Being Nice Is Not Enough

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

In 2016, I watched as my Facebook feed began dripping with contempt. The contempt replaced anger that was directed largely at invisible others. Those people. The contempt worried me in a way that the anger had not. Anger means you want the other person to be better. But contempt . . . that’s different.

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. Organizations like the one I lead (the One America Movement) sprang up all over the place.

Not surprisingly, our fledgling industry was met by skepticism. 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. 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?

I see two tasks as we confront 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 our 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! Conflict often surfaced because something had been allowed to go sideways, softly, over time, until the consequences came home to roost. 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 respecting that diversity by challenging 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 essential way we were not. We had to challenge each other by caring enough 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 flashed anger at injustice and hypocrisy and also loved his enemies, and who commanded me to do likewise. To Jesus, peacemaking was the work of reconciliation in the world, a reconciliation only possible through both love and truth.

Jesus taught “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… 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, 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. Before the peacemakers Jesus blessed the meek.

It is our Christian obligation to seek reconciliation with all people, including 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 towards it.

For this year, and the years ahead, I ask myself: Is what I am about to do or say going to bring me closer to a world reconciled to our Creator and to each other?

If the answer is yes, my relationships will look less like “Kumbaya” and my words will sound less like “speaking my truth.” I will face a challenge both inward and outward, a cross to bear that won’t always be fun or easy but which will move us all 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.