Americans are really nice people. . .

“Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth,” Walker Percy once observed.  He is correct.  If there is a disaster some where or a crying need, Americans send their money to relief agencies and go fund me pages more than any other people.  Americans are sentimental -- we are the only ones in the world to keep so many greeting card companies busy with invented holidays and saccharine sayings to fit them all.  Americans are nice and smile their way through many things that would deserve at least a frown.

“Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history, so observed the same Walker Percy.”  While that was written at a time when abortion was barely a generation old as a right protected by the constitution (so said the Supreme Court), it is still true.  Abortion is no longer a federally guaranteed right found in the constitution but it is still legal in more states than not and it still offends many that it is restricted anywhere.

How to figure out the contrast?  I wish I knew.  I have found the same thing related to other issues.  In the Midwest of my youth, there are plenty of nice Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians who are conservative in values but too nice to argue with those who are not.  Many of those are Lutherans who remain with a Lutheran body that long ago departed from Lutheran values.  They are too nice.  I know that is hardly possible but it is true.  They are too nice.  Sometimes we just do not know when to stand up and say "no" to the things that are just plain wrong.  

Yes, we risk offending people and alienating friends but it is not nice to confuse our children with invented genders.  Yes, we risk offending people and alienating friends but it is not nice to confuse our children with overt sexuality and put them in adult positions, making adult decisions, when they are only kids.  Yes, we risk offending people and alienating friends but it is not nice to confuse our children with invented virtues while we trash the old ones all in the name of new gods of modernity.  Yes, we risk offending people and alienating friends but it is not nice to confuse our children with the idea that God's Word is only partly His Word and we get to decide which is and which is not.  Yes, we risk offending people and alienating friends but it is not nice to confuse our children by saying God is good with whatever makes us happy -- in life and in worship.  By the way, it is not just the children that end up being confused.  The nice folks do as well and in that confusion they end up surrendering that which they once held sacred because it certainly is not nice to offend.  

We went fifty years flushing away the children in the womb in the name of what seemed right in the moment.  We are just beginning the accelerated conflict over marriage, gender, and sexuality that will certainly be as divisive as abortion was and is.  Nice should not be cover for doing what we all know is wrong.  When you are that nice, you are too nice.