The Tyranny of Niceness: Why a Good Man Is Not Always a Nice Guy

It is a curious fact of our age that we have confused two words that were never meant to be twins. We say “good” and “nice” as though they were interchangeable, as though a man who never raises his voice, never ruffles a feather, and never says anything that might spoil a dinner party must surely be a saint. But niceness and goodness are not the same thing. They are not even close cousins. Niceness is a manner; goodness is a substance. Niceness asks, “Will they like me?” Goodness asks, “Is this true, and is this love?” And the tragedy of the modern man is that he has been trained so thoroughly in the first question that he has quite forgotten how to ask the second.

This is not, mind you, an argument for rudeness. The world has no shortage of loud men who mistake their bad temper for courage. It is rather an argument that the Christian man is called to something far more dangerous than niceness. He is called to be good. And goodness, as anyone who has read the Gospels with open eyes will discover, is not always a comfortable thing to be around.

The Foolish Roots of a Pleasant Word

There is a delicious irony buried in the history of the word itself. “Nice” descends from the Latin nescius, meaning ignorant or not knowing. For centuries in English it meant foolish, simple, even silly. Only slowly did it soften into the pleasant, agreeable, inoffensive word we know today.

I cannot help but think the old meaning had it right. For there is a kind of niceness that is really a kind of ignorance: a willful not-knowing, a polite refusal to see what is plainly in front of us. The nice man does not know that his friend is drinking himself to death, because knowing would require saying something. He does not know that his son is drifting toward ruin, because knowing would require a difficult conversation at the kitchen table. He does not know that the joke at the office was cruel, because knowing would require him to stop laughing. His ignorance is not an accident. It is a strategy. And it is one of the most comfortable forms of cowardice ever invented.

The Man Who Overturned the Tables

If we want to know what goodness looks like, we must look at the only perfectly good Man who ever lived. And the first thing we notice is that Christ was not, by the standards of polite society, a very nice man.

He called the religious leaders of His day whitewashed tombs, lovely on the outside and full of dead men’s bones within. He told Peter, His dearest friend and the rock upon which He would build His Church, “Get behind me, Satan.” He walked into the Temple, braided a whip with His own hands, and sent the moneychangers’ coins rolling across the stone floor like marbles. No etiquette manual in the world would recommend such behavior. No human resources department would approve it.

And yet, and yet. This same Christ took little children into His arms when His disciples tried to shoo them away. He knelt in the dust beside a woman caught in adultery and sent her accusers slinking off one by one. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He washed the filthy feet of the very man He knew would betray Him.

Here is the paradox we must not resolve too quickly: the hand that overturned the tables was the same hand that touched the leper. The voice that thundered “Woe to you” was the same voice that whispered “Neither do I condemn you.” Christ was not sometimes harsh and sometimes gentle, as though He suffered from a divided temperament. He was always one thing, and that one thing was love. Love simply wears different clothes depending on whether it is facing a wounded sheep or a wolf in the sheepfold.

Notice, too, what He said to the woman caught in adultery. Not merely “Neither do I condemn you,” which is the part we like to quote, but “Go, and sin no more.” A nice man would have stopped after the first sentence. A good man finishes the thought.

The Sin of Eli

The Old Testament gives us a sobering portrait of a nice man, and it is not a flattering one. Eli was the high priest of Israel, a man of genuine piety who raised the boy Samuel in the house of the Lord. By every account he was gentle, patient, and kind. But his sons, Hophni and Phinehas, were scoundrels who robbed the sacrifices and defiled the sanctuary itself.

Eli knew. He even scolded them, mildly, once. But Scripture renders a devastating verdict: his house was judged because his sons made themselves vile, and he did not restrain them. That is all. He did not join in their wickedness. He simply did not stop it. His niceness, his reluctance to wound, his preference for peace over truth, became the very instrument of his family’s destruction.

Contrast him with the prophet Nathan, who walked into the throne room of King David, a man who had just arranged a murder to cover an adultery, and told him a simple story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb. When David burned with righteous anger at the injustice, Nathan looked him in the eye and said four words that no nice man would ever dare to say: “You are the man.”

Nathan risked his life to say it. Kings have killed prophets for less. But because he was willing to be unpleasant, David was brought to his knees, and from that broken heart came the fifty-first Psalm, one of the most beautiful prayers of repentance ever written. Eli’s niceness ended a dynasty. Nathan’s goodness saved a king.

Faithful Are the Wounds of a Friend

The book of Proverbs puts the matter with characteristic bluntness: faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. This is one of those verses that sounds perfectly reasonable until you actually try to live by it. For it means that the friend who flatters you may love you less than the friend who corrects you. It means that a kiss can be a betrayal, and a wound can be a gift.

Saint Paul understood this. When Peter, the chief of the apostles, began to withdraw from eating with Gentile believers out of fear of what certain people might think, Paul did not schedule a quiet meeting to share his feelings. He opposed Peter to his face, in front of everyone, because the truth of the Gospel was at stake. It was not nice. It was necessary. And the Church is still better for it.

We must be honest about why we so often choose niceness instead. It is rarely because we love the other person too much to hurt them. It is far more often because we love ourselves too much to risk being disliked. Niceness is frequently a kind of silent bargain: I will not trouble your conscience if you will not trouble my comfort. It looks like generosity, but it is really a transaction, and the currency is approval.

The good man has broken that bargain. He has decided that he would rather be faithful than favored. He has learned that love sometimes means saying the thing that will make the room go quiet.

Let Us Not Mistake Harshness for Holiness

Now, a word of warning, lest some reader take all this as permission to become the sort of man who announces “I’m just being honest” before saying something cruel. That man has not escaped the trap of niceness. He has merely fallen into the opposite ditch. He is not good; he is simply unpleasant, and he has baptized his unpleasantness with a religious name.

The fruit of the Spirit includes gentleness and kindness, and these are not optional extras for the Christian man. But kindness is not the same thing as niceness. Kindness wills the true good of another person. Niceness wills the smooth surface of the moment. Kindness will sometimes wound; niceness never will, which is precisely why it so often fails.

When Christ blessed the meek, He used a Greek word, praus, that was sometimes applied to a powerful animal brought under the bridle. Meekness is not weakness. It is strength that has learned to obey its Master. The meek man has a spine of iron and a heart of flesh, and he knows exactly when each is called for. Saint Paul gave us the formula in a single phrase: speaking the truth in love. Truth without love is brutality. Love without truth is sentimentality. The good man refuses to choose between them.

What Goodness Looks Like on a Wednesday

What does all this mean for an ordinary man on an ordinary day? It means the father who says “no” to his daughter and endures her slammed door, because he loves her more than he loves her approval. It means the husband who gently but firmly confronts the habit that is slowly poisoning his marriage, rather than keeping a resentful peace. It means the friend who drives across town to say, “I am worried about you,” knowing the conversation may cost him the friendship. It means the man at work who will not laugh along when a colleague is mocked, and who quietly says, “That’s enough.”

None of these men will be called nice in the moment. Some of them will be called worse things. But years later, the daughter, the wife, the friend, and the mocked colleague may well remember them as the best men they ever knew.

No One Crucifies a Nice Man

Here is the final and most uncomfortable truth. Nobody crucifies a nice man. Nice men are invited to dinner parties. They are elected to committees. They are thanked politely and forgotten quickly. The world has never felt threatened by niceness, because niceness asks nothing of it.

But the world crucified Christ. It crucified Him because He was good, because His goodness exposed the darkness that niceness had been content to leave undisturbed. And He calls us to follow Him, not to the dinner party, but to the Cross.

So let us stop aspiring to be nice. Let us aspire instead to be good: gentle when gentleness heals, fierce when fierceness protects, honest when honesty saves, and always, always moved by love. The world has plenty of nice guys. What it desperately needs are good men.

The question is whether we have the courage to become one.

~The Seekers Quill