Can Christians Have Bias?

When Bias Blocks the Path to Love

What if the greatest threat to our faith isn’t a lack of knowledge, but a failure to love? What if we’ve spent so much energy defending truth that we’ve made love optional?

These are uncomfortable questions, but they’re essential ones for anyone who claims to follow Jesus.

The Problem With Staying Put

In the early days of the church, something remarkable happened—or rather, didn’t happen. Jesus had clearly told his followers to go everywhere, to take the good news to all people, to the ends of the earth. But they didn’t go. They stayed in Jerusalem, comfortable among people who looked like them, believed like them, and lived like them.

It wasn’t until persecution broke out that they were finally forced to scatter and spread the gospel message beyond their familiar boundaries.

This raises a critical question: If persecution forced them to go, what was causing them to stay?

The answer is simple and sobering: They believed salvation was only for people like them. They had convinced themselves that God’s preference aligned perfectly with their own bias.

The Danger of Projecting Our Preferences Onto God

Here’s a pattern that continues to compromise Christian witness today: We try to justify our own bias by projecting God’s preference.

We take our stand, shape our responses, and choose our battles while claiming we’re simply agreeing with God. But here’s the reality check—God is love. When our behavior, our words, and the way we relate to others clearly lack love, we obviously aren’t reflecting God’s heart.

We need to stop blaming our bias on God.

Whether we’re talking about white supremacy, extreme expressions of black pride, anti-Semitism, dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants or Muslims, or fueling divisive gender wars—we must measure our witness against this basic truth: You don’t have to hate others in order to love yourself.

You don’t have to mistreat some people in order to care deeply for others. You don’t have to reject differences in order to appreciate similarities.

Love takes time. Love takes the necessary time to negotiate our relational differences in a way that fully accommodates the gospel mission.

The Confrontation That Changed Everything

The apostle Paul faced this issue head-on in a dramatic moment recorded in Galatians 2. Peter, one of the original disciples, had been eating with Gentile believers—sharing meals, building relationships, demonstrating the unity that the gospel creates. But when certain Jewish believers arrived, Peter withdrew. He separated himself from the Gentiles, afraid of what his Jewish brothers might think.

Paul’s response was stunning: “I opposed him to his face.”

Not in private. Not with a gentle aside. Paul confronted Peter publicly because the issue demanded it.

Was Paul being divisive? That’s the question we need to wrestle with. Because how we answer reveals much about our own understanding of love and unity.

The truth is, Paul wasn’t creating division—division had already taken place the moment Peter decided one group of people was better than another. Bias was already at work, causing fractures within the church. Paul’s confrontation wasn’t divisive; it was corrective.

The Subtle Drift of Bias

Proverbs 28:21 warns us: “To show partiality is not good, yet a person will do wrong for a piece of bread.”

How much does it take for you to drift in the wrong direction? How much influence does bias currently have in your life?

We can talk about extremes—racists, bigots, homophobes—and those realities are serious. But sometimes we use those extreme terms to hide the fact that we all carry some measure of bias ourselves. That’s the uncomfortable truth.

Bias doesn’t go away on its own. We don’t grow out of it. It doesn’t get better with time—it actually crystallizes in our hearts if left unchecked.

This is why we must give serious consideration to the truth of history. Just because something happened yesterday doesn’t mean it’s not still affecting today. When we only consider the good parts of history, we leave ourselves vulnerable to repeating the same mistakes.

Bias must be challenged at every turn, opposed on every occasion, and confronted in every instance.

The Challenge Before Us

If liberty has been freely given to us, and if diversity is naturally growing among us, then unity must be fiercely guarded by us.

Are you ready to fight for what Jesus gave His life for us to have?

The reason love demands so much from all of us is because love has given so much to each of us. And if we truly believe that, our lives must reflect a willingness to follow wherever God leads—always in the direction of greater love.

Not more knowledge. Not more achievements. Not more possessions. Greater love.

Are you taking the necessary time to love across differences? Are you allowing for the margin required to truly love people who are different from you?

Your bias may be broken, but God’s love never is. And His love is strong enough to break through every barrier we’ve built, if we’ll let it.