The Problem With Absolute Civility

The world wants you to be “civil.” Don’t forget to first be truthful.

January 15, 2021

Smooth and deceptive words often wear the mask of civility. According to today’s “tone police,” incivility is the worse possible sin. But civility is like a knife. A surgeon and thief may both use it to cut you. But the purpose of one is to heal you, the purpose of the other is to threaten and kill you.

Civility is a subordinate virtue whose true worth depends upon its telos. It is always tied to a greater end. To know the end for which someone is “civil” is to know whether those civil words are the kind that heal or kill you.

Is the terminus of civility truth, peace, and salvation in Jesus Christ? Or is it lies, death, and destruction?

Satan was very amicable in the Garden. His niceness was disarming. Eve found his tone winsome and charming. He spoke respectfully to her and introduced the matter at hand with a question. How meek and gentle! In fact, he wanted to know about what God had said. How humble! Satan is always nice. But his niceness is always unto death. “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.”

For a Christian’s civility to be a virtue, it must always be tied to defending God’s truth and righteousness. That is to say, a Christian’s civility, for it to be the real article, must uphold how God ordered the world. It must guard the Christian deposit of faith. Gentility is no virtue when it cannot defend the faith once given to all the saints.

This is because Christian civility is covenanted to God’s truth. Christian gentleness is shackled to God’s righteousness. The meekness of the Lamb of the God is the meekness of the Lamb of God who is the Lion of Tribe of Judah.

In his introduction to Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis wrote:

“I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin.’ The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”

Evil men can be very courteous. But their courtesy is garbage and a cover for evil. I would rather a horned and pitch-forked devil than one elected to Congress who has mastered the words, “My fellow Americans.”

Modern Christianity is so conditioned to niceness. But in its niceness, it has jettisoned the truth. Let’s be honest. The Church is full of “nice guys”
and evangelical white knights.

The greatest goal of the nice guy is to comply and concede to all, especially to persistent women and a loud world precisely at those points where the Church is experiencing a withering assault— God made man male and female, over against the androgynous trends of the world; God made the goodness of work, family, and social gatherings, over against societal lockdowns; Christ conquered death and the fear of death in His resurrection, over against the paralysis the world seeks to instill in us because of COVID; the Lord is God, not Caesar; God commands the Church to worship the Trinity on the Sabbath, over against the encroachments of a world that labels Christian worship “non-essential.” For the nice guy, there is no fight he would choose to take up as his own. He has no internal tipping-point that awakens him to the sin of his past dormancy and steels his nerves to speak on behalf of His King.

Robert L. Dabney, speaking of the feckless conservativism he saw in the northern United States, from his southern vantage point, wrote this in 1897 (emphasis added):

“This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always— when about to enter a protest— very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.”

Courtesy, tenderness, civility, and gentility without a defense of truth is simply progressivism driving at the speed limit. It eventually arrives at the same destination, only a little later. Without truth, you do not have true civility. You have lies and death cloaked beneath a happy, smiley face.

Concessionalism, the process by which you negotiate away the Christian faith bit by bit, does not gain you the admiration of the world. It loses your soul. Those who demand “civility” at the top of their lungs are demanding your conformity to the world’s zeitgeist. They don’t really want “civility.” They want you to not make waves in their ocean of unbelief.

But God calls you to faithfulness, to stay the course, to uphold the Christian faith with all the strength, gifts, gusto, joy, and, yes, civility He gives you. A pastor is to be “correcting his opponents with gentleness” (2 Timothy 2:2). A Christian pastor is to be gentle. His ministry is such, however, that he has opponents. And he corrects them.

Do not strain the gnat and swallow the camel. Do not focus on someone’s tone and dismiss their claims. If your most cherished virtue is courtesy and not truth, then you will be content to have a mild-mannered policeman stamping his rubber boot on your face as he arrests you for exercising the freedoms given you by God. If you really just want people’s tone to be civil, then you will be relieved to have a troubled man, insisting he is a woman, serve as Pennsylvania’s Health Secretary, giving calm and re-assuring daily press briefings on COVID. That he has medical degrees in both pediatrics and psychiatry only further staggers the mind. If you just want to get back to a “politics of decency,” Joe Biden is your guy. Never mind he wants to expand the “incivility” of the current abortion genocide. Minor detail.

The kindness you owe men must never diminish one bit the force with which you hold to God’s truth. God calls you to love the people He has placed around you and to hate with a holy hatred the sinful system of the world. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re captures well Christianity in its faithful civility and faithful incivility. Be pleasant in manner but relentless and uncompromising in the substance of the Christian faith. Your King expects no less.

Photo by Roberto Catarinicchia on Unsplash