Good Manners

What Nostalgia Tells Us About Tradition

We are rounding the corner on the eight-part series from the church bulletin. We’ve evaluated smiling wives, obedient children, loud singing, strong handshakes, and young marriages so far. As we are working our way down the list, the next topic is “good manners”. At first glance, this seems out of place and maybe even weird. But it makes a lot of sense. It’s not just about traditional manners and etiquette, it’s deeper than that. 

The first feeling it evokes is nostalgia. It’s the notion of an older generation reflecting on things lost in society that should still be important. It’s the older generations griping how kids should still be learning to write and read cursive. It’s grandparents talking about how the younger generations aren’t as polite as they used to be and manners have been lost. This feeling might lead to a response of “Okay, Boomer!”, but for American Christianity, good manners is nostalgia for returning to a time when America was a Christian nation.  It is a story of a time when America was a good Christian nation filled with good Christian people, and we have fallen away from that. The language of manners, politeness, or civility in this context is code for Christian values. When we've lost civility, it means we're not Christian enough anymore.

If you've ever had a conversation with somebody about this idyllic past in which America was a good Christian nation, any argument about a history of oppression or horrible atrocities falls on deaf ears. The point is that good manners energizes and mobilizes action aimed at recreating the old society. The fact that it was never fully in order isn't what matters. It’s harkening back and expressing this nostalgic desire again and regaining something that people feel has been lost. And if that's all the nostalgia was, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. I can get nostalgic. 

But this idea of manners or politeness or civility goes to darker places. It's not just about people not knowing to say please or thank you. There are other more problematic expressions of what manners or politeness require. It lies in the subtleties that embrace the memory and also the exclusion. It’s narrative like “I don’t have a problem with gay people, but they don’t have to flaunt it all the time” or “I’m no racist, but they are protesting all the time and making it about race”. That’s the language of manners, too. It's bad manners when people protest racial inequality. It's bad manners when women show their bodies in public. Here it's the language of propriety. It is the language of what is proper. It brings us to the real issue, which is the nostalgia for a lost America.

It's about a lost America that was properly ordered. I talk about this topic a lot, as well as the notion of a society that is put together properly. I have written a book about this because I believe this is a real issue. Like the other topics we’ve looked at in this series, there’s a tie to understanding the terms of proper order defined by Christianity. It’s an America that keeps queer people in the closet and people of color accept what the white majority “gave” them and not ask for more. It’s a society in which women know their place and adhere to their roles. It’s living by the outline that people such as JD Vance and the far-right evangelical conservatives are setting forth in politics today. 

This isn’t the adversarial and controversial message of Donald Trump. It’s an acceptable passive-aggressive narrative because it’s frontloaded with words like “traditional” and “old school”. It makes marginalization, microaggression, and hate justified and okay. It is the essence of false harmony. Anything to the contrary is improper. Talking about emotions and fighting for human rights is not allowed. Equality, talking about sex in public, and expressing disappointment about your relationship is inappropriate. Talking about identity and gender outside of being straight, cis, and white, is identity politics and counter to Christian manners. So in my mind, when I see good manners on this card, it's just Christian nationalism in the guise of your kind-hearted, well-meaning older person who grew up in a different time. 

Who would want to confront a grandmother just because they use the euphemisms that excuse sexism, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia? Who wants to go up against an “old soul”? That’s what I mean when I say it’s passive-aggressive. It’s the rhetoric that says “I’m not trying to be contentious, but I just remember a time when people were more civil”. 

So the point on this card may seem innocuous, but the coded message is so much more. When you come to this church, you will experience the return to tradition, values, and the church built on a Christian nation. You will see the Christian vision embodied in the congregation. You come to our church and you're going to visit a space where you can step back into time. You can experience a kind of microcosm of what America once was, and what it can be again. But for it to be what it once was, we have to return to the exclusion of anything that doesn’t fall in line.