Love Wins

We had a discussion about the car decal "Love Wins."  I thought, given that it was a Subaru Outback, that it was an LGBT statement, though because it was at an evangelical camp it might still be a holdover from Rob Bell's book that was popular a decade ago. 

I have written about Bell a few times, mostly in 2011. Checking up on him, he seems to have gone further down the celebrity spiritual critic path even more, and is now on the Oprah network.  He maintains he is not saying anything heretical, just raising questions. Could be. He is in to being spiritual, which causes me to look out over the top of my glasses.  I am not interested in the type of questions he wants to raise.  By the end of my attention at that time, I felt he was telegraphing that it was important to see how much liberalism and Jesus overlapped, and to kick people who weren't abandoning ideas he thought they should. That has some use, I suppose, but it wears thin quickly. 

Google (or DDG in my case) splits the top thirty hits or so between the ideas, but I notice the book references tend to be older.  The sticker is likely about gay marriage, then. Drawing attention to itself this way, I noticed for the first time that it has a different tone from a Pride flag. People put Pride flags everywhere, sometimes trying to infuse them with all-the-minorities representation, and I mostly don't notice them.  Sometimes they seem to be a bit much, as when all the churches we saw around Boston Common displayed them prominently.  You really think you need to shout it out there, in a place where everyone already agrees with you? Well fine.  Maybe people would get suspicious if you took it down at this point.

But it's mostly just there in the background, sometimes being injected inappropriately, as anything that's a statement might be, but mostly just sort of vaguely positive and cheery: Shout out to gay people! We really like you! Be encouraged. 

"Love Wins" strikes me as more aggressive. There are always gradations in political statements, and everyone wants to get the effect of maximum challenge while retreating to the blamelessness of minimal interpretation.  It is straight out of Screwtape, where it is used to describe conversation between a man and his mother "I simply ask what time dinner would be and she flies into a temper," and we suspect he did not simply ask that but freighted the comment with more meanings, while she, for her part overreacted. "Black Lives Matter."  My niece and goddaughter  (University of Denver) went on FB to explain to us that "All it means is..." in response to people displaying "All Lives Matter" or "Blue Lives Matter," who were being falsely offended and, and, and...and the latter are also trying to extract maximum pushback with butter-not-melting innocence as well. She is Earnest, and is going to work for an NGO in DC. I worry.

You can find plenty of BLM people - real ones, not cartoons of the Right who will say "no that's exactly what we mean; deal with it." We all want it both ways. No, no, no!  It's mostly older people who just want someone to listen to...

Using the word "Love" is especially irritating to me now that I have looked at it carefully, as the expression rolls several of the meanings and shadings of that word into one as if they were identical.  Well, they certainly aren't the first to do that. As far back as Chaucer (Amor Vincit Omnia) people saw that there were multiple shadings of the word that could be played off each other deceptively.  Love is becoming a red-flag word for me, one that is brought out only for camouflage when the real meaning is opposite. Like putting "truth" in your book title, organisation name, or website. Uh-oh.

I am sure someone will think that I have overread this and ALL the phrase means is...