In a chapter titled - ‘The Spirit and the Forms of Love’ - Daniel Day Williams, a theologian, professor and author has cautioned that love without regard for the terms of justice is sentimentality. Few societies illustrate this caution as sharply as Naga society today, where a deeply Christian population, among the most churched in Asia, has spent seven decades entangled in a struggle for political recognition, internal rivalry and factional conflict that the language of agape has never quite managed to pacify.
Nagaland’s churches preach love of neighbour with a fervour few places can match. Yet the same society remains fractured along tribal and clan lines that often matter more, in practice, than the gospel of universal brotherhood proclaimed from its pulpits. Williams’ insight that “group loyalties always have elements of sexuality within them” and can “mask idolatrous or self-centred love under the form of universal benevolence” describes precisely the Naga dilemma. The community identity of the Naga people is a legitimate, even beautiful form of belonging, the soil out of which language, custom and dignity grow. But when the community loyalty hardens into the final measure of who counts as neighbour, love collapses into division. The decades-long rift between the Naga Political Groups, each claiming to fight for the same “sovereign” Naga nation, is not merely a political failure; it is a theological one, a failure to let agape – the selfless, unconditional and sacrificial love, stand in verdict over the loves each group also affirms.
This is where Williams’ distinction between love and justice becomes indispensable rather than academic. It is not enough for Naga civil society, the churches and the Naga National Political Groups to feel goodwill toward one another. Reconciliation requires, as Williams insists, “the terms upon which men may so live together that the way is opened to communion.” It requires concrete structures for balanced power-sharing among the communities, transparent accountability for taxation and extortion that today burdens ordinary Naga public the most, and institutional guarantees that protect every section of the society without any form of disparities.
In his chapter originally published in 1968, Williams also reminds us that “justice is accomplished by a confluence of historical forces,” not by love’s intention alone. The Naga movement’s long insistence on the righteousness of its cause, however historically grounded, must still submit to the same self-critical humility Williams demands of each group, however sincere, may identify its own cause with the whole of the supreme justice. Protest against the governments failures of recognition remains legitimate, but protest unrestrained by confession of intra-Naga wrongs - extortion, factional killings, silencing of dissent - becomes exactly the self-righteousness Williams calls “as offensive to love as positive unrighteousness.”
The Naga churches’ central task, then, is not simply to comfort but to convict - to hold the society as a whole accountable to a justice larger than any single village, clan or political groups, while still honouring the real human loves those loyalties contain.
