Is Truth "Hate Speech"?

I saw a post recently arguing that religious beliefs never justify what it called a "violation of basic human rights," and that faith preaches love, not hate. I believe with all my heart that real love and real truth are not enemies. They meet in one Person.

1. Love and truth are not opposites

A common assumption today is that naming something as sin is automatically an act of hate, and that only full agreement or celebration counts as love. Scripture never allows that split.

Ephesians 4:15 (LSB) says believers are to be "speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all things into Him who is the head, even Christ." Truth and love are meant to work together, not compete.

1 Corinthians 13:6 (LSB) says love "does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth." If something is actually unrighteous, love cannot celebrate it and still be love. That would just be sentiment, not love.

2. Naming sin is not hatred, it's actually a command to love your neighbor

Leviticus 19:17-18 (LSB) says, "You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you may surely reprove your neighbor, so that you do not bear sin because of him... but you shall love your neighbor as yourself." In the very same passage where God commands love of neighbor, He commands honest correction. Silence in the face of what God calls sin is not what the Bible calls love. Biblical love wants a person's good, including their eternal good, which is different from wanting to harm or humiliate them. That distinction matters. Hatred wants harm. Truth-telling, done rightly, wants restoration.

3. Where does "human dignity" actually come from?

The post I read assumes that religious belief threatens human rights. But you have to ask, where does the very concept of human dignity or human rights come from in the first place?

Genesis 1:27 (LSB) says, "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them." Human worth, in the Christian worldview, is not invented by culture or law. It's given by God because every person bears His image. That includes every person in the LGBTQI+ community, fully and without exception. They are not less made in God's image than anyone else.

But that same passage that grounds human dignity also reveals God's design, including His design for marriage and sexuality (Genesis 2:24, Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26-27). You cannot consistently borrow the Bible's authority to establish human worth while rejecting its authority when it defines God's design. That's picking and choosing, not principled reasoning.

4. Truth isn't a majority vote. It's a Person.

In John 18:38 (LSB), Pilate stood in front of Jesus and asked, "What is truth?" not realizing he was asking the very source of truth Himself. Jesus had already said in John 14:6 (LSB), "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." And John 1:14 (LSB) says Jesus came "full of grace and truth." Not grace instead of truth. Not truth instead of grace. Both, fully, in one Person. That's the model. That's what real love looks like.

5. The goal was never condemnation. It's grace, for everyone, including me

1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (LSB) lists several sins including sexual sin, but also greed, drunkenness, and swindling, and then says, "And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God." No sin is singled out as uniquely unforgivable. Every sin, including my own, is met by the same gospel and the same grace when a person turns to Christ.

God's word, rightly understood, is actually the most loving thing anyone could hand you, because it tells the truth about who we are, what's broken, and where healing actually comes from.

Love is not truth's enemy. Love is truth, lived out, in Christ alone.