Legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane called his album A Love Supreme an offering to God. The four-suite musical masterpiece was a spiritual declaration, he explained in the liner notes, signifying the marriage between his music and his faith in God.
The Apostles’ Creed wasn’t Coltrane’s statement of faith. But he was raised in the church, and his artistic expression showed that influence alongside evidence of God’s common grace. A Love Supreme “mixes modern jazz with the ecstatic energy of the Black gospel,” said the late jazz enthusiast and cultural critic Greg Tate, and it was structured like a church service, moving from rising chants of worship, to a fiery sermon, to an instrumental interplay resembling a call and response between pulpit and pew, then to a sweet, forward-looking benediction.
The album was recorded in 1964, the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the same year Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. Listening to it now, it’s hard not to make that connection—and to notice that this movement was pursuing and living into a love supreme without Coltrane’s theological ambiguity.
Civil Rights was a movement that lived out the truth of the Negro spirituals that activists sang, an unabashedly Christian endeavor in philosophy and practice alike. The love that Christians in the Civil Rights Movement sought to embody was not self-interested or limited to affirmation. It was a love they hadn’t received from this nation but one they knew to be necessary and real. They knew a love truly supreme was possible in Christ because the Bible said so.
The Bible told them to love their enemies (Matt. 5:43–48), and they obeyed. That is the Christian love imperative. It’s possibly the most counterintuitive, otherworldly, and pride-shattering component of the gospel.
In a sense, it’s not complicated, but it’s hard. What I mean is the concept isn’t astrophysics, but in practice we find it extraordinarily difficult. It runs counter to our broken psychological and emotional reflexes: Why in the world would I love my enemy? By definition, this is someone who is worthy of my contempt. This is someone who doesn’t have my best interest in mind.
But what Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount was establish a deliberately indiscriminate love that is not conditioned upon shared identity, shared interests, or even peaceful cohabitation. This love extends to those who’ve done nothing to deserve it—in fact, to those who’ve done everything to make themselves ineligible for it.
That includes racists in seats of power whose policies are explicitly or implicitly unfair and inequitable. It includes abortionists whose every swing and stroke of the scalpel undermines human dignity—and greedy financiers whose ambitions suppress wages and treat the existence of the poor like manipulable numbers in a prospectus.
And not only them: us too. No one is below or outside the scope of this amazing grace, this supreme love.
Yet despite our universal need of it, perhaps no concept has been more often co-opted and butchered than the true meaning of love, even in the church. Conservatives often focus on a “tough love” that excuses them from social justice, empathy, and love for people like George Floyd. Progressives have made love into sentimentality and vain affirmation, which allows them to stay in good standing with their secular peers though it means rejecting the Christian sexual ethic.
But Christian love isn’t self-righteous condemnation or the well-intentioned sanctifying of sin. It isn’t passive niceness, nor does it necessarily require agreement. It “always hopes” but also “always protects” (1 Cor. 13:7), which means it holds people accountable for wrongdoing. I can love my enemies and still believe they need to be loudly corrected, stripped of their authority, or even jailed.
But I can’t love them and want them to be humiliated or punished out of proportion with their offenses. I can’t love them and want the worst for them. Even with enemies, love means self-sacrificially wanting the best for others.
It could mean protesting MAGA policies while advocating for more hospitals in Trump-loving rural areas. It could mean exposing the lack of wisdom in Los Angeles’ criminal justice laws while working to help the city rebuild after its wildfires.
Love may require advocating for those who might not do the same for you. This is the greatest love, a love supreme.
The Civil Rights Movement captured this ethic. While Coltrane was soulfully revolutionizing jazz, the Black church was composing their own paean to the love God requires of us.
They dared to apply Jesus’ words in the public square, choosing to see their antagonists as ill, just as the Bible describes (Mark 2:17), not purely evil or irredeemable. “America was sick and it needed a doctor,” said activist Fannie Lou Hamer. And love was the only remedy. Understanding opponents of civil rights as sick was solidly biblical, and it opened the door to feeling compassion for them. We don’t hate people for being sick. We care for them and help them heal.
This perspective informed Civil Rights activists’ language, attitudes, and advocacy. Their political opponents weren’t abstractions but people. Their racism was wrong and had to be opposed in no uncertain terms, but their sickness was not stronger than the Good News. They were redeemable, and the Civil Rights activists knew it and acted accordingly.
Civil Rights advocate Diane Nash has recounted a story about how a white restaurant manager who was initially against desegregation became an ally and persuaded other white businessmen to desegregate too. This never would have happened had activists treated him with contempt. And King never pulled punches, but he helped even many opponents want to live up to the explicitly Christian standard of love he so beautifully professed.
We are not always so committed to love in the political controversies of today. Americans both inside and outside the church cheer on the representatives who degrade and mock their opponents in the most performative and audacious ways. We’d rather vent than persuade or inspire, taking the quick gratification of bitterness over the hard work of negotiation and cooperation.
This may provide some fleeting pleasure of retribution, but it’s never fulfilling. It’s always empty and corrupting. We may try to justify our hideous attitudes by pointing to how our enemies wronged us first or worst, but there is no defense of malice under the gospel. Even if our cause is righteous, animosity and a taste for humiliation are themselves symptoms of the sickness of sin.
Six decades after King and Coltrane, the Civil Rights Movement should remind us that our lovelessness is never defensible. It has no redemptive value. It’s a net negative in God’s economy, serving only to torture our hearts and sin against God and our enemies. It’s bad politics. But more importantly, it obstructs us from finding love supreme.
Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of And Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the author of the forthcoming book Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around: How the Black Church’s Public Witness Leads Us out of the Culture War.
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