Christ did not merely urge humanity to be kind. He embodied perfect kindness by giving his life for those who neither earned nor expected such a gift.
You’ve probably seen it. Maybe your neighbor has the sign in his yard, or your colleague has the bumper sticker that decrees: “Be Kind.” It’s the moral mood of our age. It’s the gentlest of imperatives, a soft commandment for a secular age. No one questions it. No one asks why. We simply assume the world would be better if everyone lived by it. But that assumption raises a surprisingly deep question: Why should we be kind? And what does it look like to be kind?
What appears to be a sentimental slogan reveals something much larger about us, though. Even as Western culture distances itself from Christianity, we cannot stop speaking in moral terms. We may no longer quote the Ten Commandments, but we still issue commandments of our own with the same moral certainty of Moses or Jesus. “Be kind” is merely the friendlier version of “do better,” “stop hate,” “end injustice,” and a dozen other imperatives spoken with unmistakable authority.
This is ironic, of course, because many who protest “authoritarianism” often deliver moral rules with unquestionable absoluteness. They condemn, they exhort, and they instruct. They, in other words, behave as if there really is a moral standard higher than all of us.
No one lives as though morality is merely preference.
And that raises a very basic yet necessary question: what gives these words any authority at all? If there is no higher moral truth, no transcendent good, or no divine moral law, then “Be Kind” carries no more weight than “Try the new soy latte” or “Root for the Savanah Bananas.” A preference cannot bind another person. Without an objective standard, no one can say someone else is wrong. Not really. Because wrongness itself would be nothing more than personal dislike.
Yet no one lives as though morality is merely preference. When we encounter cruelty—when someone mocks a stranger, betrays a friend, or harms the vulnerable—we don’t simply say, “I personally dislike that.” We think or say, “That’s wrong.” We feel it. And we expect others to feel it too.
That reflexive moral judgment is exactly what C.S. Lewis seized upon in the opening of Mere Christianity. Human beings everywhere, he argued, appeal to a standard of behavior that they neither created nor control. They know they ought to be kind; they know others ought to be as well. And that sense of “ought” is stubborn. It refuses to shrink down to biology or cultural conditioning. It points upward.
Our moral instincts act like signposts and directional arrows pointing toward something beyond us. And if we follow those arrows, they lead somewhere. They lead to the idea that goodness is real, not invented, that moral duties flow from a moral order, and even that this moral order reflects the character of Someone who stands above creation. And eventually, they lead to the possibility of revelation — that this Someone has revealed who he is.
This is where the Christian story makes far better sense of our yearning for kindness than any secular explanation. Christianity teaches that God is good, that we are created in his image, and that the moral law stitched into our hearts reflects his own character. We recoil at cruelty because it contradicts the One who made us. We gravitate toward kindness because it harmonizes with the God who is love.
And the moment we ask what kindness really is, we find ourselves drawn not just to general moral principles but to the defining moment of Christian faith. According to Jesus himself, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). If kindness is about self-giving love, then the cross is its clearest and most breathtaking expression. Christ did not merely urge humanity to be kind. He embodied perfect kindness by giving his life for those who neither earned nor expected such a gift.
This is the part our modern slogans can never capture. The greatest act of kindness the world has ever known is not a slogan on a tote bag but the Son of God offering himself for sinners. The cross is not just an example of kindness; it is the definition. It is the moral center of the universe, where goodness stops being an abstraction and becomes flesh and blood.
So the next time you see “Be Kind” on a water bottle or a yard sign, don’t dismiss it. Let it remind you of the deeper truth it unintentionally confesses: goodness is real and kindness is more than a preference. It is a reflection of the God who made us and redeemed us.
Lewis was right. Our cultural insistence on kindness is an invitation, an onramp to a far greater story. If we follow the longing far enough, it leads not just to the idea of God but to the One who showed us the greatest love of all when he laid down his life for his friends. And in him, the command to “Be Kind” finally makes sense.
