Jesus practiced a love so radical it unsettled the powerful and disoriented even his closest followers. He loved people who were cast aside, touched those considered untouchable, and welcomed those others despised. Yet in all my years in church, I rarely saw that kind of love in practice. I heard countless sermons about love and acceptance, but when love became costly—when it meant breaking social rules or standing with the marginalized—it disappeared.

Radical love is not sentimental or polite. It is the refusal to treat anyone as less than fully human. To love someone is to see and affirm the fullness of their humanity—their history, beliefs, struggles, flaws, and hopes. Anything less is not love but a form of erasure. Dehumanization is the opposite: it reduces people to categories, stereotypes, enemies, or even to animals. Radical love resists this reduction. It insists that every person is worthy of dignity, even when systems, traditions, or institutions say otherwise.

I cannot pretend I have always lived this way. I too have ignored or diminished parts of others that made them fully human, which kept me from truly loving them. But over the past two years, I have begun to see radical love put into action. People across the world have shown me that to love radically is to love in ways that defy power and expectation. It is, as Paulo Freire—a Brazilian educator and thinker who believed that true learning helps people recognize their dignity, question injustice, and work together for freedom—described, the struggle for humanization: the fight to become more fully human ourselves by refusing to dehumanize others. This fight for liberation is, at its core, an act of love.

Freire said that while dehumanization has been our history, it does not have to be our destiny. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he argued that the oppressor dehumanizes others through domination, but in doing so also dehumanizes themselves. As long as there exists a class of people who are oppressed, no one can be fully human. For this reason, rebellion against oppression, though it may mirror the violence of the oppressors, can paradoxically be an act of love. By breaking the oppressor’s power to dominate, the oppressed reclaim their own humanity and offer the oppressors a chance to recover theirs.

Yet humanity has repeatedly failed to take up this call. Too often, the oppressed see liberation not as ending domination but as seizing the place of the dominator. Freire warned that the oppressed may aspire to become oppressors or what he called “sub-oppressors.” These sub-oppressors remain dehumanized themselves but accept a partial share of power in order to participate in the further dehumanization of others. In modern terms, this plays out when members of the working class, whether left or right, are encouraged to direct their anger not toward the ruling class, but against those more vulnerable: immigrants, queer and trans people, racial minorities, the poor, political opponents. This dynamic divides the working class against itself while the ruling class holds firm.

In reality, no matter where one falls on the political spectrum, if you live by selling your time, skills, or labor—and someone else profits off of that labor—you belong to the oppressed class. A warehouse worker, a nurse, a teacher, a programmer, a doctor, a lawyer, a consultant, or a fast-food employee all share this condition, even if the wages look very different. They don’t control the wealth they create; that surplus is captured by those who own the companies, the banks, and the investment firms. That owning class, or the people who live not by working but by owning and profiting from the labor of others, are the ruling class today.

Too often, the working majority mistake liberation for climbing into the role of the boss, manager, or politician who enforces the same system of domination. Freire called these people “sub-oppressors”: still exploited, but given just enough privilege to enforce the dehumanization of others. This can take the form of supervisors pitting workers against each other, politicians channeling working-class anger into scapegoating immigrants or queer people, or pundits convincing ordinary people that their real enemy is their neighbor with different beliefs rather than the billionaire who owns both their jobs and their media.

Now more than ever, in an age where most social interaction happens behind screens and neoliberal algorithms dictate what we see and believe, we must resist the temptation to reduce each other to labels, such as “liberal,” “conservative,” “MAGA,” “socialist.” These are masks that obscure our shared humanity and our shared class position. Radical love demands that we speak to each other as human beings rather than party members, as workers who are suffering under the dehumanizing constraints of capitalism rather than enemies.

For the past decade, the divide between left and right has widened and the dehumanization of “the other” has become deadly. The only way forward is a radical love like that exemplified by Jesus and like the love Freire described: a love rooted in collective liberation, where my humanity is bound up with yours and yours with mine. To humanize each other is not only possible, it is necessary. Our future depends on it.

Yet it is—paradoxical though it may seem—precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found. Consciously or unconsciously, the act of rebellion by the oppressed (an act which is always, or nearly always, as violent as the initial violence of the oppressors) can initiate love. Whereas the violence of the oppressors prevents the oppressed from being fully human, the response of the latter to this violence is grounded in the desire to pursue the right to be human. As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.

(Freire, 2005, p. 56)

This is radical love.

Reference

Freire, P. (2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed). Continuum.