What Does It Mean to Let Go of Our Judgments?

When we stop judging other people, we can see their radiant essence.

I think that we as humans can be very judgmental. I know I can be. Just in the past week, I've caught myself judging people I care about for being (in my view): too cautious in their relationships, too prone to walking on eggshells, too blinkered by their own emotions, bad spouses, and (irony of ironies) too judgmental.

And so recently I've been thinking: what does it mean to let go of our judgments of other people?

I think when we truly let go of our negative judgments of other people, what's left is a deep and unconditional love for them. Bereft of judgments, we can see their radiant and beautiful essences. We can see their pure nobility of character, and the thousand and one ways that that nobility shines through in their actions. We can see their demons; but we can also let ourselves feel awe and joy at the ways (however small or large) that they have beaten those demons. We can see the darkness that has hold, to a greater or lesser extent, over every human being; but we can also find ourselves filled with wonder and lost for words at the light of their pure and radiant spirit as it shines through the cracks in that darkness.

I think to let go of our judgments for another person, then, means to love them unconditionally. It means to see their infinite and immutable worth as God's treasured sons and daughters.

(This is, again, something at which I am not perfect. But it's also something that I want to get better at in 2025.)

To let go of our negative judgments of a given individual doesn't mean that we approve of everything that he or she says or does. We can disagree with them. We can impose boundaries so that they can no longer insult or attack us.

We can even take action to stop them, if they're hurting other people. In Mere Christianity, theologian C.S. Lewis writes that,

"Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy."

But, Lewis proceeds to caution, "We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who became a spy and ultimately joined a plot to assassinate Hitler, embodies this distinction. In the excellent 2024 movie Bonhoeffer, when Bonhoeffer's role in the plot has been discovered and he is being led into a cell, his cellmate calls him, "the pastor who forgot to love his enemies." But I'm not sure that his cellmate's criticism is accurate. Following Lewis' logic, it would be perfectly reasonable for Bonhoeffer to love Hitler (as a fellow human and as one of God's treasured children) while still also trying to kill him (in order to protect others of God's children from him).

I think, as Lewis suggests, the key is this. We can take action against people; and in the modern world, this can mean anything from fighting against their ideas, to setting boundaries with them in our personal lives, to imprisoning or executing them if we as a society consider such action necessary to protect other people from them. But if we take action against another human being—another of God's infinitely loved children—our hearts should burst with three emotions:

1) A deep love for them.

2) A profound sorrow at having to take action against them. We should weep, not smile the cold and self-satisfied smile of schadenfreude.

3) (for those who do harm to others or to us): a profound sorrow for the demons of fear, guilt, and shame that are wracking them and driving their worst actions; and a soul-deep prayer than they will heal—not only for the sake of their victims, but also for their own sake.

One area where I see judgments cropping up consistently is in politics. A 2018 Axios poll found that 61 percent of Democrats see Republicans as "racist/bigoted/sexist." 54 percent of Republicans see Democrats as "spiteful".

In possibly the most horrifying study on toxic polarization I've ever seen, fully 30 percent of people in either party agreed that members of the other party "lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals."

Most of us have the experience of being insulted and attacked for our political views. Some of us (and I'll sadly include myself among this group) have the experience of being the insulter or attacker.

Sometimes it seems like these judgments arise naturally out of a fraught politics in which we have to debate and decide on the biggest issues of the day. With stakes like these, isn't a little toxicity inevitable?

But I don't think it is. What if we were to continue fighting for our vision of the good society; but in the midst of that fight, we were to let go of our negative judgments so that we could truly love those on the other side? I think we could do a lot to knit our fractured country, our fractured communities, and our fractured families back together.

(And if you'd like to know how to get started letting go of your negative judgments of the other side, I highly recommend checking out Braver Angels, a national nonprofit focused on bridging the partisan divide for the good of our democratic republic).

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