A Christmas Pledge to Courtesy

Gina Dalfonzo has an excellent piece at CT on the need to resurrect courtesy as a defining virtue. I want us all to join in on the Jesus Creed pledge this Christmas to double our efforts to be courteous.

This September, in response to a rash of teen suicides, columnist Dan Savage created the “It Gets Better Project.” The campaign quickly garnered attention from all over. Soon everyone from celebrities to legislators to President Obama was making videos addressing teens who were being bullied because of their sexuality. The idea was to help them understand that bullying doesn’t last forever—that they can look forward to adulthood as a time when they can create their own destiny and enjoy the respect of others.

Then she lists a bundle of examples of authentic but incivil speech about others. And this leads to a powerful point:

Could it be that, as a post-Christian society, we no longer have any clear notion of why we should be considerate of other people? The whole idea of political correctness was formulated as a sort of secular version of “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and yet the backlash it created seems to have made things worse than ever. How often have you heard someone justify an unkind remark by saying, “I’m sick of being politically correct”?

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How do we find the elusive balance between honesty and kindness? I think it’s going to require that we ditch the postmodern virtue of political correctness and rediscover what C. S. Lewis called “the Christian virtue” of courtesy. In Mere Christianity, Lewis named this virtue as one of the hallmarks of a “fully Christian society”; in The Four Loves, he identified its “root principle” as the idea “that no one give any kind of preference to himself.”

Christian courtesy is rooted and grounded in the idea that every person—however much we may dislike him or her—is made in the image of God and precious in his sight. It is an ideal that we may struggle to live up to, but the struggle makes us better people; it reminds us to show kindness when every impulse and instinct is urging us to do the opposite. It requires of us something deeper than a rally or a video, something more than the obligatory apology that follows most celebrity catfights. It’s a lifestyle that has to be consciously lived every day.