Loving Through Enmity: Healing the Broken Heart of Christian Antiracist Work

Loving through Enmity responds to the failure of US Christian antiracist work to translate love of the enemy into meaningful societal transformation. Beginning with an analysis of the racial enmity that is fundamental to white supremacy, Wickware clarifies an oft-elided distinction between private and structural enmity. While systemic opposition of interests between white and BIPOC Christians is the core enmity at play in white supremacy, Christian antiracist work too often centers individual slights, struggles, and forgiveness.

Centering structural enmity, Wickware explores how white supremacy produces and circulates a distorted love that takes as its goal the happiness of white people and demands sacrifice from those who challenge white happiness through the pursuit of mutuality. As a step toward articulating a more faithful love, he offers an account of Black love as a transformative, politically powerful emotion directed toward mutual care.

Building on that account of Black love, Wickware reimagines divine power and love in terms of God’s power to sustain connection, holy need for relationship with creation, and desire for creaturely thriving. Ultimately, faithful love of the enemy mirrors God’s love and involves embracing our need for those whose interests are structurally opposed to ours under the conditions of white supremacy, engaging in mutual aid, and committing to accountability toward one another’s need for self-love. Scholars and ministers alike will benefit from Wickware’s insightful conclusions.