Midwest Nice

Encounter Church is located in Kentwood, MI, right in the heart of what many refer to as the land of  “Midwest Nice.” Perhaps people in the good state of Minnesota are nicer, but because they’re so darn nice over there, they’ll let us claim a piece of Midwest Nice along with them. I sometimes wonder, though, if in the midst of all of our niceties, if our little song and dance and lies sometimes do more damage than we would care to admit.

There are a few hard-and-fast rules when it comes to playing the Midwest Nice game. For example, when you meet someone for a coffee, your Midwest Nice gene compels you to offer to pay. Even if you don’t want to pay, you just can’t help it. And the coffee transaction itself has a particular form that goes something like this:

                 

“Hey, it’s so good to see you! I’m so glad we can get together. I can’t believe it’s still snowing in July. Michigan is so crazy.”

“Oh, yeah, the weather here is always nuts.”

[The friends order coffee]

“Here, let my buy the coffee today.”

“Oh, no, that’s so nice of you to offer, but I can get it.”

“No, really, I want to treat today.”

“No, you don’t need to do that.”

“No, really, I insist. You paid for our lunch at IKEA last month.”

“Well, ok. Thanks so much.”

You see what I mean about the song and dance and lies? You have to offer to pay three times before the other will relent and accept the gift, and now the other will feel compelled to pay the next time. There’s a delicate system in place. 

I’ve heard that drivers operating in Midwest Nice Mode often stop behind a driveway at a red light to allow a car sitting in that driveway to turn into traffic since you’re just going to sit at that red light anyway. Apparently that doesn’t happen in other parts of the country. And in Michigan, people actually tend to drive the speed limit. Another example: In my last car, a VW Jetta, the speedometer didn’t work. It read the correct speed until about 40 mph, but after that it didn’t keep up with the actual speed. I had figured out that when my car was traveling on the highway at 74 mph, the speedometer would read 85 mph. Recently, my mother-in-law was kind enough to accompany me to Muskegon for a visit to Binder Park Zoo (which happened to be closed when we arrived, much to the emotional distress of my preschooler). I set the cruise for my standard 85 mph, which I knew to really be 74 mph. We traveled at that speed for over an hour. I had not told my mother-in-law about the broken speedometer, and only after returning home did it occur to me that she must have thought that I was a maniac, hurtling my infant and toddler through space in a metal box at ridiculous speeds when we were in no hurry at all. She didn’t say anything while we were in the car, but I wonder if she noticed, and if she chose not to say anything, was it because of the Midwest Nice phenomena. I mean, who packs her two kids in the car along with a PB&J and a Juicy Juice and then drives at breakneck speeds to a closed zoo?

Dirk didn’t mention Midwest Nice at church this past Sunday, but he did bring up an important cultural distinction between our current American Culture, and the ancient Eastern culture of the Israelites. The Israelites believed in corporate sin, that is, they believed that the sins of an individual became the responsibility of the community. So if an individual committed adultery or petty thievery or slander, everyone in that community had to atone for that sin. Imagine if this were the case for us—that every sin of your friends, family members, roommates, and neighbors settled upon your scorecard as well.  It would be much harder to ignore your cousin’s extramarital affair or your neighbor’s gossiping tongue if you knew that you had to bear their sins along with your own. And imagine how you would act differently if you would be forced to confess your sins publically and everyone else would listen to your confession and then be responsible for it. No more Midwest Nice, I’m afraid.

The problem with Midwest Nice, is that it avoids confrontation and acts rather passive aggressively. Two neighbors in conflict don’t address the problem and arrive at healing for the relationship; instead, the neighbors do their best to avoid one another and passive aggressively extend each other a non-invite to their annual Christmas parties. Or perhaps you have a lot of opinions about how your sister ought to discipline her kids, but because you believe them to be beyond your responsibility, you allow them to be disobedient and disrespectful.  The ancient Israelites may have experience less grace in their lifetimes than we would like to claim, and perhaps they didn’t hide their admonishment behind passive aggression, but they probably had a better understanding of sin, atonement, repentance, and community responsibility.


[Kristin vanEyk lives in Kentwood, MI where she loves to talk about Jesus in ways that are most assuredly not passive agressive.]