Being Nice Is Not Enough

Peace Without Challenge Is Soft. Challenge Without Reconciliation Is Toxic.

I’ll never forget the first time my wife explained to me the difference between anger and contempt. This was in the early days of our courtship (which is a funny word to use, but I’m going with it!), before we had experienced anything remotely approaching either emotion toward each other. But she knew. Marriages, she said, can survive anger. Anger means you want the other person to be better. But contempt . . . that’s different.

In 2016, I watched as my Facebook feed began dripping with contempt. It was a smooth transition overall, because the contempt replaced anger that was directed largely at invisible others. Those people. When you are angry at people you’ve never met, the key thing that makes anger constructive is missing. It’s hard to really want them to do better. You don’t even know them. 

Out of the ashes of this contempt, an entire “industry” was born. It was once described snarkily as the “getting people to talk to each other industrial complex.” But I was surprised to find outright opposition, too. Organizations like the one I lead (the One America Movement) sprang up all over the place, funded at first largely by a grant program called “the Helping People Get Along Better Fund.”

Not surprisingly, our fledgling industry was met by skepticism (“You’re going to bridge the divide between me and those people? Good luck!”). But I was surprised to find outright opposition, too. A lot of people seemed to feel that bridging divides wasn’t necessarily a good thing, that it was the sort of thing that the “moderate” white people of Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail would do. That it was an effort to paper over the real stuff in the hope of just getting along.

Once, when I was first starting out, with no money, no organization, just an idea, I had lunch with a former high school teacher of mine. We had a great conversation that lasted over an hour, pushing and pulling at the issue. Afterward when I emailed him to ask if he’d be open to helping, he said no. “Some people just need to lose,” he wrote. 

As I wrestled with the difficulty of these responses, I couldn’t summon much self-righteous indignation. It really did seem like there was a lot of “soft” bridge building that wasn’t what I had in mind when I started doing this work. A rabbi told me that he was tired of interfaith gatherings where Muslims and Jews would say, “You like hummus? That’s great! I like hummus too!,” a formula for harmony that would hold up very badly after October 7.

Was peacemaking soft? Was it just about getting along better, a “negative peace,” in the words of Dr. King? 

There are twin challenges facing us as we confront the great challenge of our day: overcoming the divisions tearing our world apart. For peacemaking to succeed, it has to be embedded in a challenge culture that pushes us to grow through disagreement and the infusion of new ideas. Simultaneously, it has to be rooted not in the conquest or discarding of opponents, but in the deeply God-rooted reconciliation of all people.

In short, peace without challenge is soft. Challenge without reconciliation is toxic.

A few years ago, the staff members in my organization began to recognize a problem: we were too nice! We had internal conflict, to be sure, but that conflict often came about not because two people saw the world differently and confronted each other. No, the conflict often surfaced because something had been allowed to go sideways, softly, over time, until the consequences came home to roost. At that point, conflict arose over why the project hadn’t been completed well. And when we traced the roots of those failures backwards, it almost always ended with an initial piece of work that wasn’t good but had been allowed to move forward. We had been “approving” our colleagues’ work even when it wasn’t good.

But why? After all, we had intentionally built an entire organization to be politically, racially, and religiously diverse, and we had constantly emphasized the importance of living into that diversity in a way that challenged each other to, well, challenge each other. We disagreed about abortion and guns and more. But we were too nice to critique each other’s work?

One of our colleagues, a pastor, framed it this way: “I think,” he said, “that we are more willing to challenge each other’s political views than we are to tell each other that our slide deck sucks.”

This was a crucial insight. We were living into a challenge culture in one way, but in another critical way, we were not. We had to challenge each other, but not by destroying each other’s confidence, not by creating a culture of fear, but by caring enough about each other to be honest with each other.

A peacemaking mission, a challenge culture—you need them both.

Scripture affirms this. As a Christian, I follow a Savior who both ordered me to love my enemies and flashed anger at injustice and hypocrisy. Peacemaking to Jesus was the work of reconciliation in the world, a reconciliation only possible through both love and truth. 

The central reference point in the Gospels on this is Matthew 5:9: “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” Evangelical theologian John Stott argues that "peacemaking is divine work. For peace means reconciliation, and God is the author of peace and of reconciliation. Indeed the very same verb which is used in this Beatitude of us is applied by the apostle Paul to what God has done through Christ. Through Christ, God was pleased ‘to reconcile to himself all things . . . making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.’”

We will not achieve that reconciliation without challenge. We have to pursue truth, we have to be willing to say difficult things that people don’t want to hear (such as, “your PowerPoint kinda sucks”), and we have to be willing to challenge not just other people’s views but also our own. After all, our faith also teaches humility. I often ask audiences to close their eyes and say to themselves, “Of the eight billion humans beings on earth, I am the most correct about what I believe.” They laugh. But the reality is that we often walk around believing that statement to be true without interrogating it.

In this sense, it is our Christian obligation to seek reconciliation with all people, including, quite relevantly for today’s world, our political opponents. But we cannot achieve that reconciliation by just “being nice.”

In 2025, that’s a countercultural idea.

And that’s why God is calling us toward it.

For this year, and the years ahead, we have a simple filter for every action, every social media post, every conversation: Is what we are about to do or say going to bring us closer to a world reconciled to our Creator and to each other?

If the answer is yes, it’s going to look less like “Kumbaya” and less like “speaking our truth” and a lot more like a challenge both inward and outward, a cross to bear that won’t always be fun or easy but which will move us closer and closer to a world that reflects both God’s love and God’s truth.

Andrew Hanauer is president and CEO of the One America Movement, which is dedicated to supporting faith communities in peacemaking.

Art by James Tissot.