Pray for Them Anyway

Jesus did not say pray for the people you agree with. He said pray for your enemies. That command is harder than it sounds and easier than we are making it.

The Command We Would Rather Skip

It is right there in the Sermon on the Mount, plainly stated, no room for creative interpretation: You have heard that it was said, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

I will be honest with you. Sometimes I do not want to.

Not because I think Jesus is wrong. Not because I have worked out a sophisticated theological objection to the command. Simply because there are people whose politics, whose decisions, whose public statements make something in me want to dig in rather than open up. The pull of contempt is real. It feels, in the moment, almost righteous, like refusing to pray for certain people is a form of integrity rather than a failure of charity. The Gospel has a word for that feeling. It is not a flattering one.

Jesus does not qualify the command. He does not say pray for your enemies unless they are really bad, or unless they have done enough damage, or unless your side is clearly right. He says pray for them. And then He raises the stakes: if you love only those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? The standard He is setting is not niceness. It is the love of the Father, who makes the sun rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. That is the model. That is what we are being asked to participate in.

It is worth sitting with how uncomfortable that is before we do anything else.

A Quick Reality Check on the Word “Enemy”

Before we go further, we need to be honest about something. The word enemy is doing a lot of work in American political life right now, and most of it is borrowed glory.

Around the world, there are Christians for whom the word enemy refers to something with real weight. There are believers who are imprisoned for owning a Bible. There are communities where going to Mass requires courage that most of us will never be asked to find. There are people who have watched family members killed for refusing to deny their faith, who have lost everything for the name of Jesus, who pray for their persecutors from prison cells and refugee camps and burned out churches.

And here we are, in one of the most prosperous and religiously free nations in human history, applying the word enemy to people who voted for the other candidate.

I do not say that to be dismissive of genuine disagreement. Policy matters. Values matter. Elections have consequences and it is not wrong to care deeply about the direction of the country. But if you genuinely struggle to pray for President Trump, or if you genuinely struggle to pray for President Biden, I think that is worth pausing on. Not because their records are above scrutiny or their decisions beyond criticism, but because the gap between that struggle and what Christians in other parts of the world are being asked to endure is so vast that we ought to feel it.

The Question That Reveals Everything

A question that I think is worth asking yourself and answering honestly is the following.

If you lean left: if President Trump brought about world peace and ended world hunger, would that make you happy?

If you lean right: same question, but replace Trump with Biden.

Take a moment with that. Answer it honestly, not the way you think you should answer it, but the way you actually would if nobody was watching.

I think a majority of people answering that question with full honesty would say no. Or they would feel a hesitation, a reluctance, a quiet resistance to the idea of the person they oppose succeeding in any meaningful way. And if that is true, then the question is no longer really about policy at all. It is about something older and more stubborn than politics. It is about pride. About the investment we have made in being right about them being bad. About how much of our identity has quietly become organized around opposition to a particular person or party, so much so that their failure has started to feel more satisfying than the good that their success might produce.

That is not political conviction. That is an idol. And it is one of the more common ones in contemporary American life, because it wears the costume of principle.

When the answer to that question is no, or even hesitant, we are not praying for our enemies because we do not actually want good things for them. We want to be vindicated. And the Gospel command to pray for enemies is aimed precisely at that knot, because prayer, real prayer, for someone you oppose has a way of slowly loosening it.

What Praying for Your Enemy Actually Means

Let us clear up what this is and is not asking of you.

Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the command to love enemies, makes a distinction that is genuinely helpful here. He says that Christian love is primarily an act of the will, not a feeling. To love someone, in the theological sense, is to will them good. It is not to feel warmly toward them, not to agree with them, not to pretend that what they have done is not harmful or wrong. It is to desire their genuine good, and the highest genuine good for any person is their salvation, their conversion, their flourishing as a child of God.

You are not required to feel affection for someone whose policies you find destructive. You are not required to treat every political opponent as your special friend or to pretend that disagreement does not exist. What you are required to do, as a Christian, is refuse to exclude them from the reach of your charity. There is a difference between a general love that desires salvation for all and a particular intimacy that belongs only to those close to us. Aquinas is clear that the command operates at the level of the general. You are not required to like them. You are required not to write them off.

And here is the part that I think gets lost in conversations about praying for enemies. Some people resist the prayer not because they find it morally complicated but because they have quietly decided it is pointless. That person is too far gone. They are too proud, too powerful, too dug in. Nothing will change them. Prayer might work for ordinary problems but not for that.

That is not a political opinion. That is a statement about the limits of God’s power, and it is wrong.

Jesus is Lord. Of all of it. Of every proud heart and every corrupt institution and every person who seems most thoroughly insulated from grace. The same Jesus who stopped Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, a man who was literally traveling to arrest and imprison Christians, and turned him into the greatest evangelist the Church has ever known, that Jesus is the one you are praying to when you pray for your enemy. If you had asked the early Church to name the person least likely to become an apostle, Saul would have been on the shortlist. God was apparently not consulted on their ranking.

No one is too far gone. No heart is beyond the reach of God’s mercy. The mustard seed of faith that actually prays, that actually brings the name of the person you find most difficult before God and asks for their conversion and their good, that prayer is not wasted. It is aimed at the only One with the power to do anything about it.

Pray for Them Anyway

The command is not conditional. It does not wait for the enemy to deserve it, or soften first, or come around to your position. It does not require you to feel ready. It requires you to do it.

And here is something worth naming: the person you cannot bring yourself to pray for has more power over your interior life than they deserve. The contempt you are holding, the satisfaction you take in their failures, the way their name or face can ruin a perfectly good morning, that is not strength. That is captivity. Praying for them is not a gift you give them. It is a freedom you reclaim for yourself, and more importantly, it is an act of trust that God is actually in charge of the parts of the world you cannot control.

We are not asked to be neutral. We are not asked to pretend that bad policy is good policy or that harmful decisions do not have real consequences. We are asked to refuse the step that takes disagreement and turns it into dehumanization, that takes opposition and turns it into contempt, that takes political difference and turns it into a reason to place someone outside the reach of our prayer and outside the reach of God’s mercy.

They are not outside the reach of God’s mercy. Nobody is.

So pray for them. Pray for the politician whose decisions keep you up at night. Pray for the commentator whose voice makes you want to change the station. Pray for whoever came to mind when you read that question a few moments ago and felt the honest resistance rise up. Pray not because you feel like it but because Jesus told you to, and because Jesus is Lord, and because prayer aimed at the Lord of all things is never wasted.

Give it a shot. Mean it. See what happens.

Lord, this is hard. There are people I find it genuinely difficult to pray for, and I think you already know who they are. I am asking you now to change that in me. Bring them to mind not as my opponents but as people you made and love and died for. Convert their hearts. Grant them humility. Give them wisdom greater than their own. Give me the grace to want good things for them, even when everything in me resists it. And if my faith is small, if it is barely the size of a mustard seed, let it be enough. You said it would be. Amen.