I listened to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” dozens of times during those years, yet I never caught on to the words. Cobain slurred his words, and the liner notes to Nevermind didn’t include lyrics. It wasn’t until I was in college, listening to the track on campus radio, that I realized the song was a taunt—a wry dare to an industry that panders to young consumers: “I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now, entertain us.” It expresses the rage of teens who have been asked for nothing more than their passive, profitable attention—and their cynical awareness that this rage will inevitably be aired on a media conglomerate network, between commercials for deodorant. I didn’t catch all of that at thirteen; all I knew was that this music made me stop feeling like a sheltered and naïve homeschooler. I knew it made me smarter and hipper than the kids at church—that it made me less of a sucker in a world that was trying, on all fronts, to dupe me.
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Few evangelical teens today are probably familiar with the name Fanny Crosby, but if you were to open a Christian hymnal, you would see her name on dozens of the choruses. Before praise and worship bands took over, our church sang her hymns like “Blessed Assurance” and “He Hideth My Soul” in our Sunday services. Crosby—a blind rescue mission worker during the Civil War—is considered the “Queen of Gospel Songwriters,” but before she became a Christian, she wrote popular songs. Her most famous tune, “Rosalie, the Prairie Flower,” earned her nearly three thousand dollars in royalties—a staggering amount in her day. Once she began writing hymns, she claimed that she sometimes had to reject the melodies musicians proposed because they sounded too close to the secular tunes that were currently in fashion. She believed in an ideal that today seems ridiculous in all but the most fundamentalist circles: that Christian culture should remain set apart from the trends and caprices of the world. She feared that in using familiar tunes, people “would think that Fanny Crosby who once wrote for the people in the saloons has merely changed the lyrics.”
By the early 2000s, straddling the spiritual-secular line was precisely the goal of CCM groups. Popular bands like Creed, Switchfoot, and Lifehouse specialized in songs with vaguely romantic, vaguely spiritual lyrics, so they could be picked up by both Christian and secular markets. Jars of Clay, whose 1995 debut contained explicitly spiritual content, had lightened up considerably by the release of 2002’s The Eleventh Hour. In a review of the album, NPR’s Scott Simon wrote, “to the uninitiated, many of the tunes could be taken for straight-ahead, modern-pop love songs…their subject could be God or a girl.” Guitarist Matt Odmark admits they made a conscious effort, in the project, to avoid “the noisy vocabulary of religion.”
Lifehouse’s “Hanging by a Moment”—which was the number one single of 2001—is a more well-known example of this trend:
Desperate for changing,
starving for truth
I’m closer to where I started,
I’m chasing after you.
Although singer/songwriter Jason Wade identified as a Christian and was embraced by the CCM market—his band met playing in a worship team at church—he claimed that Lifehouse was not a “Christian” band. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he said, “We don’t want to be labeled as a ‘Christian band,’ because all of a sudden people’s walls come up, and they won’t listen to your music and what you have to say.”
Basically, CCM caught on to the number one rule of coolness: don’t let your marketing show. The best bands—the successful ones, at least—learned to gloss over the gospel message the same way TV producers camouflaged corporate sponsorship. Explicitly Christian lyrics prevented DC Talk from crossing over to the secular market in the ’90s; today it’s difficult to imagine their unapologetic faith making it in the Christian circuit.
This trend spreads beyond CCM into many areas of evangelical culture. The church is becoming increasingly consumer friendly. Jacob Hill, director of “worship arts” at New Walk Church, describes the Sunday service music as “exciting, loud, powerful, and relevant,” and boasts that “a lot of people say they feel like they’ve just been at a rock concert.” Over the past ten years, I’ve visited churches that have Starbucks kiosks in the foyer and youth wings decked out with air hockey tables. I’ve witnessed a preacher stop his sermon to play a five-minute clip from Billy Madison. I’ve walked into a sanctuary that was blasting the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started” to get the congregation pumped for the morning’s message, which was on joy. I have heard a pastor say, from a pulpit, “Hey, I’m not here to preach at anyone.” And yet, in spite of these efforts, churches are retaining only 4 percent of the young people raised in their congregations.
Despite all the affected teenage rebellion, I continued to call myself a Christian into my early twenties. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because being a believer made me uncool or outdated or freakish. It was because being a Christian no longer meant anything. It was a label to slap on my Facebook page, next to my music preferences. The gospel became just another product someone was trying to sell me, and a paltry one at that, because the church isn’t Viacom: it doesn’t have a Department of Brand Strategy and Planning. Staying relevant in late consumer capitalism requires highly sophisticated resources and the willingness to tailor your values to whatever your audience wants. In trying to compete in this market, the church has forfeited the one advantage it had in the game to attract disillusioned youth: authenticity. When it comes to intransigent values, the profit-driven world has zilch to offer. If Christian leaders weren’t so ashamed of those unvarnished values, they might have something more attractive than anything on today’s bleak moral market. In the meantime, they’ve lost one more kid to the competition.
2011, Guernica
AMERICAN NICENESS
Upon hearing that someone had published a lengthy study of American niceness, undoubtedly the work of years, my first impulse was to pity her unfortunate timing. Of all the things our era may eventually connote, it seems fair to assume that niceness will not be one of them. But then, have Americans ever been nice? Already it is difficult to remember the not-so-distant past, but the most familiar epithets would seem to suggest otherwise: the Ugly American, the Loud American, the Vulgar American.
According to Carrie Tirado Bramen, the author of American Niceness: A Cultural History, these archetypes are intimately bound up with the idea of niceness. The American character is defined by a kind of doubleness, she argues, with niceness and nastiness being two sides of the same coin. If the Old World aspired to civility, a rigid code that moderated social interactions between the classes, the New World went for niceness, a cruder virtue. Rather than cultivating the self-discipline to avoid stomping on toes in the first place, the nice American assumes a spirit of cheery sociability to compensate for a host of transgressions. Bramen acknowledges that the very idea of a national affect may seem quaint, perhaps even regressive, recalling the catalogue of dusty national archetypes—the efficient German, the lazy Irishman—that began as xenophobic specters and somehow persist even in an era of accelerated globalization. But she’s interested in how this temperament has been constructed as a sociopolitical device across the past two and a half centuries.
American Niceness was inspired, in part, by the aftermath of 9/11, when the question “Why do they hate us?” became such a popular refrain that George W. Bush included it in his speech to Congress weeks after the attack. For Bramen, the question was another way of asking “Why don’t they like us?” It obscured the history of American interventionist tactics in the Middle East by making the tragedy into “a failure of likability.” At the root of this query, Bramen locates a willful innocence, a national ethos that refuses to acknowledge its own capacity for violence. “Niceness implies that Americans are fundamentally well-meaning people defined by an essential goodness,” she writes. “Even acts of aggression are framed as passive, reluctant, and defensive acts to protect o
neself against the potential aggression of another.” At this point, my pity for the book’s seemingly ill-timed publication vanished—its immediate relevance was obvious. “Well, I think I’m a nice person. I really do,” Donald Trump said, in 2015, on Meet the Press. He added, “When I made, you know, harsh statements about various people, that was always in response to their criticism of me.”
Bramen traces this impulse back to our nation’s origins, when the passive framing of the Declaration of Independence (“it becomes necessary”) presented the Revolution as a grudging act of war instigated by British tyranny. But niceness came into full fruition, she argues, in the nineteenth century, her area of scholarly expertise. This was the period when America became an imperial power, and Bramen demonstrates the ways in which niceness served as a cheery façade pasted over violence and injustice. The culture of “Southern hospitality” perpetuated the belief that American slavery was a kinder, more compassionate variety than that practiced in the Caribbean. Later in the century, the annexation of the Philippines was heralded as a mission of “benevolent assimilation,” a phrase that President William McKinley used in his 1898 speech to the occupied nation to suggest that, unlike the Spanish Empire, Americans would be nice. “We come not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends,” McKinley proclaimed. Bramen also examines feminine niceness in the novels of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe (“a major theorist of American niceness”), and in female-led city missions like Jane Addams’s Hull House. During an era of exploitive industrialism and urban alienation, women were often encouraged to take on acts of “neighborliness,” reflecting the assumption that “interpersonal amiability can placate class tensions.”
It would be easy, of course, to dismiss niceness with wholesale cynicism. Any nation that lays claim to certain principles, just like any person who dares to do so, opens itself up to the charge of hypocrisy. But some of the best moments in Bramen’s history ask what might happen were we to actually live up to our ideals. Appeals to niceness, she notes, have fostered ethical practices and brought attention to human rights abuses. Bramen cites John Augustus Stone’s 1829 play, Metamora, which dramatized Native American hospitality for white audiences in order to portray the genocide of indigenous peoples as a tragedy of niceness betrayed. Reviews of the play suggest that it helped at least a few Jackson-era Americans come to terms with national guilt.
Such narratives point to what Bramen calls a “counter-tradition” of niceness, “one that linked a shame-based model of moral outrage with a call for national humility.” Still, she remains skeptical that such gestures can have a lasting effect. If niceness allows us to reckon, on occasion, with legacies of violence, these gestures just as often become merely therapeutic, another avenue to catharsis and forgetting. A sunny spirit of inclusion can obscure structural inequities, and the rehearsal of clichés and truisms—even those meant to acknowledge past errors—can reinforce the illusion of our own blamelessness and ease the conscience into a kind of historical amnesia. The political scientist Michael Rogin has dubbed this process “motivated forgetting.”
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I live in Wisconsin, a place where niceness is so ubiquitous that it seems practically constitutional, so it may be unsurprising that I found Bramen’s thesis convincing, and a little unsettling. Congeniality has always come easily to me, almost by default; my husband claims that he frequently wakes to me murmuring litanies of consolation—“No worries, no worries”—in my sleep. Perhaps for this reason, I’ve long suspected it to be a substitute for more demanding virtues. In this part of the country, niceness is less an expression of generosity than it is of reserve: assuming an inoffensive blandness is a way to avoid drawing attention to oneself, and the most reliable means of keeping others at bay. I recall reading, with a pang of recognition, Lorrie Moore’s observation, in her short story “Childcare,” that the phrase “sounds good” functions for midwestern girls as a kind of exit strategy. “It was the Midwestern girl’s reply to everything,” the narrator reflects. “It appeared to clinch a deal…except that it was promiseless—mere affirmative description. It got you away, out the door.”
This regional variety of niceness can also carry more hostile undertones. In 2015, Mike Pence, who was then the governor of Indiana, defended his state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act against charges that it would allow businesses to discriminate on the basis of a person’s sexual identity. On an episode of This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Pence, with an air of exasperation, said, “Hoosiers don’t believe in discrimination….Anybody that’s been in Indiana for five minutes knows that Hoosier hospitality is not a slogan, it’s a reality. People tell me, when I travel around the country, ‘Gosh, I went to your state and people are so nice.’ ”
I suspect that fewer Americans now regard niceness as aspirational than did in the past. Most of my fellow millennials would likely prefer to be known as fierce, unapologetic. But the posture of innocence remains seductive. More than once while reading Bramen, I was reminded of the characters in Greg Jackson’s stories, thirtysomethings of the creative class who are acutely aware of their comfortable status in a nation known for its decadence and waste, who nevertheless need to assure themselves of their inherent goodness by driving Priuses and donating to charity and returning, via hallucinogens, to a state of childlike credulity. “We thought we were not bad people,” observes the narrator of “Wagner in the Desert.” “Not the best, a bit spoiled, maybe, but pleasant, insouciantly decent.” An apparent article of faith among young Americans on the left, a group in which I include myself, is that while we may belong to an ugly nation, we ourselves constitute a more benign and welcoming elect, a distinction that seems to depend less on the civic duties we have undertaken or the sacrifices we have made than it does on the fact that we use the right pronouns and ritually acknowledge our privilege and buy fair trade.
Niceness, Bramen notes, is a virtue of “surfaces rather than depths.” Of all the qualities that might constitute a national character, it is surely the most passive, the closest to sheer indifference. Kindness requires active engagement. Compassion involves some measure of vulnerability. But niceness demands so little. It allows you to turn your back and slip out the door, grabbing your coat and calling out, over your shoulder, those sweet and empty wishes that facilitate so many exits: Sounds good. Take care. Have a nice day.
2017, The New Yorker
MATERNAL ECSTASIES
According to the literary critic Lytton Strachey, Florence Nightingale was consumed by an unnatural spirit. “A demon possessed her,” he wrote in his 1918 biographical essay on the Englishwoman who pioneered modern nursing. “It was not by gentle sweetness and womanly self-abnegation that she had brought order out of chaos in the Scutari hospitals,” he wrote. “It was by strict method, by stern disciplines, by rigid attention to detail, by ceaseless labour, by the fixed determination of an indomitable will.” Strachey aimed to dethrone the angelic “lady with the lamp” who lived in the popular imagination, a reputation he believed was idealized and overblown, and in doing so, conjured another caricature, a precursor to Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched. The Nightingale of Strachey’s account was autocratic and severe, methodical to the point of inflexibility. After long days of imposing her meticulous regulations on disorderly hospitals, she would stay up late into the night pouring her “pent up” energies into vitriolic letters addressed to her subordinates. This perverse disposition, the critic concluded, arose because Nightingale had refused the “inevitable habiliments of a Victorian marriage” and the domestic life it would have entailed. Her “possession,” then, stemmed from an absence. She was haunted by a nurturing instinct gone haywire, having suppressed “the most powerful and the profoundest of all the instincts of humanity”: marriage and motherhood.
Nightingale’s own writings reveal a mind more humane and complex. She believed she had been called by God to a solitary life and often spoke
of her work as a spiritual vocation. She feared, more than anything, the breach of autonomy that befell Victorian mothers. “Women never have a half-hour…that they can call their own,” she wrote in her diary at the age of thirty-two, an idea that inspired Virginia Woolf, several decades later, to write A Room of One’s Own. And yet Strachey was not alone in his diagnosis; Nightingale’s early biographers were convinced that she was afflicted with neurasthenia, a nervous disorder thought to derive from overexertion, which one medical journal referred to as “Nature’s protest against the childless condition.” Her sickness—likely a case of brucellosis contracted in the Crimea—was believed to be the consequence of resisting the transformative, and presumably relaxing, power of motherhood.
The heroine of Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder is an English nurse in her late twenties who trained under Nightingale and served with her at Scutari during the Crimean War. Like Nightingale, Lib Wright is a single woman who comes from an upper-middle-class family. “My father was a gentleman,” Lib tells a doctor upon arriving at her new job in rural Ireland, then immediately feels ashamed for distinguishing herself by her class. In fact, Nightingale’s reforms would transform nursing, long regarded as a dirty form of menial labor for the lower classes, into a respectable occupation for educated women.
Several years after her work with Nightingale, Lib is summoned to central Ireland to supervise Anna O’Donnell, an eleven-year-old who claims she has been living for months without food, subsisting only on immaterial “manna from heaven.” Religious tourists have made pilgrimages from around the world to pay homage, and the girl’s own family believes she is a saint. A local commission, headed by the family’s doctor, has decided that Anna must be carefully observed to determine whether she is eating in secret. For several hours each day, Lib sits vigil in the girl’s room and takes notes on her behavior, watchful for any suspicious activity.
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