In a nation reeling from political division and recent violence, Harvard professor and Catholic author Arthur Brooks offered a striking remedy at the Faith Matters Restore conference in Orem, Utah: “Love your enemies.”
The event was held at Utah Valley University Sept. 26, just weeks after the killing of Charlie Kirk on the same campus. Against a backdrop of national tension, Brooks delivered a keynote — later published in The Free Press — arguing that contempt, more than disagreement, lies at the heart of America’s divisions.
To explain how such contempt takes root, Brooks pointed to the concept of “motive attribution asymmetry.” He described this as the belief that “both sides believing, incorrectly, that they are driven by love, and their opponents by hate.”
This dynamic, he said, doesn’t just poison political dialogue; it “explains civil wars. It explains permanent conflicts among nations. It explains divorces.”
He added, “Motive attribution asymmetry perfectly described, even back in 2014, the relationship today between political conservatives and progressives: I love this country, but you hate everything this nation stands for.”
He described the insight that first shifted his thinking: “Nobody has ever been persuaded with insults. Nobody has ever been hated into agreement. But you have one tool that will work: love.”
But love, Brooks stressed, requires action — especially when it’s inconvenient. Choosing love in a divided society means being willing to confront the contempt coming from your own side.
“[M]oral courage is not standing up to the people with whom we disagree. Moral courage is standing up to the people with whom you agree, on behalf of those with whom you disagree,” he said.
Brooks said he came to that conviction during a political event where several conservative speakers mocked liberals as ignorant and un-American. Listening to their remarks, he suddenly realized: “They were talking about my parents.”
Though his family’s politics differed from his own, he said, “there is nothing stupid and evil about them. They loved me. They brought me up as a Christian, with a belief in the radical equality of human dignity, no exceptions, now or ever.”
This experience helped him understand how easy it is to slide from disagreement into contempt — especially when surrounded by people who think the same way. Contempt, he warned, isn’t just rude; it’s relationally corrosive. It’s what causes people to not just oppose each other, but to dehumanize one another.
“When we deploy disgust in conjunction with anger, we produce a complex emotion called contempt: the conviction of the worthlessness of another person,” Brooks said.
To illustrate the danger of contempt, he drew on the research of John Gottman, a clinical psychologist who claims he can predict a couple’s chances of divorce with startling accuracy.
“If either one rolls their eyes, or expresses derision or sarcasm, that’s evidence of contempt, and it’s exactly what will drive them apart,” Brooks explained. “America today is like a couple on the brink of divorce.”
Brooks argued that civility and tolerance fall short of what the moment demands, calling them inadequate responses to the deeper damage caused by contempt. Real healing, he said, requires something far more demanding.
“If I told you my wife and I are ‘civil’ to each other, you’d say we need marriage counseling,” he said.
The standard can’t be mere politeness — it has to be love. He anchored this standard in the Gospel itself: “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
That verse, he said, is “the most radical, transgressive teaching ever.” He echoed Martin Luther King Jr.’s interpretation: that liking is emotional, but love is a decision — a redemptive act that frees both the one who gives it and the one who receives it.
He closed with a challenge to reject the notion that tragedy demands uniformity.
“Some have said that the tragic events of the past two weeks oblige us to agree with each other more often. That’s wrong,” he insisted. “Agreement is a form of mediocrity. It necessitates a lack of competition.”
The problem isn’t disagreement — it’s the hatred surrounding it.
“We do not need to disagree less. We need to disagree better,” he said. “And we must do so not by standing up to the other side, but by standing up to those on our own side who say we must hate each other. We must go looking for contempt, and run toward it with love.”
He ended with a story from a small church in Maryland, where he once saw a sign hanging above the exit — not the entrance. It read, “You are now entering the mission field.”
That, he said, is the call facing every American today.
“Imagine it is calling you to love your enemies,” he said, “and in doing so, to help restore the vitality, health, and competitive disagreement of the greatest country on Earth.”
The post Catholic speaker: Healing the nation starts with loving our enemies appeared first on CatholicVote org.