AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
A lot of people are struggling to love themselves right now. And it’s no wonder. We live in a culture that rarely—if ever—taught us how to. Instead, most of us were handed scripts rooted in patriarchy, religion, and power that told us our worth depended on how much we gave, obeyed, or sacrificed. To love ourselves? That was considered selfish at best, sinful at worst.
But here’s the truth: we aren’t born under a system that gives us permission to love ourselves well. We are born into systems—whether patriarchal households, rigid church communities, or consumer-driven economies—that thrive when we don’t love ourselves. Because a person who doesn’t know their worth is easier to control.
For years, certain pastors and Christian influencers have insisted that self-love is dangerous. They warn that loving yourself leads to pride, narcissism, selfishness, even sabotage. Titles like Toxic Empathy make the rounds, and megachurch leaders like Greg Locke and Mark Driscoll thunder from pulpits about the so-called dangers of prioritizing yourself. Desiring God, the ministry built around John Piper, even published an interview titled You Don’t Need More Self-Love, where the argument boiled down to this: your problem isn’t lack of self-love, but too much of it.
This messaging runs deep in evangelical culture. From Sunday school lessons to women’s Bible studies, the refrain is clear: deny yourself, die to yourself, don’t focus on yourself. Anything else is selfish. Anything else makes you unworthy of God’s love.
But let’s pause. Because while it sounds pious, what’s really happening here is not spiritual guidance—it’s spiritual sabotage.
Patriarchy works by convincing people—especially women—that their value lies outside of themselves. A woman is told her worth is in being a “good wife,” a “selfless mother,” or a “faithful servant.” Men, too, are trapped in this system, taught to measure themselves by domination, success, or how much they can suppress their emotions.
Self-loathing becomes the fuel. If you constantly feel you’re not enough, you’ll work harder to earn approval. You’ll stay in unhealthy relationships. You’ll overextend yourself at work or church. You’ll silence your own needs for the sake of others.
This is not love. It’s control.
One can only love to the capacity they know how to love themselves. If you don’t know gentleness for yourself, how will you extend gentleness to others? If you don’t know how to honor your own needs, how can you possibly honor anyone else’s? Jesus himself put it bluntly: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That statement presumes self-love. It presumes awareness of your own worth.
Yet churches flip it upside down. They whisper that self-love is arrogance, and then weaponize shame when people dare to see their own value. Why? Because a person who loves themselves cannot be controlled by fear. They cannot be manipulated by threats of hell or silenced by guilt. They cannot be told to “submit” when submission harms them.
The truth is, when pastors attack self-love, what they’re really attacking is self-awareness. And without self-awareness, you stay small, pliable, and easy to dominate.
We’ve seen the damage. People raised to believe that loving themselves is sin often grow into adults who accept abuse as normal. Women remain in violent marriages because they’ve been told divorce is selfish. LGBTQIA+ teens are driven to despair because every instinct to accept themselves is labeled rebellion. Survivors of spiritual and sexual abuse are told to “forgive and forget” instead of protecting their own well-being.
This isn’t humility. It’s erasure. And it kills.
When pastors like Locke and Driscoll rail against self-love, they are not protecting the flock. They are preserving power structures that depend on people ignoring their own needs, silencing their own voices, and sacrificing their own dignity.
Real love is not martyrdom. Real love does not demand you burn yourself out to prove devotion. Real love starts at home—within yourself. The more you love yourself, the more deeply you can love others without resentment, without coercion, without hidden agendas.
Loving yourself doesn’t mean worshipping yourself. It doesn’t mean placing yourself above everyone else. It simply means recognizing that you, too, carry the image of the Divine—that your needs, your boundaries, and your well-being matter.
Without that foundation, love collapses into codependency or control. With it, love becomes expansive. Fierce. Free.
So here’s the pushback to every pulpit that dares to call self-love “toxic”: The real toxicity is a theology that convinces people they are unworthy of love unless they disappear. The real poison is preaching that convinces people to silence their pain instead of healing it.
To say that self-love is dangerous is to fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be human, what it means to be whole. And perhaps, that’s the point. Because wholeness is threatening to any system that profits from your brokenness.
It’s time we see through the lie. It’s time we reclaim the radical truth: you are worthy of love—beginning with your own.
So how do we begin to dismantle self-loathing and practice self-love? A few places to start:
You were never meant to live in self-loathing. That is not holy. That is not love. That is not the will of God or the design of humanity.
The systems that taught you self-love is dangerous were lying—because a person who knows their worth is powerful. A person who loves themselves is free. And a free, loving person is the greatest threat to systems built on control.
So, if you’re struggling to love yourself today, hear this:
It is not selfish to love yourself.
It is not sinful to care for yourself.
It is sacred. It is necessary. And it is the first step toward a world where love can actually flourish.
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