“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” — C. S. Lewis
“Be patient and merciful and innocent and quiet and good.” — The Didcache
There’s a certain trend among conservative Christians that’s been gnawing at me for a few years now. I don’t know how to describe it, except that they’re really down on being nice. It’s not that they’re in favor of being mean; at least, that’s not how they would put it. But they’re absolutely emphatic that being “nice” is not a virtue.
For example, a few years ago, right-wing Catholic media was in a tizzy about something they called the “Church of Nice.” Mostly they meant those social-climbing bishops who water down the Faith in order to spare non-Catholics’ feelings and ingratiate themselves to our post-Christian society. But this tendency exists among the intelligentsia as well. These folks will point out that many great Catholic minds were huge jerks. Look at St. Jerome! Look at Evelyn Waugh! Look at… well, those are the only two examples I ever hear.
It’s not only Catholics, though. Around the same time that Catholic media was railing against the “Church of Nice,” Protestants were revolting against the “winsome” evangelism of Tim Keller (memory eternal!). They argued that Keller’s aversion to politics—his refusal to involve himself in the “Culture War”—was an abdication of his duties both as pastor and theologian. The implication is that Christians have a duty to embrace the “conservative” elements of our Faith, even if it displeases our post-Christian neighbors.
I thought the anti-nice movement had begun to die down. Then The Lamp, that venerable rag, published an essay by Robert Wyllie called “Against Humanity”.
“I do not wish to criticize human beings,” Dr. Wyllie explains, “some of whom I assume are good people. When I argue ‘against humanity,’ it is to detonate the first denotation in Webster’s Dictionary: the quality of being humane. It is this humanity—amiability, mild benevolence, easygoing kindness, what now passes for basic human decency—to which I feel compelled to object.”
Dr. Wyllie rebukes Charles Dickens, for example, because A Christmas Carol makes no mention of the Incarnation and “offers sentiment rather than policy” in regards to the suffering of the poor. By the end, he has accused liberals (broadly defined) of the same error. “Liberals,” he writes, “sacrifice principle and policy to clutch the pearls of humanity.”
Well, let’s say this about that.
First of all, Dickens offers a bit more than mere sentiment. At the end of the story, the Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrooge a vision of his own grave. Moved by this memento mori to a contemplation of the Last Things, he gives Bob Cratchit a raise, allowing him to pay for the surgery/medicine needed to save Tiny Tim’s life.
Paying one’s employees a decent salary so they can afford healthcare seems like pretty sound policy to me. But I know there’s a certain kind of socialist who gets angry when the rich are benevolent towards the poor—just as there’s a certain kind of capitalist who gets angry when government programs do what they’re supposed to. That’s not charity, though. It’s not justice. It’s ideology.
Secondly, does anyone think that we as a society suffer from a glut of amiability? Is our civilization being crushed beneath the weight of our mild benevolence? When you go out in public—to work, or study, or shop, or whatever—are you suffocated by strangers’ easy kindness?
Thirdly—and most importantly—“niceness” is an integral part of the ordinary praxis of the Christian faith. St. Paul himself commands the Ephesians to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you.” Likewise, he tells the Colossians: “As the elect of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering, bearing with one another, and forgiving one another, if anyone has a complaint against another; even as Christ forgave you, so you also must do.”
For the first Christians, this wasn’t a throwaway line. On the contrary, they viewed it as central to the daily practice of Christianity. This fact has been attested to by experts everywhere, from the Church Father Tertullian to the sociologist Rodney Stark. As the former famously said, “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’” Nor was their lovingkindness limited to fellow believers. Emperor Julian the Apostate complained to his fellow pagan priests, “The impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well.”
In fact, scholars from Stark to Tom Holland to David Bentley Hart have argued that the first Christians’ kindness—their selflessness, their decency, their attentiveness to the needs of their fellow man—was central to the spread of our Faith. Tim Keller was absolutely right: “winsomeness” is essential to evangelism. We’re naturally attracted to those who take an interest in our good.
It’s true, as some might point out, that the Psalm also says, “Let the righteous strike me; It shall be a kindness.” This is why the Roman Church lists rebuking the sinner among its Spiritual Works of Mercy. True kindness—true charity—sometimes means confronting our loved ones about some grave sin and helping them to repent. But, again, this is not the ordinary expression of kindness.
Of course, you encounter sinners every time you walk out the door, or glance at your phone, or look in the mirror. But correcting them isn’t always the right thing to do. The Fathers say we must consider whether, by rebuking the sinner, we may not drive him deeper into sin. To quote St. Augustine: “Perhaps from shame he might begin to defend his sin; and him whom you thought to make a better man, you make worse.” (See also: Westboro Baptist Church.)
According to the Fathers, we should only rebuke someone we’re very close to—a close friend or family member. This person should know that we love him and that we desire his good. He should trust our judgment. And if/when we do rebuke him, we should do so privately, and in the gentlest possible terms. In other words, we have to be very nice to someone for a very long time before we can justify rebuking them for their sins—and even then, we must do it nicely.
It’s also true that, sometimes, only rudeness can awaken us from our ego-sleep. Athonite monks have perfected the art of softening people’s hearts by insulting them. (It even worked on Roosh V!) But unless you spend twelve hours a day in prayer I’d stick to more conventional methods. Because, for the most part, someone’s more likely to agree with your ideas—or convert to your religion—if you’re nice to them. That’s not even Psychology 101; it’s too obvious to mention.
Why, then, are these polemics against “niceness” so popular today? Why are they so common especially among “conservative” Christians, who pride themselves on their doctrinal purity and fidelity to Church tradition? Why do they so proudly announce that “being ‘nice’ isn’t a virtue” when it clearly is?
Partly, I think, it comes down to the fact that most conservative Christians don’t know their faith nearly as well as they think they do. Or, rather, they assume that whatever they’ve labeled “conservative” is compatible with—if not derived from—Christianity. Like progressive Christians, they’ve inherited their values from secular ideologies. Their phronema is not formed by Scripture and the Church Fathers, but by… something else. Anything else.
Not to keep picking on Dr. Wyllie, but he also mocks Dickens’s “philanthropic dream.” As it happens, one of the titles of God used in the Eastern Church is “lover of mankind”—in Greek, philanthropos. This is from the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. It doesn’t get much more traditional than that.
Clearly, “niceness” is not something that infected the Church from the outside. It’s one of Christianity’s great gifts to Western civilization. True: as our society becomes unchurched, much of the traditional theological context of our Christian values is stripped away. The values themselves, which were once fundamental to our social order, have become watered-down or perverted. And niceness is one of them. But attacking “humanity” because it’s abused by secular liberals is like saying that the problem with gay marriage is marriage.
To put it another way, Flannery O’Connor famously said:
If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
She’s right, of course. And Christians naturally—rightly—want to offer a counter-witness to this fake tenderness. But the opposite of fake tenderness is not real harness, cruelty, etc. It’s real tenderness. And that’s exactly what Christ offers.
It also comes down to plain-old sin. We all know why progressive Christians explain away the story of Sodom and Gomorrah: they like sodomy. By the same token, conservative Christians “debunk” the “Church of Nice” because they want to be mean. At the very least, they want an excuse not to be kind, tenderhearted, etc. They’re making excuses for their sin. It’s exactly the same thing, and anyone who disagrees is a sophist.
Final thought. Unless you live under a rock (if so, I envy you), you caught some of the brouhaha over the “He Gets Us” commercial that ran during the Superbowl. This year’s ad shows a series of odd couples washing each other’s feet. There’s a cop and a black man, a rancher and an Indian, an oil-rig worker and a greenie activist, a priest and an effeminate roller-skater.
Various Christian pundits have pointed out that Jesus didn’t just “get us”: He called us to repentance. And besides, He’s only shown washing His disciples’ feet, etc. etc. etc. Okay, sure. But He died on a cross for everyone—every single one of us. If He gave His life to redeem hippies and gays, I’m sure He’d wash their feet, too.
Liberals get lots of things wrong, but this isn’t one of them. Jesus taught love, and the most basic expression of love is kindness.
So, yeah. Be nice.
“If the highest end of virtue is that which aims at the advancement of most, gentleness is the most lovely of all, which does not hurt even those whom it condemns, and usually renders those whom it condemns worthy of absolution. Moreover, it is the only virtue which has led to the increase of the Church which the Lord sought at the price of His own Blood, imitating the lovingkindness of heaven, and aiming at the redemption of all, seeks this end with a gentleness which the ears of men can endure, in presence of which their hearts do not sink, nor their spirits quail.” — Saint Ambrose of Milan
Hmm still dislike the word. Maybe I’ve read That Hideous Strength too many times. I prefer the word kindness, which St. Paul uses. Of all the subject complement adjectives he used about love, he did not include “nice.“
However, I have course agree with the general gist of your article. And no one wants to defend church militant, but to be fair, their “church of nice“ appellation mainly referred to the pastors who watered down doctrine, not their attitudes.
I like this a lot. Too many people these days seem to have concluded that being a jerk is a virtue and that kindness is for suckers. And, unfortunately, I think it’s a bipartisan problem. I come from the more progressive side of the American political divide and I’ve spent a long time trying to convince my fellow lefties that this is the wrong approach. I’m very glad to read this same argument coming from the other direction. Maybe if people of good will across the political spectrum keep making this argument, it will make some headway. After all, hope is a virtue too. Thanks for writing this.