Love Beyond Hate: Timely Old Wisdom for the New Year - How Menninger Thought Love Heals Minds, Families, Churches, and Societies

“Love cures people—both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.”— Karl Menninger

This morning this truth jumped out from an old psychological guru. I was cleaning out books for the new year—pulling volumes from shelves, deciding what to keep, what to pass on, what still spoke and what had grown quiet. In the middle of that small ritual of sorting and letting go, I came across Karl Menninger again. His book Love Against Hate stopped me. I sat down on the floor, opened it, and felt that familiar sense of recognition that comes when a voice you trust is still telling the truth.

Menninger’s work feels like that. It does not age. If anything, it feels more urgent now.

In an earlier reflection, we spoke of love as our deepest spiritual purpose: we are here to love and to be loved, including the difficult and often neglected work of self-compassion as we age. Here I want to stay with that same truth, but approach it from another direction—not theology alone, but psychology; not only individual well-being, but societal health.

Karl Menninger was one of the great psychiatrists of the twentieth century. Born in 1893, he co-founded what became the highly renowned Menninger Clinic in Kansas, a place that transformed the treatment of mental illness. He worked with people in profound psychological distress—trauma, violence, despair, psychosis. He was not a sentimental thinker. He was a clinician, a physician, a careful observer of human suffering.

And yet, after decades of listening to pain, he reached a striking conclusion: love and hate are the primary forces shaping both mental illness versus mental health and social well-being versus alienation and despair.

In Love against Hate, Menninger argued that hate is not simply a moral failure. It is a psychological and social illness. Hate grows where love has failed—where people feel unseen, unsafe, humiliated, abandoned, or stripped of meaning. Love, by contrast, is not weakness or indulgence. It is a stabilizing force. It organizes the psyche. It makes life livable.

Long before loneliness was called an epidemic, Menninger was naming it as a central psychological danger. Long before we talked about “social connection” as a health factor, he was saying plainly that human beings cannot survive—mentally or morally—without love.

This conviction shaped his thoughts about religion and the church. Menninger did not reject religion, nor did he romanticize it. He asked a serious psychological question: Does religion actually increase love, or does it sometimes cultivate fear, guilt, and hostility instead?

At its best, he believed, religion is one of humanity’s greatest containers for love. It teaches people how to belong, how to forgive, how to care for one another, how to live with limits and loss. At its worst, religion can amplify shame, hatred, judgment, and fear—doing psychological and societal harm while believing it is doing moral good.

For Menninger, the central task of the church (or synagogue and other religious institutions) was not control or moral superiority, but the cultivation of love strong enough to oppose hate. He believed the church should be one of society’s most powerful mental-health resources: a place where people learn how to love themselves without arrogance and others without fear.

To make this visible, Menninger often turned to story and symbol. He reflected on St. George slaying the dragon and Sir Galahad seeking the Holy Grail. Psychologically, these were not quaint legends. They were maps of the human task.

A likeness of St George slaying the dragon depicts the famous legend in Heidelberg, Germany...we saw these sort of images in tourists shops, even on beer steins there, it symbolizes good defeating evil.

St. George, in Menninger’s reading, represents the courage to confront what destroys life—fear, cruelty, despair, hatred—both within individuals and within societies. The dragon is not only “out there.” It lives inside institutions, families, and hearts. Facing it is necessary work.

Sir Galahad represents something equally important: the longing for meaning, wholeness, and goodness. His search for the Grail is not about conquest, but Life and Beauty. He is a seeker, not a controller. Together, these two images describe a healthy spiritual and psychological life: confronting what harms love, and actively seeking what heals it.

This is not abstract theory. It plays out in ordinary communities every day.

Imagine a small church in a rural town. It once had warmth and vitality, but over time it grew tight and anxious. At first it actually grew. Hatred fed it in malignant ways, but eventually the mean-spirited conversations started to become cancerous and scary. Rules mattered more than relationships. Fear quietly replaced curiosity. Love was still spoken about, but it was no longer practiced generously.

At the same time, imagine a family in that same town. No one would call them abusive. They were hardworking, responsible, well-intentioned. But the home was tense. Expectations were high. Mistakes were met with criticism and judgmental comments rather than understanding and support. Silence filled the spaces where warmth might have lived. Everyone felt alone, even together.

Menninger would recognize both situations immediately. He would say neither the church nor the family was intentionally cruel. They were fear-organized. And fear, left unexamined, organizes itself into control, judgment, and hostility. Love, by contrast, organizes itself into curiosity, compassion, and care.

Now imagine that something small—but profound—begins to shift.

In the church, a new pastor arrives, not with sweeping reforms, but with a different posture. She listens more than she speaks. She visits people in their homes. She notices who is missing. In sermons, she speaks less about who is right and more about who is hurting. Again and again, she returns to one simple idea: we are here to learn how to love.

She names fear gently and helps people see how fear has shaped their reactions. She invites the congregation to think of church not as a fortress, but as a shelter. Not a place to prove rightness or wrongness or even to secure a place in the pearly gates, but rather a place to practice compassion.

Some people resist. A few leave. But others soften. Older members, once silent, begin to share stories of grief and resilience. Younger families feel less judged and more welcomed. Children aren't constantly shushed. Meetings grow less combative. People start asking different questions: Who feels unseen? Who needs care? How can we be present rather than correct?

Meanwhile, in that family, something shifts too. One evening, after a painful argument, the mother pauses. She suddenly sees that everyone in the room is hurting and scared—scared of failing, scared of disappointing one another, scared of losing connection. She remembers hearing at church that love is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of compassion.

She speaks differently that night. Instead of correcting, she listens. Instead of defending, she names her own fear. The room grows quiet. Tears come. No problem is instantly solved. But something essential enters the space: safety.

Over time, the family practices a new way of being. Mistakes still happen, but they are met with curiosity rather than condemnation. Apologies become possible. Laughter returns in small, unexpected moments. Love slowly replaces fear and judgment as the organizing force of the home.

The ripple effects are quiet but real.

That church becomes a place where people bring their grief instead of hiding it. Where elders are valued for their presence. Where mental-health struggles are named without shame. Where self-compassion is taught alongside compassion for others.

That family raises children who are less afraid of failure and more capable of empathy. Those children carry that posture into classrooms, friendships, workplaces. They become adults who know how to sit with pain rather than turn it into anger.

Menninger would say this is how societies heal. Not through perfection. Through love practiced imperfectly, persistently, courageously.

Psychology now confirms what Menninger saw so clearly. Love regulates the nervous system. Being seen and valued calms fear. Giving care creates meaning. Receiving compassion reduces shame. Self-compassion protects against despair and bitterness, especially as we age.

Menninger believed many psychological symptoms were not moral failings, but cries for love that had nowhere to land. When people are deprived of love, they often turn against themselves. Harsh self-judgment replaces care. Shame replaces dignity. Hate grows where love is absent.

Seen this way, love is not a private virtue. It is a public necessity. It shapes mental health, family life, church culture, and societal stability. When love is cultivated, hate loses its grip. When love is neglected, no amount of technique or control can compensate.

Perhaps this is why rediscovering Menninger while cleaning out books felt so timely. He was reminding us of something we keep forgetting: psychology and spirituality are concerned with the same question. What allows human beings to live together well...without destroying one another?

His answer remains simple and demanding: love must be taught, practiced, protected, and renewed—again and again.

And that brings us back to where we began. We are here to love and to be loved. Not only for our own sake, but for the mental health and moral sanity of the world we share.

So let this be the question to roll around:

If love is the force that heals minds, families, churches, and communities, where might our own presence—our compassion, our gratitude, our warm-hearted presence, our self-kindness, our willingness to soften—be quietly transforming more than we realize?

Sidebar:

We see three of our gkids regularly. Two of them are teens. Their friends often hang out here as well. As I watch them and listen in, the issues are all about rejection or belonging. Judging verses understanding. Helping versus harming, proving we are better than others or respecting the gifts of others. If we think ageing is hard, we just need to remember back to those years! And...I find myself often being more preachy, controlling, and judgmental than wise, caring, and curious. Sheesh. I try to remember John's mantra to take keep love front and center. But sometimes I just don't. That's when I try to remember to treat myself with gentleness and kindness as well. The human journey continues into 2026 I guess and so does the clearing out of the no longer needed while holding on to the wisdom of the old and making room for the new....

making way for the new or nothing by clearing out a few no longer needed books (many, many more to go!!) while holding on to the wisdom of the old

And when I feel hopeless about big situations...seems I can't do much, I double down on my beliefs that I can do something with myself, my family, and my community...and I believe in the power of ripple effects as well as the butterfly effect. Small acts can have far ranging, and under the right conditions, enormous impact.