Your 'Hard Truth' Isn't Love. It's Power.

Photo by Caleb Oquendo: www.pexels.com

Almost every single time I post something on social media about God being love, about Jesus saying his disciples would be known by their love, someone shows up in the comments with the same response: “But real love means telling people the truth!” And then, like clockwork, comes the baby running into traffic.

You know the line. “If a baby’s about to run into traffic, the loving thing is to grab them and yank them back, even if it hurts them. Sometimes love has to be tough.”

I’ve seen this analogy deployed dozens of times across X, Facebook, Instagram, and every comment section of every progressive Christian blog post ever written. It’s become the go-to defense for why Christians should be known more for what we oppose than what we support. Why our “truth-telling” often looks suspiciously like condemnation. Why love, apparently, requires us to police other people’s lives, relationships, and callings.

Here’s the thing: I used to believe this argument. Growing up Southern Baptist, I absorbed the idea that speaking hard truths was the most loving thing you could do. That being nice was weak, but being “truthful” was strong. That if you really cared about someone’s soul, you’d tell them exactly where they were wrong. But the older I get, the more time I spend actually reading the Gospels, the more I realize this argument isn’t about love at all. It’s about power. And it’s about being certain we’re right.

The Baby in the Street

Let’s start by actually examining this analogy, because it only works if you don’t think about it too hard. A baby running into traffic has zero agency, zero capacity for informed decision-making, and is facing certain physical death. The person yanking them back has witnessed countless cars kill countless people. There’s no ambiguity here. Traffic kills. Babies can’t understand that. Someone with knowledge and experience intervenes to prevent imminent harm.

But when Christians deploy this analogy, we’re almost never talking about babies or traffic. We’re talking about women serving as pastors. About LGBTQ+ Christians being fully included in the life of the church. About biblical interpretation, political stances, or theological frameworks that differ from our own. These aren’t questions of imminent physical danger with objectively verifiable outcomes. These are contested interpretations where sincere, faithful, Jesus-loving Christians land in completely different places. And here’s the crucial bit…the person using the traffic analogy always casts themselves as the clear-eyed adult and the other person as the clueless infant. It removes agency from people made in the image of God and assumes a certainty about theological matters that frankly, none of us have.

The analogy reveals its own problem. We should probably ask why it’s always someone else’s identity or calling that poses the danger. Funny how it’s never the person wielding the analogy who needs correction. Imagine that. It’s never their own sin they’re heroically rescuing people from. It’s always the marginalized, the different, the ones who’ve finally found the courage to show up as themselves. That’s pretty telling if you ask me.

Jesus and the Traffic Cops

So, let’s look at who Jesus actually “spoke truth to” and how he did it. Because if we’re going to claim we’re following his example, we should probably know what that example actually was. Let’s start with the woman at the well. The one with the complicated relationship history that every evangelical sermon loves to point out. Jesus didn’t show up with a checklist of her sins. He offered her living water. He stayed in her town for two days. He treated her like a full human being worthy of dignity and theological conversation. Zacchaeus, the corrupt tax collector? Jesus invited himself to dinner. The woman caught in adultery, dragged before him by men ready to stone her? He refused to participate in her shaming and sent her accusers away.

But the Pharisees. Oof. The ones absolutely certain they had truth on their side. The ones who knew scripture backward and forward and deployed it as a weapon against the vulnerable. The ones who used their theological correctness to exclude, condemn, and control. Them? Jesus called whitewashed tombs. Broods of vipers. He reserved his harshest words not for people living messy lives, but for people using religious truth to harm others.

And this pattern matters. Because when we position ourselves as the ones who need to “speak truth” to others, we’re not putting ourselves in Jesus’s shoes. We’re putting ourselves in the Pharisees’ shoes. And Jesus had some thoughts about that.

When Love Keeps No Record

Here’s where I want to get a little nerdy, because 1 Corinthians 13 might be the most quoted passage about love in all of scripture, and I’m not sure we’ve actually read it. Paul writes that love is patient (μακροθυμεῖ - makrothymei), which carries the sense of being long-tempered, slow to anger. Love is kind (χρηστεύεται - chrēsteuetai), actively showing goodness and usefulness to others. It doesn’t envy, doesn’t boast, isn’t proud. It doesn’t dishonor others, isn’t self-seeking, isn’t easily angered, and—this is the one that gets me—keeps no record of wrongs (οὐ λογίζεται τὸ κακόν - ou logizetai to kakon). That phrase literally means love doesn’t keep a ledger of evil, doesn’t calculate or reckon up someone’s failures.

Read that whole passage. Then read it again. Notice what’s conspicuously absent? “Love tells people hard truths.” “Love corrects theological error.” “Love protects orthodoxy at all costs.” Paul’s not describing someone who positions themselves as the arbiter of right and wrong. He’s describing someone who shows up with patience, kindness, and a refusal to weaponize someone’s past or present against them.

If we’re going to talk about what love actually is, not what we wish it was, not what makes us feel important or right, we should probably start with what scripture says love looks like. And spoiler alert…it looks nothing like yanking babies out of traffic.

The Humility We’re Missing

Real love requires something the traffic analogy doesn’t leave room for. Humility about our own certainty. It requires recognizing that we might be wrong. That our interpretation of scripture, our understanding of God’s will, our certainty about who’s in and who’s out might be as limited and culturally conditioned as everyone else’s. Love doesn’t position itself as having perfect knowledge. It doesn’t remove agency from other adults. It doesn’t confuse physical danger with interpretive disagreement.

The baby-in-traffic analogy ultimately reveals more about the speaker’s need to be right than it does about love. Because love, the kind Jesus modeled, doesn’t yank people around like infants. It sits at wells in Samaria. It eats at tables with sinners. It shows up without an agenda to fix, correct, or save people from themselves. It trusts that the Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of leading people without us appointing ourselves as traffic cops for the kingdom.

Maybe the most loving thing we can do is learn to be present without being certain. To offer gentleness without demanding agreement. To trust that God is bigger than our need to be right about everything. Because that baby running into traffic? That’s not your neighbor who disagrees with you about theology. Give me a brake. (See what I did there?)

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