Chris Abraham

“Love your neighbor” is often reduced to sentimental approval or moral surrender. In the Gospels, it is neither. It does not mean liking someone, agreeing with them, dissolving boundaries, or abandoning truth. It means refusing to dehumanize. It means recognizing the image of God in someone even when you reject their choices, arguments, or worldview.

Jesus modeled this clearly. He ate with tax collectors and prostitutes, and the Pharisees interpreted that proximity as endorsement. They assumed that sitting at the table meant signing off on the lifestyle. It did not. Presence was not affirmation. Dignity was not validation. He extended mercy without redefining sin. He loved people without collapsing moral distinctions.

That distinction matters. Love in the Christian sense is not coerced sentiment and it is not ideological compliance. It is a chosen posture of restraint and regard. It refuses contempt. It refuses caricature. It refuses to reduce a human being to a category.

The New Testament also shows that love coexists with boundaries. Jesus walked away from hostile towns. He confronted hypocrisy. He spoke hard truths. The apostles warned against destructive behavior and divisiveness. None of that contradicted love, because love is not the absence of disagreement. It is the absence of hatred.

When “love your neighbor” is weaponized to demand surrender of conscience or silence of conviction, it ceases to be love and becomes leverage. Love does not insist on its own way. It does not manipulate. It does not coerce. It acts without contempt.

Christians, especially during Lent, would do well to read the Gospels directly rather than rely on simplified childhood summaries. The red text is more demanding and more nuanced than the slogans. It calls for humility without erasing moral agency. It calls for charity without collapsing truth.

To love your neighbor is not to endorse everything about them. It is to refuse to deny their dignity while you live, speak, and decide in accordance with your own conscience before God.

We all heard the line in some form: if you’re young and not liberal, you have no heart. If you’re older and not conservative, you have no mind. It gets pinned on Winston Churchill, though historians can’t find proof he ever said it. The quote probably predates him. But the idea stuck because it felt intuitive. Youth burns with moral clarity. Age cools into calculation.

For decades, the life-cycle theory of politics suggested that people drift right as they acquire mortgages, families, and tax bills. You start with ideals. You end with spreadsheets. Heart first. Head later.

But 2024 complicates that story.

Gen Z is not moving as a bloc. The gender gap is historic. Young women are identifying as liberal or leftist at higher rates than previous generations of women at the same age. Issues like reproductive rights, climate, gun policy, and economic precarity are not abstract to them. Politics feels personal and urgent.

Meanwhile, young men are trending more conservative or at least more right-leaning than their female peers. Some frame it as a reaction against progressive cultural norms. Some see it as populist defiance. Some simply distrust institutions across the board. Whatever the cause, the divergence is real.

Instead of a generation starting liberal and aging conservative together, we’re seeing parallel tracks form early. The old adage assumed a shared cultural baseline. Today’s young adults are building political identities in different online ecosystems, with different media diets and different threat perceptions. So is the saying still true?

Maybe the “heart versus mind” framing was always too neat. It assumes compassion lives on the left and realism on the right. Reality is messier. There are idealistic conservatives and hard-nosed liberals. There are young pragmatists and older revolutionaries.

The more interesting question might be whether people still change predictably with age at all. In an era of identity politics, algorithmic media, and hardened partisan brands, it’s possible that political orientation is stabilizing earlier and shifting less.

The old proverb imagined politics as a journey. 2024 looks more like a fork in the road that appears at 18.

Heart and mind may no longer take turns. They may just be choosing different tribes.

Here’s my Gen X confession: I’m not wide-eyed about Epstein because I’ve been marinating in this storyline my entire life.

I saw Eyes Wide Shut and understood the metaphor immediately. I grew up during the satanic panic era. I watched decades of crime TV where every season ended in a warehouse, a shipping container, or some shadow network moving terrified people around like inventory. I’ve heard Alex Jones talk about occult elites. I’ve watched QAnon build cinematic universes out of trafficking rumors. I’ve listened to No Agenda break down elite hypocrisy. I’ve read the “more slavery now than ever before” statistics for decades.

By the time Epstein became front-page news, it didn’t feel like a genre shift. It felt like the latest episode in a very long series about power, secrecy, vice, and the fact that when people operate without constraint, they often slide toward appetite.

That doesn’t make it acceptable. It makes it unsurprising.

We’ve also lived through decades of cultural contradictions. People dismiss the satanic panic of the 1980s as hysteria but insist that modern revelations are categorically different, as if exploitation was invented in 1995. Meanwhile, everyone quietly understands that wealth plus insulation plus status equals access, and access plus lack of accountability creates rot.

On top of that, I’ve seen enough of the social climbing ecosystem to know how proximity works. There are always “tests.” Always blurred lines. Always a gradient from harmless indulgence to moral compromise. Power circles are rarely wholesome summer camps.

And culturally, we’ve never exactly been naive about age gaps, sexual scandal, or hypocrisy. America pretends to be shocked while simultaneously producing endless narratives about the older executive and the barely-legal assistant. Europe shrugs at age differences that would light up American cable news for weeks. Hawaii’s age of consent was 14 until 2001. The world has always had wildly inconsistent norms.

So when people clutch pearls as if they’ve just discovered that powerful men can be grotesque, I feel less outrage theater and more weary recognition.

The revelation isn’t that depravity exists. The revelation is that some people thought it didn’t.

That’s my Gen X baseline.

Yeah, strong talk. I mean, The UK and Europe can still intervene and break NATO limitations and go in there with boots anyway. Europe is being a wuss. They should have risked nuclear oblivion and global escalation with talk like this. www.gov.uk/governmen…