Reading the first chapter of No More Christian Nice Guy by Paul Coughlin, I felt a resonance. A resonance of things I had seen and experienced in the past. Yes, I had seen the church of the clean with the narthex of the nice that would rebuke anyone that did not come across as being overmeek and hyper gentile.
The author comes out and states this very important statement when he stated that:
Shame is big in the church. Helps keep guys in line. Keeps their heads down. Keeps them humble. Supposedly.
The author is 100% right because we have overdefined what is of ‘the spirit’ and what is of ‘the flesh’. A revolutionary like Jesus who would call out the Pharisees as hyprocrites and a brood of vipers would in many churches get told to be quiet, get kicked out, get told to repent of bitterness and go watch some Focus on The Family videos in your Thomas Kinckade home with your seven Precious Moments figurine looking homeschooled children, get publically humiliated to where he would never speak again, etc. Why would this happen? It is because the author clearly analyzes in the next paragraph that the personal identity is squashed for the mass-produced Christian clone, the will of what they call ‘the flesh’ is broken for the overmeekness of ‘the Spirit’, and the authority figure over those who love and depend on him is killed for the tolerant one with no backbone.
The author goes onward in the chapter to explain how passive dainty Christian men created their own “Nice Guy Bible” (and sarcastically called it the NGV version) and rewrote many passages and reinterpreted them to imply that Jesus was like Ned Flanders of The Simpsons trying their best to explain away exclamation points, language such as ‘hypocrite’, and making a whip cord and driving out the merchandisers in the temple. What happens later is that (and the author tells us this) the Nice Guy becomes a doormat for people to abuse and take advantage of. When this takes place, the word ‘no’ in reference to performing additional tasks asked becomes non-existent because saying no is ‘disobedience’ in his eyes. Of course, the leaders of the feminized nice-guy promise keeping, church of the butterfly kissers convince him that this is the way to humility, servanthood, sacrifice, and the ‘fruit of the Spirit’ and that the whole world would get saved and the utopia of the insulated church will finally come to manifest on earth. You see Christian Nice Guys start to refuse gifts of gratitude, shrug off positive comments of respect and adoration, refuse to stand up for what is right, and refuse to accept help from anyone because in the Chruch of the Christian Nice Guy, accepting the gratitude is anti-humility, absorbing the positive comments is pride, standing up for what is right and engaging in conflict is rebellion, and at the same time, admitting weakness and being weak is equally as bad as to be assertive and fulfilling your needs in the ‘not-so-nice-guy manner.’ He is stuck between The Rock and a hard place. No wonder he is so confused.
You might remember that in one episode of The Simpsons, Ned Flanders himself got pushed too far and exploded over everybody. Even “Nice Guy Ned” had his limit, and when he got pushed over it, it got real ugly real fast.