The Truth About Kindness

I come from a family that runs hot. Emotionally charged, deeply feeling, sometimes volcanic — we are people who love hard and hurt hard and don't always manage the space in between very well. You may know what that's like. You walk into the room and you can already feel the temperature before anyone says a word. You learn, almost as a survival skill, how to read the air — who is tense, who is fragile today, what subjects are landmines. And somewhere along the way, you make a quiet deal with yourself: I'll keep the peace. I'll say the soft thing. I'll leave that one alone.

That's what I want to sit with today — this strange cultural moment we've landed in, where empathy has become so exalted that it has quietly dethroned truth. Where the most compassionate thing you can apparently do is agree, or at least go silent. Where any counter-opinion, any push-back, any quiet "I'm not sure that logic holds" is instantly reframed as an attack. Pay close enough attention and you'll see it everywhere — in politics, in social media, in living rooms and family group chats. Disagreement has become violence. Correction has become cruelty. And what we call kindness has slowly become something closer to collusion.

I picked up a book recently that put language to something I had been feeling for a long time. A.E. Howland's The UnTruth of Kindness is one of those books that earns its provocative title. Howland's central argument is not complicated, but it takes courage to say out loud: what we routinely call kindness is often nothing more than the avoidance of discomfort — ours, dressed up as concern for theirs. He makes a distinction that has stayed with me: sometimes what a person needs isn't a hug. It's a mirror.

But what struck me just as much as his argument was something more personal in the way he tells it. Howland describes himself as a lifelong reader of rooms — almost always the outsider, watching how people organize themselves. Who gets the laughs. Who the group defers to. How alliances form. Who gets picked last and why. There's something about the person who stands slightly outside the social current who learns to see it clearly. And what he noticed is that the loudest, most socially rewarded behavior in most rooms is agreement. The person who affirms, who validates, who never challenges — that person is welcome. The person who says "wait, I think you've got that wrong" is the one the temperature drops for.

We live in a day where empathy, for all its beauty, has been subtly weaponized. This is worth saying carefully, because genuine empathy is among the highest human capacities. The ability to feel with another person, to enter their experience with you rather than just alongside them — this is rare and precious and I do not want to argue against it. What I want to argue against is its impersonator.

The impersonator of empathy says: to love someone is to affirm them. It follows that to challenge them is to withhold love. And from there it is only a short step to the cultural position we now occupy, where every counter-argument is coded as aggression, where every raised eyebrow is a microaggression, where to say I think that idea might be wrong is heard as I think you are worthless. The self and the idea have been fused. Challenge the thought and you've attacked the person. This is the eggshell world, and once you see how it works, you see it everywhere.

Here's what bothers me most about it, theologically: it makes genuine love impossible. Because real love — the love described in every serious tradition, the love that Scripture speaks of in the kind of language that costs something — that love is not afraid of the hard word. Paul tells the Ephesians to speak the truth in love. Not instead of love. Not despite love. In love. The truth and the love are not in tension. They are the same act. The ancient idea is that love is precisely what gives you the standing and the obligation to tell someone a difficult thing — not to wound them, but because you care what happens to them.

Let me bring it back to the family, because that is where I learned it.

I grew up in a home where the emotional temperature was high enough that truth-telling required a kind of courage I was not always able to summon. It was easier to say the gentle thing. To let the bad idea pass. To swallow the "I think that's illogical" before it became a scene. And I watched, over years, what that kind of kindness actually cost us. Not immediately — the cost was always delayed. But the reckoning always came. The unaddressed idea became a pattern. The unchallenged assumption calcified into something nobody could touch anymore. And the truth that nobody said in 2010 to protect the room's peace became the wound nobody could close in 2020.

What I believe — what I think the tradition I stand in has always known, even when the culture has forgotten it — is that the most loving thing you can do for someone is stay present enough to tell them the truth. Not brutally. Not as a weapon. With warmth, with care, with all the patience the relationship deserves. But truthfully. To look someone in the eye and say: I think you've got that wrong, and I care about you too much to pretend otherwise — that is the act of love. The agreement that costs nothing and changes nothing is the impersonator.

Howland puts it simply: we've dressed up avoidance as alignment. We've called silence compassion. And in doing so we've created something that soothes the ego but starves the soul.

There is a reason Jesus was not the most popular person in every room he entered. He was the most present — but not always the most comfortable. He had a way of saying the thing that needed to be said, even when it landed hard. You have heard it said…but I say to you. The whole Sermon on the Mount is an act of loving disruption. He did not walk into rooms and confirm people in their assumptions. He walked into rooms and asked them to see more clearly, think more honestly, love more truly. And they either leaned in or they walked away, because the middle option — the comfortable, affirming, eggshell option — was not really on offer.

I think we are afraid of that combination. And I think the cultural pressure to separate them — to make love mean agreement and truth mean aggression — is one of the more consequential lies of our moment. Howland calls it an untruth. I'd call it a long-running deception that has made us smaller and lonelier and less capable of the real thing.

If you're like me, you've felt the pull of the eggshell world. You've chosen the soft answer when the honest one was available. I'm not going to pretend I've solved this — I'm still learning what it means to tell the truth in love rather than instead of it or despite it. But I know the cost of the alternative. I've watched it quietly at work in rooms I love, in conversations I've managed rather than had, in agreements I've offered that I didn't quite believe.

What I'm reaching toward is not an excuse to be harsh. It is a recovery of something older and better: the understanding that a person who loves you enough to tell you the truth is a gift. That disagreement offered with care is not an attack. That the mirror — held steady, held warmly — is one of the most loving things one human being can offer another.