Hi Friend,

It sounds strange to write an essay on virtue that finds fault with niceness.  After all, Jesus admonished us to treat others as we want to be treated.  Who doesn’t want to be treated nice?

So, I was surprised to read a Christian-based article describing a Culture of Niceness that is destroying civilization.  The author contends that our nation has reached a stage where we can’t tell anyone an evident truth about life for fear of offending.

An obvious example is demonstrated by an “interview-college-kids” internet video making the rounds.  In it, a 5’9” white male interviews college students at the University of Washington and tells them that he identifies as a 6’5” Chinese female. The sample of students interviewed had generally positive responses, one encouraging him several times saying, “Good for you!”

It isn’t hard to tell that a 5’9” white male isn’t 6’5” or Chinese or female.  We may typically recognize a person who has blinded himself to obvious truth as mentally ill.  A rational person would say to someone who makes such claims, “But you are white, you are short, you are male, and you are not Chinese.”

What are the consequences of such self-delusion?  When a man denies obvious truth, he eventually stops believing there is any truth.  When there is no truth there is no reality.  When a person loses touch with reality, we say that he is insane.  He is a danger to himself or others.

When Pilate asked Jesus, “Are you a king then?” Jesus responded, “I have come into the world that I should bear witness to the truth.  Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.”  Pilate responded with the rhetorical question, “What is truth?”  (John 18: 37-38) The question reflects the mind of a nihilistic tyrant who is so caught up in the politics of pleasing the deep state leaders that he has lost contact with reality.

Maybe Pilate started as a sincere dedicated person who wanted to serve his fellow man.  Maybe he wanted to make the world better.  Maybe he wanted to raise his children in a world of justice and ethics.  Somewhere along the way he became disillusioned about life.  It all began by denying the truth that he could see with his own eyes.  He lied to himself about things he knew to be true.

In an incredible irony, Pilate comes face to face with God in the flesh—the Truth, but in this state of self-deception, Pilate is unable to administer justice to the judge of all the earth.  He could not see the truth staring him in the face.

It is a similar irony that students on a college campus for “higher education” blind themselves to the physical attributes of a person who is obviously not what he says he is.  Are the students in today’s colleges insane?  I doubt it.  But the intellectual culture of college campuses has become mentally unsound.  We’ve become too nice to give students poor grades for poor scholarship, too nice to correct their bad behavior and too nice to expect students to discipline their moral appetites.  In short, in the name of being nice, we deny truth.

By denying such obvious truths as sexual identity, universities have lost a connection to reality and have thus become a breeding ground for hopelessness and despair.

There is an answer to all this.  Jesus gave it to mankind when he said, “I am the way, the truth and the life!”

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien