In The Kindest Way Possible

I honestly haven’t had much time to notice anything online the last few days, except this tweet did leap out at me, because of all the many hours I have spent watching Revoice:

I truly don't understand those who downplay the importance of tone & Christlike behavior online.

Sure, you can disagree profoundly w/ someone, but our words & deeds say something about who Christ is and what he is like.

— Chelsea Patterson Sobolik (@ChelsPat) February 8, 2022

In other words, it seems, there is an ongoing argument on Twitter about Tone. It’s not what you’re saying that’s the problem, say some, it’s how you’re saying it. In response to which the ones being criticized say, no, it’s what I’m saying that you don’t like, but you don’t want to say that you don’t like it, so you’re criticizing how I’m saying it. I’m pretty sure this sort of disagreement isn’t new. In every age, there are the disagreements themselves, and the rules about how those disagreements can be expressed. But it is an important issue because I think some Christians–and I mean this in the fullness of kind, loving, charity–are naive, blasé even, about the nature of the disagreements.

By way of illustration, because the thing I wrote for CRI about Revoice definitely falls into the tl;dr [too long didn’t read] category, let me just pull out the accusation that Preston Sprinkle makes about the church. I briefly summarized what he said in the beginning of his talk:

But the church, claims Sprinkle, has not offered true repentance to self-identifying gay Christians. The church has preached a false message that to become a Christian, a person had to stop being “gay,” had to pray the gay away, had to keep repenting not just for their behavior, but for who they were. They were never invited to enjoy the warm embrace of familial Christian community. They had to live hidden lives, or at best lurk on the margins of the church. They have never had the opportunity to lead or participate in ministry because they were always having to cut off an essential part of themselves — not only their desires, but also the way in which they see the world, which, they claim, is fundamentally different from that of straight or “sexual majority” believers.

I would say–and I think many people just cannot hear it, because it is so ubiquitous in some subcultures of American Christianity–it is the substance that produces the tone. If Sprinkle would have more often employed the word “some,” or “I have observed sometimes that,” of course, almost everyone would agree with him that specific congregations and individual Christians have behaved appallingly to people suffering from desires that the church could not bless. But to say that “the church” has not offered true repentance to people is a sweeping claim and it sounds bad because it is so sweeping. I would say both what Sprinkle is saying, and the tone in which he is saying it, is off the mark. But to go on quoting myself:

This is “unkind,” says Sprinkle. The church has not embodied the “kindness that leads to repentance” toward the LGBTQ community. The church should share the love of God instead of always telling this particular group of people, and all the individuals inside the group, that something essential to their identity was too wrong to know and love Jesus. The church should repent and begin to learn from the LGBTQ community.

Sprinkle goes on to demonstrate ways he has learned from LGBTQ Christians. (In the spirit of Kindness, I am not putting either LGBTQ or Christians in scare quotes, but I should because, as I said in my piece, that is the pin upon which all the semantic disagreements turn.). Christians who identify that way are more faithful than “straight” Christians, and have better marriages and better friendships. Again, these are vague claims, and would be improved by a more precise demonstration of actual marriages and friendships that are either “better” or “worse.” But let me just quote myself one more time:

To characterize the “church” as being “unkind,” as erecting a barrier to repentance and faith, is a grave and serious claim. What constitutes “kindness?” Before answering that question, it would be beneficial to trace some of the origins of this idea that “kindness,” which is really a matter of love, is something that can be used to measure the church. If a definition of kindness is taken from Scripture, of course it can and should be used as such a measure. The church should be judged by what the Bible teaches. Unhappily, that is not how Sprinkle is using the term. His definition of kindness is more akin to one given in 2016 by Misty Irons in an address to the Gay Christian Network. She quotes Robert Brault, saying, “Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.”

And that, dear friends, is the trouble. Tone is very often pitted against Truth on the interwebs. For Christians, however, lies in and of themselves constitute unkindness–cruelty actually, as an Anglican bishop said somewhere. To generalize to the whole population of the world, human creatures like to insulate themselves from the truth of God’s Holy Word because it is painful, it cuts against them. But that is the means–the proclamation of the Truth–by which God brings those same creatures to repentance. It is a sufficient and powerful Word, even when proclaimed in obdurate and stultifying tones. It does not rely on the winsomeness of the speaker.

Moreover, and then I really must rush into the day, it is a dangerous thing to say that we know what kindness is when we see it. That is too facile by half, and the very point. We do not know the kindness of God because we are dead in trespasses and sins. We are blind as well as dead. We are deaf as well as dead. God brings his creatures to life by the power of his Word and shows those creatures that he is actually kind. The kindness that leads to redemption often feels unkind, harsh, because God is doing the painful but necessary work of dragging a person out of death and into life.

So anyway, have a nice day! I mean that in the kindest way possible.

Photo by david laws on Unsplash