By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

From time to time certain ideologues insist in tones of moral superiority that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. The historical evidence clearly contradicts this.

But it’s worth considering what our national politics and public policy would be if we really were a Christian nation. The best expert on that is not found among American fundamentalists or the politicians who exploit them. He is Jesus of Nazareth.

Everything that Jesus taught was informed by love for all people. Not because of their individual qualities, or who they are to you, but simply because they exist. Because they, and you, are God’s creation.

He told his followers, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.” But Jesus’s love wasn’t just for those who agreed with him. He said, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them who despitefully use you.”

Yet it is exceedingly rare to hear a politician exhort us to love each other, or to advocate policies that would make loving each other real. So among the dozens of speeches given at last month’s political conventions, the one that most captured my attention was by Senator Cory Booker. In it, he said, “We are not called to be a nation of tolerance. We are called to be a nation of love.”

He went on to explain that, “Tolerance says I’m just going to stomach your right to be different, that if you disappear from the face of the Earth, I’m no better or worse off. But love—love knows that every American has worth and value, that no matter what their background, no matter what their race or religion or sexual orientation, love recognizes that we need each other….”

His remarks bring to mind Jesus saying, “Whatsoever you have done to the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” And his distinction between tolerance and love evokes a parallel distinction between two kinds of freedom.

One notion of freedom is that of noninterference. This individualistic concept implies that freedom is a fence that protects us from others’ restrictions on our actions. But another notion of freedom is the opportunity to most fully realize our potential, which we can only achieve by working together.

Booker invoked this concept when he said, “Rugged individualism didn’t defeat the British. It didn’t get us to the moon. It didn’t build our nation’s highways.… We did that together. And so this is the high call of patriotism. Patriotism is love of country. But you can’t love your country without loving your countrymen and your countrywomen. “

Listening to Senator Booker, I got to thinking about how we would understand and respond to the issues most preoccupying today’s Americans if we truly were guided by the principles of love that Jesus taught.

When a lawyer asked Jesus what one must do to enter the kingdom of heaven, his answer was love:  Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. When the lawyer asked who his neighbor was, Jesus told a parable.

Although we live at a time of growing intolerance and bitterness toward people of races, ethnicities, and geographic origins different from our own, similar hatreds were widespread in Jesus’s day. Among the most despised of the “others” were the Samaritans. Yet in Jesus’s parable, it was the Samaritan who was the exemplar of love, and whom Jesus identified as the lawyer’s “neighbor.”

We also live in a time of growing economic inequality, with the wealthiest of us becoming wealthier, and more and more middle-class citizens sinking into poverty. The Democratic and Republican Party establishments both attribute this to globalization and technology, as if these were disembodied forces that just happened to descend from the heavens.

But every policy that regulates trade or the appropriation of technology is a series of choices regarding who will benefit and who will be harmed. A Democratic President and a Republican Congress, for example, sold NAFTA as a policy that would benefit everyone in North America.

It did benefit Mexican, American and Canadian elites. It also displaced 682,900 American jobs, put two million Mexican farmers out of work, and put 20 million poor Mexicans into “food poverty,” swelling the ranks of illegal immigrants.

Jesus’s love for and loyalty to the poor was unequivocal and repeated throughout the gospels. He told the rich to sell their goods and give them to the poor. When a wealthy young man became unhappy with that admonition, Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

In service to the rich, a Democratic President and a Republican Congress deregulated American banks, leading directly to the 2008 financial meltdown that put 2.6 million Americans out of their jobs, millions more out of their homes, and brutalized working people across the world. Jesus made a whip and drove the money changers out of the temple.

A Democratic President and a Republican Congress created a new growth industry that expanded the prison population by 673,000 Americans during the Clinton administration alone. Jesus said that he had come to free the prisoner. He rescued a woman from being stoned to death for a victimless crime and told her, “No man condemns thee, neither do I.”

Although crime has been steadily declining in the U.S. for 25 years, demagogues now seek political advantage by inflaming Americans’ fears. But law-and-order buffoonery will neither reduce crime nor calm the frightened.

Public policy that is guided by love might. In last year’s apostolic exhortation, Pope Francis wrote, “Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality within society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence.”

Jesus did not inveigh against the evils of big government. When a fisherman asked Jesus whether he should pay his taxes, he said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.”

In case after case, we find that those politicians who most frequently insist that America should be a Christian nation adopt policies that are directly at odds with what Jesus taught, policies that treat us as isolated individuals and families, without mutual obligations and with no connections other than through the market place.

But as Cory Booker suggests, we need each other if we are if we are to achieve our highest aspirations. He sums this up with an African proverb often quoted by Nelson Mandela: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”