neighbors. In the parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25–37) Jesus made it clear that this did not apply merely to fellow believers. That fact may be the only one that many evangelicals get right, because they often include every social cause they support in the meaning of loving one’s neighbor. They can point to the often pitiful condition of illegal immigrants attempting to cross the border, or to extreme poverty in America’s cities, perhaps even to the mere desire of people from other nations to live in America, and claim that loving one’s neighbor means allowing such immigrants (legal or otherwise) into the country, or to the government spending vast sums of money to eliminate poverty. This becomes a potent rallying cry every time there is an election.

The biblical command to love one’s neighbor is a command to seek, within one’s own immediate experience, to do good to those one encounters in life. Loving one’s neighbors might mean helping them rebuild after a natural disaster, or other acts of basic human kindness, but the main point of Christ’s teaching on the good Samaritan was to combat a Jewish restriction of mercy and kindness to fellow Jews, to show them (and everyone else) that your neighbor is the person right in front of your face, Jew, Christian, or pagan.

Christians must love their neighbors. But Christians also must adhere to all biblical teaching and must live in harmony with God’s creational design. If a specific action undermines God’s creational design, it for that very reason cannot be an instance of loving one’s neighbor. Illegal immigration, and even mass legal immigration without the possibility of assimilation, undermines the social fabric of any nation. Welfare payments (apart from temporary emergency provisions) discourage industriousness and lead to a whole host societal disfunctions (a lack of children with married parents, etc.). Lenient criminal sentencing encourages crime and violence (as seen in recent decriminalizations of theft in many cities). None of these policies, then, can possibly be instances of loving one’s neighbor.

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