Have you heard of “sanewashing”?

It is a new word that has entered our public vocabulary.  It refers to some media outlets and individuals who try to minimize or reframe extreme statements or cognitive issues to make them seem more normal.  It is the attempt to present harmful, dishonest, or dehumanizing ideas as “reasonable,” or simply another side of a debate.

In some ways, sanewashing can sound virtuous.  Who doesn’t want calm conversations?  Who isn’t weary of shouting matches?  But from a progressive Christian perspective, sanewashing poses a serious moral and spiritual problem because it can mask injustice, dull our conscience, and present cruelty as common sense.

Jesus did not avoid conflict to appear reasonable.  He called out hypocrisy, challenged power, and named harm when he saw it.  He did not “both sides” the temple moneychangers, nor did he treat the cries of the oppressed as merely one opinion among many.

Sanewashing, however, does the opposite.  It takes ideas that demean immigrants, scapegoat the poor, deny human dignity, or undermine democracy and dresses them up in calm language, and respectable “panel discussions” with “thoughtful” people on both sides.  The result is that what is actually dangerous begins to feel merely debatable.

Sanewashing also plays on a very human temptation: the desire to feel polite rather than prophetic.  It is often easier to say, “Well, people just have different perspectives,” than to say, “That policy harms children,” or “That rhetoric dehumanizes our neighbors,” or “That lie puts lives at risk.” 

But our faith asks more of us than comfort.  As people of faith, we are called to be truth-tellers, not appearance-keepers.  The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and countless saints and martyrs remind us that faithfulness sometimes sounds disruptive.  Balance without justice is not a Christian virtue.

Another danger of sanewashing is that if we repeatedly hear hateful speech framed as “legitimate grievance,” we may become less sensitive to the people it wounds.  If we see lies treated as just another “narrative,” we may become numb to the real-world consequences of those lies.  This is spiritually corrosive.

In the end, our calling is not to make harmful ideas sound sane, but to help create a world where justice, compassion, and truth can breathe.  As followers of Christ, may we have the courage to refuse sanewashing and instead have the grace to speak, act, and love in ways that reflect God’s liberating truth.

See you in church,

Rev. Dominic