We live in a world where words have become weapons. To disagree is treated as a form of violence. To challenge someone’s ideas is oppressive. Words that make someone uncomfortable are harmful. The only acceptable speech is speech that affirms, mirroring back to people exactly what they already believe about themselves. We’ve reduced life-giving speech to agreement, flattened love into validation.
This isn’t fringe ideology. It’s institutional policy and professional standard. Educators lose their jobs for refusing to use preferred pronouns. Research papers declare that failure to use preferred language is “inherently disparaging and oppressive.” Professional guidelines warn that not honoring someone’s self-identification causes damage: anxiety, PTSD, suicide. What presents itself as compassion now carries the force of institutional coercion. The message is clear: comply or lose your livelihood.
The logic is obvious. Affirmation equals respect, safety, and health. Non-affirmation therefore equals disrespect, harm, and violence. Any speech that causes discomfort is, by definition, harmful speech. The burden of proof has shifted entirely. One must now justify why they wouldn’t affirm someone else’s feelings and viewpoints or risk being canceled.
This sounds compassionate. It presents itself as evolved, enlightened care. But what if we’ve gotten this exactly backward? What if the cruelest thing you can do is dressed up as kindness? What if affirming someone in their bondage for the sake of temporary comfort is the deepest form of abandonment?
The Unexamined Worldview
Modern affirming speech is careless in the deepest sense—it never examines whether comfort and love are actually the same thing. It flows from an unexamined worldview that simply assumes they are.
The cultural consensus operates on a simple equation: comfort equals love, discomfort equals harm. This seems obvious to modern ears: we should make people comfortable, validate their feelings, never make someone feel bad about themselves. Isn’t that what love means? But this represents what Augustine called “disordered love,” a catastrophic confusion about the nature of love itself.
Augustine understood that we can love the wrong things entirely, or we can love the right things in the wrong order. Both are forms of disorder. When we love someone’s comfort more than their holiness, more than their actual flourishing, we’ve inverted the nature of love. We’ve made an idol of their immediate emotional state and sacrificed their long-term good on that altar.
They would rather be comfortably miserable than uncomfortably transformed. Comfort becomes the metric by which they choose damnation.
C.S. Lewis saw this same confusion in modern religious sensibilities. We want, Lewis wrote, “not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.'”
But this vision of divine love as cosmic permission is a fantasy. Lewis concluded: “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
In The Great Divorce, Lewis illustrated this with devastating precision. The damned don’t refuse heaven because they’re forced into hell. They refuse heaven because entering it requires turning away from the cherished evils that took them to hell in the first place; a transformation they don’t want. They prefer the grey town of their own diminishment, joyless and uncomfortable as it is, to the painful solidity of heaven’s reality. They would rather be comfortably miserable than uncomfortably transformed. Comfort becomes the metric by which they choose damnation.
Pascal understood our psychology even more deeply. “We hate truth and those who tell it us,” he wrote, “and we like them to be deceived in our favour, and prefer to be esteemed by them as being other than what we are in fact.” We don’t just tolerate comfortable lies; we actively prefer them over uncomfortable truth. We want to be loved for the false self we present, not the true self that needs transformation.
This unexamined equation between comfort and love produces a great inversion where cruelty masquerades as kindness.
The Modern Manifestation
The implications of this inversion are inescapable. If comfort is your only metric for love, all discomfort looks like hate.
Philip Rieff, a sociologist writing in the mid-twentieth century, diagnosed a fundamental shift in Western culture following the Enlightenment. As religious authority declined and psychological expertise rose to replace it, we replaced what Rieff called “guilty man” with “psychological man” referring to the way in which culture thought about the self, what it meant to be human.
The central human question changed from “Am I right with God?” to “Do I feel okay about myself?” This wasn’t merely a change in who we consulted for guidance—priests versus therapists. It was a complete reorientation of what it means to be human and what we’re ultimately for.
We’ve adopted the therapeutic framework as our comprehensive worldview, making feeling good about ourselves the measure of whether something is true, right, or loving.
When emotional comfort became the definition of health, speech had to adapt. Anything that threatens comfort became, by definition, harmful. Truth became subordinate to emotional experience—not “Is this true?” but “How does this make me feel?” Not whether something helps us flourish according to our design, but whether it validates our self-perception.
The logic becomes inescapable once you accept the premise. If comfort equals love, then discomfort equals hate. If affirmation equals respect, then challenge equals violence. If validation equals care, then truth-telling equals oppression. To love is to affirm.
This produced the “therapeutic culture,” a society that has made emotional comfort and self-validation the organizing principles of human life. It’s far more than valuing mental health. We’ve adopted the therapeutic framework as our comprehensive worldview, making feeling good about ourselves the measure of whether something is true, right, or loving. The therapist’s question—”How does that make you feel?”—has become the only question we know how to ask. Hence the post-modern skepticism of objective truth.
Consider British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain facing Adolf Hitler’s aggression in 1938. Hitler had already seized Austria and was demanding territory from Czechoslovakia, openly threatening war if he didn’t get his way. Chamberlain met with him, negotiated an agreement, and returned to Britain confidently declaring “Peace in our time.” He believed appeasement was the path of wisdom; that giving Hitler what he wanted would prevent a greater conflict.
He was catastrophically wrong. The war came anyway, and it was far worse because Hitler had been allowed to grow stronger. Sometimes comfort is what destruction looks like before it arrives.
We might think this is a problem unique to our moment, a distinctly modern mistake born of declining religious authority and rising psychological expertise. But Scripture reveals something more sobering: our preference for comfortable lies is not the least bit original.
The Ancient Pattern
We’re living in the fulfillment of ancient warnings about humanity’s persistent preference for affirmation over truth. We’re not being original in our sin; we’re being boringly predictable.
King Ahab of Israel provides the clearest window into this psychology. The story appears in 1 Kings 22. Ahab was planning a military campaign and asked Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, to join him. Jehoshaphat agreed but suggested they first consult a prophet. So Ahab assembled four hundred prophets who all told him exactly what he wanted to hear: “Go, for the Lord will give it into the king’s hand.”
But Jehoshaphat sensed something was off. “Is there no longer a prophet of the LORD here whom we can inquire of?” he asked.
Ahab’s response is revealing: “There is still one prophet through whom we can inquire of the LORD, but I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad.”
Think about what Ahab just admitted. He knew Micaiah spoke truth. He knew the four hundred were yes-men. He could distinguish between genuine prophecy and flattery. But he hated the truth-teller because the truth was uncomfortable. Nevertheless, under pressure from Jehoshaphat, he sent for Micaiah.
When Micaiah arrived, he initially gave Ahab the affirming answer: “Attack and be victorious.” But Ahab knew it was false: “How many times must I make you swear to tell me nothing but the truth in the name of the LORD?” So Micaiah told him the truth: the campaign would end in disaster and Ahab’s death.
Ahab’s response was to throw Micaiah in prison and go to battle anyway. He even disguised himself, as if he could hide from reality itself. But Ahab was killed when a random arrow struck him in a gap in his armor, exactly as Micaiah had prophesied.
There’s the pattern: Ahab surrounded himself with comfortable affirmation. He knew it was false. He demanded truth when pressed. He received truth. He rejected it. He died. Affirming speech and comfortable lies all the way to catastrophe.
The people of Judah went even further, They explicitly commanded pleasant lies. Isaiah records their demand: “Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Get off this path, stop confronting us with the Holy One” (Isaiah 30:10-11). Stop making us uncomfortable. Stop pointing to God. Just tell us we’re fine. They openly demanded to be lied to.
Jeremiah saw the same pattern in his generation. False prophets were welcomed and celebrated while Jeremiah was rejected and imprisoned. Why? The false prophets said what people wanted to hear. Jeremiah used a devastating medical metaphor: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). Later he added that they tell those “who follow the stubbornness of their hearts, ‘You will have peace'” (Jeremiah 23:17).
They were like doctors examining a patient dying of cancer and saying, “You’re fine! Nothing to worry about!” They made the disease comfortable rather than curing it. They affirmed people in their wickedness because affirmation felt like care and the lies felt better than the cure.
Jesus—whom we’ve reimagined as a gentle affirmer who never challenged anyone—demonstrates the opposite pattern. Mark 10:21 tells us explicitly that Jesus loved the rich young ruler: “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” And then, because he loved him, Jesus told him the hard truth: “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
The man went away sad. Jesus let him go. He didn’t soften the message. Love didn’t require making the man comfortable or offering a more palatable message. Love required offering him truth that could set him free, even knowing he would reject it.
Paul warned Timothy that this pattern would continue: “The time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Timothy 4:3-4).
“Itching ears”—what a phrase. It captures the restless desire for comfort, affirmation, pleasant words. Teachers who scratch that itch believe they’re meeting needs, being pastoral, showing care. But they’re doing exactly what the false prophets did, making the disease comfortable rather than offering a cure.
What happened to these people who chose comfortable affirmation over uncomfortable truth? Ahab died in battle. Judah went into exile. Jerusalem was destroyed. Those who rejected the prophets got exactly what they demanded: comfortable lies all the way to catastrophe.
Why does this pattern keep repeating? Why do we—ancient and modern alike—persistently choose comfortable destruction over uncomfortable flourishing?
Conclusion
Neither the question nor the stakes are rhetorical—they’re eternal.
Something deeper is broken in our culture beyond how we talk. Our speech reflects a deeper problem: we’ve lost a coherent vision of what human beings are, what we’re designed for, what true flourishing actually looks like. Without that foundation, even our best intentions become agents of destruction. We confidently pursue false goods, mistaking comfort for shalom, affirmation for love, validation for care.
You can’t guide people toward flourishing if you’ve lost the vision of what human flourishing looks like.
You can’t build people up if you don’t know what “up” is. You can’t speak life if you don’t know what life is. You can’t guide people toward flourishing if you’ve lost the vision of what human flourishing looks like.
Our culture has lost the ability to recognize true flourishing. So we’re either confidently pursuing the wrong goal—affirming speech aimed at comfort—or thoughtlessly defaulting to shallow kindness without any goal at all. Both are destructive because they mistake destruction for construction. We’re living under what we might call the “tyranny of niceness,” a regime where being pleasant has replaced being truthful; where making people comfortable has replaced helping them flourish; where we’ve mistaken the language of care for care itself.
The ancient pattern and our current crisis stem from the same missing foundation: not merely ignorance of what human beings are designed to be, but a refusal to orient ourselves toward that design. Ahab died not because he lacked information but because he could see no further than his own self-centered ambition and need for power. Judah went into exile not because they were ignorant of God’s law but because they’d lost sight of who they were as God’s covenant people. The rich young ruler walked away sad not because Jesus failed to communicate but because he couldn’t see who he was meant to be beyond his wealth.
We need to recover a proper vision of human life before we can recover speech that actually gives life. That recovery begins with a simple but profound question: What are human beings designed to be and do?
Not what do they want. Not what makes them comfortable. Not what they identify as or how they feel about themselves. What are they for? What does it look like when a human being functions according to their design? What is the shalom we’re supposed to be building toward?
These aren’t abstract theological questions. They’re the foundation for whether our speech gives life or deals death. Until we can answer them, the tyranny of niceness—however well-intentioned—will continue to masquerade as love, and our kindest words will remain our cruelest.
