Q&A with Melissa Florer-Bixler on 'How to Have an Enemy'

After the Trump presidency, many leaders have made calls for unity. These leaders have called Americans to put aside their differences and unite around a shared humanity and shared values. However, some people have pushed back against these admonitions saying that uniting with their perceived enemy would require them to ignore patterns of oppression. 

Melissa Florer-Bixler addresses these concerns in her new book, “How to Have an Enemy”. Florer-Bixler is the lead pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. She has authored two books. Her first book is called “Fire by Night: Finding God in the Pages of the Old Testament”. Her second and upcoming book is called “How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace”, which focuses on who Christians should have as enemies and how Christians should go about calling them to repentance.  

Melissa Florer-Bixler. Creative Commons photo.

Florer-Bixler talked with ReligionUnplugged contributor Kenneth E. Frantz about the problems she identified with calls for unity, the concept of “cheap forgiveness” and recent issues in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).     

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity. 

Kenneth E. Frantz: You write about how Christians should have enemies and how that differs from other teachings on forgiveness and also having enemies in secular culture. So why did you consider that an important topic to write about? 

Melissa Florer-Bixler: I think many of us who were a part of, or live near, communities that are outside the dominant power structures of the U S., we're really grappling with a sort of post-mortem of the Trump administration. And for me, this project was a space to work through the trauma of what these past four years have been for me, for my community, for my state, for people I care about.

And part of that trauma, I think writing this book was recognizing that part of that was the response of the majority White church. I think what we saw during the Trump administration was really an anti-Gospel that was something unique in my lifetime. 

And I think that part of me expected, or at least hoped, that this would be the church's moment to stand as a clear witness to the good news. But instead, often what I was hearing, especially from the majority White church, was sort of both-sides-ism, a reduction of all of our problems to relational issues, these pleas for unity instead of division. And I needed for myself and my community a book that actually took an enemy seriously and attended to this as part of our faith life instead of a distraction from it.  

Frantz: Building off of that, you talk about how traditional teachings of forgiveness had kind of hurt marginalized communities in certain ways. In what ways has this teaching of forgiveness hurt marginalized communities and what is a better way to go about forgiveness? 

Florer-Bixler: I think we're all familiar with the notion of cheap grace. And I think there's a corollary in the majority White church, which is a church that is deeply attracted to cheap forgiveness. 

I think one way this happens is again, we sort of take up the gospel as personal salvation with vigor. I apologize, you accept my apology and then we're back to square one. It was really just a relational issue between you and me. An example of this would be apologies that come from institutions like seminaries and denominations. 

We're seeing more of this for their participation in chattel slavery. But an apology is not a repair. So we'll take the example of seminaries and we'll see that Black graduate students face a significant debt gap. 

They often accumulate twice as much student debt as their White peers, and the reason for this is that White students have more access to family financial support. They've accrued less undergraduate debt. They're often not financially supporting other family members in addition to themselves. So this apology is really empty without addressing that systemic racism, born in the slave trade and handed down generation to generation, has financially disadvantaged Black students. So what needs to happen to address that harm is really the question. 

How can we offer new forms of life that resist repeating this in the future? What is the source of that harm? And so those are the questions that actually make for robust forms of forgiveness rather than what we often see, which are cheap forms of forgiveness. 

Frantz: You talk about how oppressors can stop being oppressive, and that might cost them, but that is an option for them to go about repentance. So would you mind expanding on that point? 

Florer-Bixler: Throughout scripture, we see these acts of conversion that are people leaving their old life and following after Jesus to do this new thing. And oftentimes when people are thwarted from that participation, it's because of their inability to imagine that they could participate in this new social order. There's too much cost to it.

So we think about the rich young man who is enraptured by Jesus. Jesus has compassion on him. But he just can't lay down this old life to follow Jesus. Jesus is very harsh. The Gospels are the continued call to disrupt all of the things that we previously took for granted as foundational to our identities, our kinship systems, the jobs that we have, all of this is sort of wrapped up in the good news of Jesus Christ. 

And so if we look back at and we continue to model our lives after what we see in the Gospels, there’s going to be changes for the kind of jobs that we have, and how we make our money and where we send our kids to school. But I think all of that takes place within the discernment of our congregation, walking with us, in how we actualize that in our lives.  

Frantz: You talk about how part of loving your enemy is trying to call them out of being caught up in an oppressive system. Would you talk about that a little bit? 

Melissa Florer-Bixler: There's a consistent strain of the prophetic voice that is happening in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The theme of that is not for the destruction of the person who was participating in the harm of another person. But because participating in that form is itself a form of destruction.

It is to align your life with the lie of your own self-mastery, you are a God unto yourself. You are not bound to other people. You in some ways take the place of God as the ruler and decider of history. I think one of the ways that Christians are uniquely called into loving our enemies is that we actually want our enemies to thrive. 

We are constantly being saved from being enemies of God and of God's people. We also want that for other people. We've recognized the destruction that not only comes from being oppressed by other people, but the destruction of being an oppressor. Until we break that cycle so people stop being oppressors, we're always going to have people who are oppressed. And so really the call to enmity is to end the cycles of violence that you're all caught up in, but none of us can find a pure place outside of these systems. 

Frantz: And I guess that makes me think about a lot of the abuse in the Southern Baptist Church, like sexual assault and Russell Moore leaving the SBC and Christianity Today doing a podcast over Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll. We're talking about people who have either enabled significant harm or have caused significant harm directly. Is there a path for those people to no longer be enemies of the oppressed and to repent? 

Florer-Bixler: Yeah, absolutely. There has to be. That's the whole game right there is that we believe in repentance, that we have a faith of second chances. But what I think is often overlooked in that scenario, and I think you're bringing up the Southern Baptist Convention is a great example of this— it took 20 years and I think over 500 different cases of sexual abuse for the Southern Baptist church to finally issue a statement saying that if you have been convicted of sexual abuse or sexual assault in the congregational setting, that you can no longer serve as a pastor…

That is the lack of accountability. That is the expectation of forgiveness without consequences. What we often sort of slide into when we start talking about this is consequences for consequences sake, which is what we call punishment. 

Book cover for How to Have an Enemy.

We at the end of the day begin to confuse justice and punishment, that there's something cathartic about seeing your enemies hurt. And this is the place where Jesus calls us to resistance. What we are actually looking for is the redemption of people who have done harm. But that doesn't happen by us simply saying, “Okay, we can start over again.” But that doesn't happen by us simply saying, “Okay, we can start over again. We're just starting from square one.” Instead, into this vein of forgiveness of comes these questions: what do we need to do to repair this situation without retribution? What does repair look like without punishment? That is such a difficult question to answer. 

How do we make sure that the people who did this harm participate in addressing their own harms? How do we protect vulnerable people in the future? What does justice look like in this particular situation rather than trying to universalize this? 

There's a particular type of work that's happening right now called “transformative justice” that I talk a little bit about in the book, which attempts to do justice that talks about community accountability, and how do we address the causes of this harm and not just the harm? How do we see that the interpersonal ruptures are met with systemic issues that are tied together. You can't pull those apart. In order to address one, you have to address the other. And so we absolutely have the tools, the vehicle everything we need to move in that direction. I think the cost of that will be that institutions that have thrived off of structures of power and hierarchies of power are going to have to give that up. That's actually going to be the thing that prevents this from taking shape and in places like the Southern Baptist convention or Mars Hill. 

Frantz: That brings me to the discussion of righteous anger, using your anger for the means of helping the oppressed and ensuring their flourishing. What does that look like? And how does that differ from notions of anger outside of the church, and even some forms of trying to avoid being angry with people inside of the church? 

Florer-Bixler: I think we're often told that anger is only dangerous and only destructive, at least that was the message that I got over time. But that actually hasn't been my lived experience. That has been a fear but not what I've experienced in real life. In protests, anger is galvanizing. It creates communities around people who have been harmed. It creates the ability to speak in one voice. 

Even when there are only a few people who've been harmed, when anger disrupts controlled systems designed to prize stability and rationality, it can clarify that we have acquiesce to these systems that see anger as dangerous. 

Willie Jennings, who is one of the most important theological influences in my life, he writes about how there is both great power but also great peril in the claim that we can be angry about the things that God is angry about. 

I think that's a place for us to be cautious. But I also agree with Jennings that we need to move through this claim with fear and trembling. In one of my favorite essays, he writes that God invites us into a shared fury but only the kind that we as creatures can handle. And then it's Jesus who clarifies for us the way that we can stop anger from becoming hatred.

I think that it's a very simple answer. But attending and forming our lives around the good news of Jesus Christ is what shifts us from an anger that is destructive and hateful into an anger that can actually be clarifying, galvanizing and can help people to know that they're not alone. 

Frantz: That brings me to the next point. A lot of people are talking about cancel culture and public shaming on social media. How would your notion of righteous anger respond to that? Is there a place for cancel culture and public shaming in some instances? Is that something we want to avoid?  

Florer-Bixler: I do think we need better ways of understanding how to address harm and then offering paths of learning and return. I am often cautious because I know that at the same time that cancellation is in the eye of the beholder. The sense of people being asked to account for their words is also significant in a culture where public statements and social media shape so much of our political lives. 

It actually is important for people to be held accountable for their words. But at the same time, I think we have found ourselves in a place of not being able to accurately name the paths for people to return when mistakes are made.

I know that sometimes we hear that cancel culture is the big bogeyman of the right. But also in abolition communities, like the ones I participate in, we also talk about cancellation. But it's interesting to hear the difference between how those are perceived. 

I was thinking about someone like Josh Hawley, whose book contract was canceled and he went on to social media to sort of blast cancel culture. And I think for Josh Hawley and in a similar way to someone like Jonathan Haidt, we live in this culture where all ideas should be shared and there should be a free flow again, the sort of Neo-liberal free flow of ideas and everything gets to be said, and then people just have to work through it. 

That's very different from someone like Adrian Marie Brown. When she talks about cancel culture, she wants us to think about cancellation as continuing cycles of retribution. Hawley wants to do whatever he wants to do. And Brown wants to say, actually, you did something wrong and you need to be accountable for that, and we need to figure out how to help you return. So even when we talk about cancellation, we're talking about two very different sorts of visions of what it means to remove ourselves from those types of cultures.  

Frantz: You use the term “enemy” in your book for oppressors and people causing active harm and abuse. You may not call it a kind of left-wing orientation, but that is the language that I hear on the left. But I also hear Christians who are more right-wing using the term “enemy”— A lot of people on the left want to kill the unborn, or they want to reduce religious liberty or harm traditional culture. [. . .] So I guess how would you respond to that? 

Florer-Bixler: I want to just start with this. This book is just providing a working definition for us of what it means to be an enemy. Because I think that is so subjective. For the sake of this book, we're going to assume that enmity is difference plus power.   And so I think that's important because it also gives us space for disagreement. 

Great disagreements can be heated, they can be painful, they can be divisive. But if power isn’t part of that equation, I want to question whether those are actually places of enmity.

I absolutely think that people in the religious right think about people who support reproductive justice as enemies. And I think that's interesting because we are enemies because of a sense of a growing imbalance of power. What we're actually seeing on the religious right, in White evangelicalism, is not a primary response to harm, to witnessing poverty, to seeing climate change or causing it to be 117 degrees in Portland this weekend. None of those are sort of the central concern. 

The central concern is losing control. So the enmity that we actually see expressed by the religious right, is about loss of power. And what happens when White Christians are no longer the deciders of public policy, that is a deeply ingrained fear. So when we hear the language of enmity coming from the right, it is actually about power. But it's about losing it. It's about what it means to have to share the world with a more secular society, with women who don't want to get married anymore, with LGBTQ people who want to be treated with the same rights as everyone else. So, what does it mean to be losing control? That's the source of enmity for the religious right. 

Frantz: On the issue of disagreement in public discourse, you do see a lot of talk about how to have enemies.  And there's also this conversation about tribalism. You see this a lot with  Jonathan Haidt.  Other people who talk about people belonging to moral tribes and how people should tone down how self-righteous they are and give their own solutions to those problems. Your book in some ways tries to respond to those ideas. So if somebody was to pose those types of arguments to you, what would you say to them? 

Florer-Bixler: I only know Haidt by reputation. I haven't read his books. But that's because I'm just not interested in his project. I don't think that reducing conflict to some people are more psychologically open to new ideas and others simply aren't is a satisfying answer. I think that moral foundation theory itself is under a lot of scrutiny, but I can't really speak fully to that.

But I do think it's fascinating that people like Haidt and also his counterpart on the conservative end, David Brooks, it often feels they like to position themselves as sort of the only grown-up in the room. Everyone else is swayed by passions and extreme ideas or these irrational psychological underpinnings, but they've found their way out. And so it, it often feels like the gloss for that is civility, common good morality, virtue that are supposed to replace this. 

Anybody who takes a principled stance that challenges that is self-righteous. That feels a bit like a self-serving argument to me. It also has been a bit strange that to Haidt, Brooks, they've chosen I guess the chicken over the egg, right? We have this moral psychology that produces these social circumstances.

It's just as likely that we have social circumstances that produce people like Haidt and Brooks who want to conceive of psychological moralism in a particular way, right? So I don't find it a completely satisfying or solid argument. But at the end of the day I’m Mennonite. So I'm perfectly happy, more or less being sectarian. I don't spend a lot of time trying to convince people to stop participating in the destruction of their neighbors. 

I didn't write this book to evangelize people on the right. I don't think anybody who wants to be swayed in their position is necessarily going to pick this up. It could be that there are people who know how to do that. I don't. Since that's not something I know how to do, or I've seen done effectively, I spend my time with people who are in the habit of cultivating hope by asking again and again, what is the world we want to live in? What can we do today to begin to build that world here, now among us? That's what I spend my time on. Rather than thinking about how we can cure partisanship or what it means to overcome our biases. I feel very comfortable in that. I know that feels like a moral equivocation for someone like David Brooks, but I’m good with it. 

Kenneth E. Frantz is a freelance writer who has written for ReligionUnplugged, Sojourners, Real Clear Religion, and Religion and Politics.