The Tyranny of Modern Sentimentality
One observes, with a mixture of fascination and dismay, the peculiar tyranny exercised in modern discourse by the word “love.” It has become a cudgel rather than a virtue, a weapon deployed to enforce intellectual capitulation rather than a disposition that seeks the genuine good of another. To question another’s choices, to express moral concern about another’s behavior, or to suggest that certain patterns of life lead to destruction rather than flourishing, these acts are now routinely denounced as failures of love, as though love itself were indistinguishable from uncritical endorsement.
This represents a remarkable inversion. Where once love was understood as willing the good of another, even at cost to oneself, even when that willing required difficult truth, it has been transformed into a demand for moral silence. The formula is simple and devastatingly effective: if you truly loved me, you would accept not only my person but every aspect of my life, every choice I make, every identity I claim. To withhold such acceptance is to withhold love itself. The syllogism is complete, and dissent is foreclosed.
Yet this construction rests upon a category error of staggering proportions. It conflates the person with their actions, the inherent dignity of a human being with the moral quality of their choices. More fundamentally, it severs love from truth, as though these were opposing forces rather than necessary complements. One might as well try to separate light from illumination, or heat from fire.
The Apostle Paul, writing to the Christians in Rome, offers a vision of love that explodes this false dichotomy with the force of revelation: “Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” Here, in a single verse, we find both the authenticity and the moral clarity that contemporary sentimentality has labored so mightily to divorce. Love, Paul insists, must be genuine, “without dissimulation,” without the play-acting and false sentiment that masquerades as affection. But this same love requires moral vision: it abhors evil and clings to good. These are not separate exhortations, easily divided and selectively applied. They are integrated requirements, the twin heartbeats of love rightly understood.
The Problem of Feigned Affection
Consider first the demand for sincerity. There exists in modern society, and, we must confess, within the church, a kind of love often described as hollow pretension. Men and women deploy the language of affection with the ease of practiced actors, their words calibrated to social expectation rather than genuine feeling. “I love you, brother” flows from the tongue while the heart remains unmoved, perhaps even hostile. Such effusive declarations serve a purpose, of course. They establish one’s credentials as a loving person, they oil the machinery of social interaction, they prevent the uncomfortable exposure of actual indifference or dislike.
This is dissimulation in its most basic form, the gap between expression and reality, the performance of an emotion one does not truly feel. Paul’s insight here cuts deeply because he recognizes how easily we deceive not only others but ourselves. We come to believe our own performance. We convince ourselves that because we have said the words, we possess the substance. The glove is stretched slightly beyond the hand within it, and we notice neither the gap nor the emptiness.
But there is a more sophisticated form of dissimulation, one particularly suited to our therapeutic age. It is the love that pours itself into words while carefully avoiding any costly action, any genuine self-denial. Such love is, most generally, intense selfishness. It speaks endlessly of compassion while maintaining a safe distance from actual sacrifice. It proclaims its own virtue while doing nothing that might genuinely benefit another. This is benevolence as performance art, charity as personal branding.
One encounters this phenomenon constantly in contemporary discourse. The individual who announces on social media their support for this cause or that marginalized group, who changes their profile picture to display the current emblem of solidarity, who speaks with great emotion about justice and inclusion, yet who has never sacrificed an evening’s comfort to sit with someone in genuine need, never given away what they would prefer to keep, never chosen another’s good over their own convenience. The words are abundant; the corresponding reality is absent.
How, then, does one cultivate authentic love? Paul’s answer may surprise us by its indirection. He does not say, “Try harder to love.” He does not offer techniques for emotional manipulation or strategies for manufacturing warmer feelings toward others. Instead, he points to transformation: the renewing of our minds, the ongoing influence of “the mercies of God” upon our whole selves. Authentic love, it seems, is less a matter of effort than of displacement. When the monstrous tyranny of self-love is broken, when we cease “thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think,” space opens within us for genuine concern for others.
This is crucial, for it explains why direct exhortation to love more sincerely often fails. The problem is not insufficient willpower but misplaced focus. It is “swollen self-love” that impedes the flow of affection toward others. Only when we receive into our minds “the mind that was in Christ Jesus,” only when we begin to see others as He saw them, with their inherent dignity and desperate need, do we find ourselves capable of loving them honestly. The path to sincere love runs through self-forgetfulness, and self-forgetfulness comes through contemplating the One who made Himself nothing for our sake.
The Integration of Love and Moral Clarity
But Paul does not stop with the demand for sincerity. In what might seem to some an irrelevant interruption, he immediately adds: “Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” The modern reader, accustomed to separating love from judgment, finds this jarring. Surely, we think, love is about acceptance, not moral evaluation. Surely the loving thing is to withhold our judgments about good and evil.
Yet Paul insists that this “healthy vehemence against evil and resolute clinging to good is as essential to the noblest forms of Christian love as is the sincerity” he has just demanded. The sequence is not accidental. These two requirements, sincerity and moral clarity, are not only adjacent but integrated. You cannot have one without the other. A love that claims to be genuine while remaining morally indifferent is a contradiction in terms.
Why is this? Because love, authentically conceived, seeks the true good of the beloved. And the true good is not whatever the beloved happens to desire or claim or choose. Some paths lead to flourishing; others lead to destruction. Some choices build up the soul; others corrode it. To love someone is to desire their genuine good, which means desiring that they flourish, not simply that they feel comfortable or affirmed in the moment, but that they become what they were created to be.
This requires moral vision. One must be able to distinguish between good and evil, between what builds up and what tears down, between truth and its counterfeits. Without this capacity for moral judgment, love becomes an echo chamber, reflecting back to the beloved whatever they wish to hear. And this is not love at all; it is abandonment dressed in kind words.
Notice the force of Paul’s language. He does not say “avoid evil” or “prefer good.” He says “abhor” evil and “cleave to” good. These are violent verbs, suggesting visceral reaction rather than cool calculation. Evil is to be detested, recoiled from, loathed. Good is to be grasped, held fast, clung to with desperate strength. There is no neutrality here, no calm indifference. Love, it turns out, requires passion, but passion directed by truth.
The modern difficulty with this integration reveals something about our cultural moment. We have been taught to see judgment and love as opposites. To judge is to be harsh, unloving, exclusionary. To love is to accept, to affirm, to withhold negative evaluation. But this is a false dichotomy, and a pernicious one. It makes love weak and sentimental, incapable of genuine help. And it makes moral truth cold and mechanical, divorced from care for actual persons.
Paul’s vision corrects both distortions. Love is not opposed to moral clarity; it requires it. And moral clarity is not opposed to love; it expresses it. The parent who sees their child reaching toward poison and says nothing, is this love? The friend who watches another spiral into self-destruction and offers only affirmation, is this friendship? The pastor who observes his congregation embracing what will harm them and remains silent, is this shepherding?
The Difficulty of the Good
But Paul’s construction reveals something else, something both penetrating and uncomfortable. He links the two exhortations, abhor evil, cleave to good, in a way that suggests the second is the foundation of the first. We are to abhor evil because we cleave to good. The firmness of our grasp on the good measures the force of our recoil from the bad.
This ordering matters because it exposes a common human failing. It is far easier to hate what is evil than to love what is good. One observes this constantly: people who are vigorous and entirely sincere in their detestation of wickedness, who can catalog sins and denounce sinners with tremendous energy, yet who show remarkably little enthusiasm for actual goodness. Their moral lives are defined by opposition rather than affirmation, by what they are against rather than what they are for.
This produces a cramped and joyless sort of virtue, if it can be called virtue at all. It speaks endlessly of what must be avoided but rarely of what should be pursued. It defines righteousness negatively, not doing this, not saying that, rather than positively. And it tends toward a suspicious, censorious spirit that is quick to condemn but slow to commend, eager to point out fault but reluctant to celebrate beauty.
Paul’s ordering suggests that this gets things backward. The proper foundation of Christian ethics is not revulsion from evil but attraction to good. We learn to hate sin not primarily through cataloging its horrors, though these are real, but through tasting the sweetness of holiness, through experiencing the beauty of truth, through grasping how good the good truly is. When we have held fast to what is genuinely good, we develop an instinct for its opposite. We recognize evil not only as rule-breaking but as a profound distortion of something meant to be beautiful.
This has practical implications. The Christian whose moral life consists primarily of avoiding wickedness is fragile, easily tempted, and generally joyless. But the Christian who has learned to cling to goodness, who delights in truth, who finds pleasure in virtue, who has tasted and seen that the Lord is good, this person possesses a different kind of strength. Their righteousness is not white-knuckled resistance to constant temptation but glad adherence to what they have found genuinely satisfying.
Moreover, this person is equipped to love others in a way that the simply censorious Christian is not. For they can offer not just warnings about what to avoid but testimony to what brings joy. They can say not only “Do not go that way; it leads to death” but also “Come this way; it leads to life, and life abundant.” The first message may be true, but the second is compelling.
Speaking Truth to Those We Love
All of this bears directly on our original problem: the modern claim that love requires acceptance of all choices, all behaviors, all self-definitions. We can now see this claim for what it is: a denial of both requirements Paul sets forth. It is dissimulated love because it refuses the costly work of genuine concern, offering instead the cheap substitute of affirmation. And it is morally blind love because it refuses to distinguish between good and evil, between paths that lead to flourishing and paths that lead to destruction.
To genuinely love another person requires something far more difficult than blanket acceptance. It requires the authenticity to be genuinely concerned for their welfare, not only for the comfort of the relationship. It requires the moral clarity to distinguish between their inherent dignity and the quality of their choices. And it requires the courage to speak truthfully, knowing that truth may be unwelcome, that it may cost the relationship, that it may result in accusation and rejection.
This is love that abhors evil not in the abstract but in the particular, abhors it when it appears in the life of someone we care for, abhors it precisely because we grasp what it is doing to them. And it is love that cleaves to good not only for ourselves but for those we love, desires it for them, prays for it, speaks of it, commends it, models it, even when doing so brings reproach.
Such love cannot be commanded into existence through sheer effort. As we have seen, it requires transformation, the displacement of self-love by the love of Christ, the renewing of our minds through sustained contemplation of truth, the growing capacity to see others as God sees them. This is the work of years, not days. It requires that we ourselves be brought under “the melting and softening influence of the mercies of God.”
But once cultivated, this love liberates us from the tyranny of modern sentimentality. We need not choose between truth and love, between moral clarity and authentic care. We can love our neighbor enough to tell them the truth. We can maintain their dignity while refusing to affirm their destruction. We can offer genuine affection without dissimulation while simultaneously calling them toward what is good and away from what is evil.
This is costly. It will often be misunderstood. The world calls it hate; Paul calls it love. The culture demands approval; scripture demands something far more difficult and far more valuable, the willingness to seek another’s true good regardless of the cost to ourselves. This is love without hypocrisy, love that integrates sincerity and moral vision, love that reflects the character of the One who loved us enough to tell us the truth about ourselves and about the path to life.
The question confronting each of us is not whether we will choose love or truth, acceptance or judgment. The question is whether we will embrace the demanding, integrated vision Paul sets before us: love that is genuine enough to be honest and honest enough to be loving, love that abhors what destroys and clings to what gives life. Only this love, scandalous in its refusal to separate truth from care, is worthy of the name.
Pastor Thomas Irvin
George County Baptist Church
Lucedale, Mississippi
