(Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 of The Tyranny of Niceness series)
In 1633, the Roman Inquisition brought Galileo Galilei to his knees. The aging astronomer had committed an unforgivable sin: he’d looked through a telescope and told people what he saw. The earth moves around the sun, he said. The evidence was irrefutable.
The Church disagreed. And they had the power to make him recant.
Indeed, on June 22, 1633, Galileo knelt to retract his claims: “I abjure, curse, and detest the error and heresy of the movement of the earth.” His affirmation of falsehood was the price of his life.
“the demand for false affirmation comes wrapped in the language of kindness and compassion. We’ve been observing – and perhaps participating in – a new Inquisition.”
The Inquisition got its public affirmation—and Galileo’s humiliation. But they couldn’t stop the earth from moving. Galileo’s coerced words changed nothing about material reality. The planets continued their orbits, indifferent to ecclesiastical decree.
But the forced speech wounded Galileo in ways the Inquisition didn’t anticipate. By speaking against what he knew to be true, he participated in his own deformation. The lie didn’t just come from his mouth—it entered his soul.
We imagine we’ve moved past such obvious crudity. We haven’t. We’ve just refined it. Today, the demand for false affirmation comes wrapped in the language of kindness and compassion. We’ve been observing – and perhaps participating in – a new Inquisition.
Culture insists that the loving thing—the kind thing—is to affirm whatever identity someone claims for themselves, even when that claim contradicts material reality. This is the tyranny of niceness in action: demanding we speak words that comfort rather than words that heal.
Affirming falsehood damages people. Not because words themselves inflict injury, but because of what speech actually is and how it functions in human formation.
Speech has real formative power. But that power operates within the constraints of created reality, according to God’s design. Speech is only good if it leads people toward their design. It’s harmful when it leads them away—regardless of how kind it sounds.
This is what Article 1 demonstrated. Now we must understand why.
What Speech Does
Speech has always operated this way.
God spoke creation into existence—light, water, land, vegetation, sun and moon, creatures of sea and sky and field. When God creates humanity, the pattern shifts. Here, he works the dirt. He forms it into shape with his hands, then breathes life into the first man.
As God’s image-bearers, we mirror this pattern to a point. We’re given dominion over the earth and commanded to fill it with God’s glory. We don’t create the material world by speaking it into existence. But, like God forming Adam from dust, we work the ground with our hands—we cultivate, shape, build, create. We re-form matter through creative and physical labor.
But in relationships, our power works differently.
James captures it: “With [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God” (James 3:9). Our words directed at image-bearers participate in either honoring or dishonoring the image itself. James compares the tongue to a ship’s rudder and a spark that sets forests ablaze. Small in size. Enormous in effect.
Here’s the key distinction: We cultivate the material world with our hands. But we speak relationships into existence.
“because relationships stand at the center of bearing God’s image, our ability to communicate is the primary mechanism of living out that image”
“I do” creates a marriage. “I’m sorry” can restore broken fellowship. “You’re my son” establishes identity. “I forgive you” isn’t reporting forgiveness—it’s enacting it.
This isn’t magic. These speech acts work because they operate within the relational reality God designed into human existence. We are creatures made for relationship, capable of revealing or hiding ourselves. Speech is the primary way we reveal ourselves—the primary mechanism for building relationships. And because relationships stand at the center of bearing God’s image, our ability to communicate is the primary mechanism of living out that image.
This means speech doesn’t merely convey data about image-bearers—it acts on them. Words either honor what they are or dishonor what they are. There’s no neutral speech when directed at persons. You’re always building up or tearing down.
Why Speech Has This Power
To rediscover speech that heals, we must first understand why speech carries formative power in the first place.That means starting with the idea of a “person”.
Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas puts it this way: “Persons don’t exist in isolation and then enter relationship—persons are relational. We become who we are in communion with others. This is why speech isn’t peripheral to personhood but central to it. Our words don’t just describe people; they participate in the formation or deformation of their identity.”
What does this mean?
To be human is to exist in relationship with other humans. That’s not something we do. It’s what we are. We’re made in the image of a relational God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit existing in eternal communion.
And relationship requires mutual self-revelation. You cannot truly relate to someone who remains hidden from you. You can’t be known without revealing yourself. This is where communication becomes fundamental.
When I speak, I’m not just transmitting information—I’m engaging in self-disclosure. I’m revealing who I am. Thus, speech is at the very heart of what it means to be a person. That’s what makes relationships possible in the first place.
Without communication, there is no self-disclosure. Without self-disclosure, there is no relationship. And without relationship, persons wither.
This is why our words carry formative power at the level of identity itself. When speech flows from love, it builds people toward their design. When speech is distorted, it pushes them away from it.
Postmodern philosophy stumbled onto something true here: our words don’t just describe reality—they participate in shaping it. Speech creates marriages, forms friendships, grants forgiveness, establishes identity. Discourse theorists like Michel Foucault are right to recognize speech as a form of power that shapes social relationships and structures.
But this insight has been pushed beyond its limits.
The power of speech to shape social reality has been mistaken for the power to reshape material reality itself. If we can speak roles into existence, the thinking goes, perhaps we can speak sexes into existence. If discourse constructs social meaning, perhaps it constructs biological reality too.
This is the categorical error at the heart of contemporary gender ideology. It wrongly treats words as creators rather than witnesses.
The correction is crucial: Our speech has generative power in the relational realm—but none in the material one. Words can bind hearts. They cannot rewire bodies. We cannot speak away the givens of human nature any more than we could command a walrus to turn into a walnut.
Speech participates in creating relational and social meaning, but only within the constraints of pre-existing material reality. Social construction works within ontological constraints, not against them.
Consider the difference: We can speak a marriage into existence because God designed marriage as a covenant relationship that comes into being through vows. We cannot speak a female into being male because God designed biological sex as a material reality that exists prior to and independent of our declarations about it.
The Two Pathways
Our words have the capacity to change persons—because persons are formed in relationship through communication. And our words carry enormous responsibility. They can call people toward their design or confirm them in confusion. This is the choice before us: submit to the tyranny of niceness and speak words that feel kind but actually harm or embrace the discomfort of speech that heals. This is why affirming false identity claims isn’t compassionate—it’s destructive.
The claims of a woman who thinks she’s a man han’t changed one atom of material reality. Like Galileo’s heliocentric orbit, biology and psychology unmoved. But when others affirm that claim, the relational framework that could help her perceive reality correctly is dismantled. Words of affirmation remove the relational scaffolding that helps a person perceive reality.
Think of it like this: You’re lost in a forest. Suppose I come along to confirm your false belief about which direction is north. I’m not changing where north actually is. But I am making it harder for you to find your way out. Each affirmation builds a shared illusion that stands opposed to reality. The more people agree to the lie, the harder it is to escape it.
We know this dynamic from the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. Everyone could see the naked emperor but pretended otherwise—until a child said the obvious out loud. When enough of the community affirms a falsehood, individuals begin to doubt their own perception. The need to fit in and be accepted by the community is a form of affirmation seeking itself. So soon communal lies come to have social power over individual conviction.
“Truthful speech risks the relationship. Affirmation sacrifices the person.”
This is precisely what happens with gender-biology identity claims. When a teenage girl declares she’s a boy and everyone around her affirms it—parents, teachers, doctors, friends—she loses access to voices that could help her see reality clearly. She is pulled further away from her created design. The more her social network agrees to pretend the lie, the more the lie sounds like the truth. She becomes isolated in that false reality, unable to find her way back.
C.S. Lewis captures this in The Weight of Glory. He wrote that every person we encounter is becoming either “an immortal horror or everlasting splendour”—and our interactions matter. “All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.” It’s in our talking, joking, working—our communication—that we participate in forming persons toward glory or horror.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw this clearly: “Nothing can be more cruel than the leniency which abandons others to their sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe reprimand which calls another Christian in one’s community back from the path of sin.” What looks like kindness—affirming someone’s chosen identity—actually abandons them to confusion. Truthful speech risks the relationship. Affirmation sacrifices the person.
Redemptive speech does the first. It names rightly—calling people toward their telos as image-bearers. This sometimes requires discomfort but always aims at flourishing because it aligns the person with reality rather than isolating them from it. This is the power of prophetic speech: truthful naming that calls people toward what God is bringing about.
The Stakes
When culture tells us to “affirm” someone’s false identity claims, they’re not asking us to be kind. They’re asking us to participate in destruction—to dismantle the relational framework that could help them perceive reality, to confirm them in confusion, to make the path back to truth more difficult.
The loving alternative isn’t silence or cruelty. It’s redemptive speech that names rightly even when uncomfortable. Because speech has real power to build up or tear down persons, we must wield it with both courage and care.
But what does that redemptive speech actually look like in practice? How do we speak truth in love when culture demands we choose between speaking truth or showing love? That’s the question we turn to next.
