In Crisis, Civility isn't a Luxury. It's a Tool.

In the Second Trump Era, to insist on retaining one’s good manners is a scandal. Talk about misreading the room! Talk about failing to grasp the scope and the scale of the Really Awful Present Crisis! Talk about white privilege! Talk about rearranging those proverbial deck chairs on the RMS Titanic!

To an exasperated and fearful left, doubling down on politeness and process in the face of the Current Odiousness is not as bad as bringing a knife to a gun fight. It’s worse: something akin to bringing an engraved sterling silver cigarette case to an exchange of intercontinental ballistic missiles. If the stakes weren’t so damn high, this insistence on manners and civility and calm could be indulged as a quaint affectation. As it is, this insistence on refusing to change tactics in the face of rudeness and cruelty is reckless, irresponsible, and worse than useless. We need to fight MAGA on their terms and using their methods.

Or not.

Though his career was tainted by sexual scandal (consider this parenthetical aside a polite-but-pointed stare at the shamers and cancellers), the late theologian John Howard Yoder remains deservedly influential in the Mennonite Church. To be fair, to some of my readers, learning someone was “influential in the Mennonite Church” is like hearing that the niece of a coworker’s best friend’s husband was just elected homecoming queen of a small high school in western Nebraska. Important to a select few, irrelevant to you. Yoder, though he belonged to a relatively small sect, endures as perhaps the 20^th century’s most accessible defender of radical Christian pacifism. And how he argued for pacifism against its critics has considerable bearing on how we think about manners and grace.

In 1983, Yoder published a short book: What Would You Do? It was the theologian’s attempt to answer the question that is thrown at everyone who renounces violence, even in self-defense. What would you do if someone was attacking your wife, your child, your parent? Wouldn’t you do anything you could – including deploy violence – to protect your loved one? These are hypothetical questions, but Yoder took them seriously. He knew that answering, “I guess I’d just pray real hard for God’s will to be done” would not satisfy his questioners. Pacifism, as Yoder understood it, wasn’t like lifelong celibacy -- a call to a holy few. It had to be understood as a practical way of living in a violent world.

Yoder notes that Leo Tolstoy – who was not a Mennonite but certainly a Christian pacifist – once got the stock “What would you do?” question posed by none other than William Jennings Bryan. (It is only through Yoder that I learned that the great Russian novelist and the great American politician and preacher met. Someone should do their day together as a one-act play.) As Yoder recounts:

Tolstoy replied with his stock answer that in all his seventy-five years he had never met anywhere this fantastic brigand who would murder or outrage a child before his eyes, whereas in war millions of brigands kill with complete license. 'When I said this,' Tolstoy concluded, 'my deal companion, with his characteristically quick understanding, did not let me finish, laughed, and agreed that my argument was satisfactory'"

In other words, the argument that interpersonal violence is sometimes necessary to defend loved ones is oversold if not downright illusory. Still, Yoder knows that anecdote isn’t very satisfying. After the anecdote, he shifts to interrogating the unspoken assumptions of the stock question. Yoder notes that stock question assumes a false binary: if you intervene violently, you can and will be able to save your loved one; if you do not intervene violently, your loved one will be killed. As Yoder points out, that kind of foreknowledge doesn’t exist in real life. There are always alternatives. There is always more than one possible outcome:

Any honest contemplation of the future must admit uncertainty of prediction; never are there only two choices. Then an unforeseen happy outcome cannot be logically excluded…

Within a given situation some way might come to mind to disarm the attacker emotionally; I might creatively find a loving gesture, I might rise to a psychological height of moral authority. I might be able to consider the attacker as a redeemable person in need of love and find ways which the writers of the scenario had not thought of to save the situation. My undefensive harmlessness might disarm him psychologically. I might use non-lethal force, or a ruse. I might interpose myself and let the intended victim escape…

I am less likely to look for a saving solution if I have told myself beforehand that there can be none or have made advance provision for an easy brutal one. I am more likely to find it creatively if I have already forbidden myself the violent easy answer. I am still more likely to find it if I have disciplined my impulsiveness and fostered my creativity by the study and practice of a non-violent lifestyle. (The bold emphasis is mine).

I have been locked up in jails and county-run mental hospitals. I have been robbed on the street at knifepoint. In those moments of great stress and fear, I have always relied on my manners. Manners are meant to de-escalate, to put at ease, to create bonds. Last year, when I was slapped in a 7-Eleven parking lot for wearing an IDF t-shirt, I didn’t fight back and I didn’t run. I deployed my manners, stood firm, and by refusing to either escalate or cower, extricated myself from the situation largely unscathed. Just as importantly, my politeness under pressure seemed to make my attacker rethink his conduct. I do not think I flatter myself unduly when I say my assailant climbed into his car with a hint of shame in his eyes.

I have been to the aforementioned county jails and mental hospitals. I have also been to many a white-tie gala in my day. Manners and charm are necessary in ballrooms and at dinner parties. Manners do include knowing which fork to use for salad when one’s table setting presents one with no fewer than five. But manners also include putting one’s fellow detainees at ease in a smelly, stifling holding cell beneath a courthouse. They also include redirecting a potential or actual attacker in a parking lot. Manners, in other words, are effective tools for real living.

Civility, charm, and grace do real service in desperate situations. They are not just a function of stagecraft to be used around other actors who know the script. They are a way of engaging and influencing those who are otherwise hostile to the play and the players.

John Howard Yoder saw Christian pacifism as a way to live and love boldly in a violent world. I do not share his particular theology or commitments, but I have always been inspired by his vigorous defense of an ideal that most dismiss as impractical and imprudent. So yes, we will bring the monogrammed handkerchief to the gun fight. We will bring great-grandfather’s cigarette case to the battlefield. We will meet the vulgarity and the swagger and the braggadocio of the moment with wit, humor, and manners. We will meet the trampling of norms with a reverence for process. We can and will do this not because we are dupes, or useful idiots, or effete doormats, but because we believe in the ultimate efficacy of the tools we use.

We do this because in an ugly, cruel, ill-mannered world, courtliness and civility have astonishing power to convert, to transform, and to bear witness to grace and goodness. It’s easier, as Yoder conceded, to do this if you’ve spent a lifetime studying and practicing your manners. But it’s never too late to start.

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