Ales Rarus

Recently, the proprietor of this blogspace, Mr. Funky Dung, commented about the "nice things" I say here from time to time. Though I am reasonably certain that Mr. Dung intended it as a compliment, perhaps in the vein of "nice arse kicking" or "nice proof of Fermat's Last Theorem," part of me was quite taken aback [I meant it in the sense of "nice reasoning" or "well thought out response" or "good points". - Funky] You see, "nice" has been registered as a complaint leveled against Evangelicaldom in recent years. And as one of the token Evangelicals in these blogparts, I must confess that I take the criticism to be all too often valid. I am therefore probably more sensitive to occurrences of this word that most folks, not having been accused of the sin of nice, use in a completely innocent, even complimentary, way. Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up…

A quick Dictionary.com query of "nice" yields a number definitions, ranging from the morally beneficial ("Of good character or reputation", "subtle" and "Done with delicacy and skill") to the morally irrelevant ("Having a pleasant or attractive appearance") to the morally bankrupt ("fussy" and "Wanton; profligate"). And though this last denotation is considered obsolete, it is easy to see why "nice" has had and continues to have such a wide spectrum of connotation. The word comes originally from the Latin nescius, ignorant, by way of Middle English, where "nice" meant "foolish". Add to this the innovative connotations given to the word in recent idiom: "Nice [sigh]" meaning "this sucks" and "That's nice, dear" meaning "That's thoroughly irrelevant, dear." Certainly no one today wishes to be identified as wanton or fussy or sucking. And in matters pertaining to moral and intellectual suasion, being merely pleasant, merely attractive or mostly irrelevant would be likely considered downright insulting… were it not true. Alas, it is just such pleasantness, attractiveness, and irrelevancy that Evangelical subculture is so often (and often rightly) accused.

Father Gassalasca Jape, the 500 year-old Jesuit blogger over The New Pantagruel's Japery, has had much to ridicule, err… say, over the past few months regarding the Evangelical tendency to exalt "niceness" as a virtue—especially as it might contend with real virtues such as reason, fidelity, and truthfulness. Other than highly recommending his incisive rants as regular addition to the astute reader's intellectual and moral diet, I'll make no attempt to replicate here (much less make sense of) his subtle, yet profound, and often side-splittingly humorous arguments.

G. K. Chesterton (he'd've made a great pope, no?) once wisely wrote that the "trouble with a quarrel is that it so often interrupts a good argument" (or something to that effect). And this is the crux of the matter to me. Many, probably most, Evangelicals, at least the ones I rub shoulders with each Sunday, cannot well distinguish between an argument and a quarrel. Birds of a feather quite often flock together. And this is no less true of Evangelicals. We like to be with each other, i.e., with people who, more or less, think and act like we do. But such a habit has one (among many) deadening effects to the moral and intellectual life, viz., we begin to see earnest disagreement as something dirty, something divisive, something to be avoided even at great costs, something that is just… not nice. But isn't earnest disagreement a product of earnest searching? And isn't earnest searching the highest order of spiritual attainment—the highest application of the imago dei with which we've all been imbued—that ability we all have to reason, to reason morally, and to reason absolutely?

The highest irony of this Evangelical distaste for argument is that, while it derives chiefly from a habit of liking to be around "folks just like us," it most seriously degrades the very skill from which we take our name, viz. evangelism—spreading the life-altering, soul-satisfying, good news of Jesus Christ. And if this is our mission, which it is, and if that mission calls us to a land of long shadows, shades of gray, and moral blindness, which it does, then a culturally induced inability to distinguish between a quarrel and an argument, and the diverse moral and intellectual maladies derived therefrom, will prove, I fear, to be an insurmountable handicap.

Let none of the foregoing diatribe be construed to mean that we as Evangelicals, or we as Catholics, or we, ultimately, as Christians, might ignore the higher forms of "niceness" when it connotes well-mannered or subtle or excellent. We have every obligation to display such virtues. But remember that there is a broad spectrum of ways to say "That's incorrect"—and none of them are all that nice. Sometimes, however rare, conditions in the ongoing battle to take captive every thought and make it obedient to the Law of Christ warrant use of the much stronger synonym: "That's a load of crap!" [Pardon the edit here, Steve, but I try to keep the language pretty tame in my posts. - Funky] Please use the weapon with caution, but let's not remove it from the collective arsenal. And by all means make sure its use is backed up with the truth, that greatest weapon of all, however nice or not-so-nice that truth may be.