“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” – I Corinthians 13:1
The folklore my mom liked to tell about our family is that I did not speak until I was 3 years old. Apparently as the youngest child, my ability to point and to communicate nonverbally initially worked well. When I finally learned “the tongues of mortals” I talked quite a lot and one day exclaimed to my mother, “Talking is the funnest thing I ever learned to do.” The ability to speak is essential in life, and I marvel at those who master several languages. Learning another language widens one’s worldview and provides perspective on the limitations of any one language. It makes us less small-minded and provincial.
The explanation of why the world’s people speak different languages is found in the Book of Genesis. In the story of the Tower of Babel following the flood in Chapter 11, God observes the hubris, haughtiness and exclusivity of the people as they build a tower to the heavens, so God confounds and confuses their speech, scattering them across the earth. The humbling diversity of language is a reminder that we are not the center of the universe and there is much in the world we do not know or understand.
In whatever tongue one speaks, the Apostle Paul reminds us that without love even the most articulate person becomes like a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. It seems Paul saw in these young, enthusiastic well-intended followers of Christ the same hubris as God saw in the tower builders in Genesis. Yet more than their zeal, the quality that troubled Paul was their arrogance and genuine feeling of superiority about being “in the know.” Paul believed in his heart that the sense of superiority and division at Corinth were caused by a loveless spirituality. In I Corinthians 13, Paul reminds us that a faith without love is meaningless. Rigid religiosity that is mean and lives with the expectation of privilege does not reflect the Gospel of Christ.
Respected, conservative journalist David Brooks wrote an article for the Atlantic in August 2023 titled, “How America Got Mean.” No one denies that we have become a mean-spirited culture. We have become increasingly rude, cruel abusive and violent with a lack of compassion and empathy for others. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity. In 2018, fewer than half did. Brooks reflects on reasons for our growing meanness: emerging technology with overstimulation on social media, changing sociology with less involvement in the community and worsening economics with financial inequities among us, leaving us afraid, alienated and pessimistic. Brooks also includes demographics as a cause for our meanness. Once a dominantly white culture, as we become a more diverse country, millions of white Americans fear they will lose their privilege.
The White Christian Nationalism movement has evolved out of this fear with a strong rhetoric articulating a meanness within people of faith. The movement is built around the idea that Christians are called to a new transformation of the United States. These are Christians who want to revolutionize the way our country looks and to make it great again in terms of being a Christian nation. By investing in spiritual warfare, through the misuse of scripture, and with the goal of a monochromatic, white, male culture, they believe they are called to fight a cosmic battle between good and evil. These “tongue of mortals” have scapegoated refugees, immigrants, people of color, women not submitting to traditional roles and the LGTBQ community, placing them in the category of evil.
One cannot help but see parallels between today’s rhetoric and the dispute among early Christians in Corinth. At the heart of Paul’s counsel to the Corinthians, he reminds them that part of the process of growing up is giving up some of that self-centeredness, certainty, simple reasoning and illusion of control we had as children and accepting that, in all our language and knowledge, we only know the truth in part and see a dim reflection of ourselves.
Unlike knowledge and language, Paul reminds us that love never grows obsolete. There was no need for arrogance, hubris and pedantic assertion in Corinth, and there is no need today. Where we need certainty is in our love and respect for one another.
This article appears in Combating human trafficking.
