I have called Tennessee home for two and a half years now. I am still new here, by this state's own reckoning. I love it here, and I want to add to the best of what this place already is. Which is why I have come to discern something running beneath the hospitality this state is so proud of: a mean spirit that surfaces once the smiling stops.
Southern hospitality is real, but it is not synonymous with welcome. One can be greeted warmly at the door and still be made to understand, before the visit concludes, that one does not quite belong. I observe that same inconsistency in this state's social policy: no common-sense gun legislation, yet the Ten Commandments permitted in our classrooms. An assault on women's rights and access to abortion, yet cuts
to the very food programs that feed our children. We will fight to post commandments on a wall and refuse to feed the hungry standing beneath them.
I have been sitting with that as I reflect on the death of Dolly Parton, because she embodied something older than southern hospitality. She lived out the parable of the Good Samaritan, found in the Gospel of Luke.
In that story, the ones who should have stopped to help passed by on the other side of the road. It is the outsider, the one the room had every reason to overlook, who stops and shows mercy without first asking whether the person on the ground deserved it.
That is not mere politeness. That is kindness, and it exacts a cost.
Kindness tells the truth
Dolly moved between rooms full of people who agreed on almost nothing, and every one of those rooms claimed her as their own. She sat with presidents and with people who could not abide those presidents. The church claimed her, and so did the LGBTQ+ community. Rural Tennessee claimed her, and so did Hollywood, often in the same week. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read that as savvy, a brand managed carefully enough to offend no one. I do not believe that is what it was.
I preached a sermon not long ago called "Be Kind," in which I juxtaposed niceness and kindness, terms we too often treat as synonyms, though they are not. Niceness is southern hospitality's shadow side: pleasantness deployed to preempt conflict, to placate a room, to sustain everyone's comfort. It costs nothing, because it demands nothing.
Kindness is a different order of virtue entirely. Scripture does not name it a personality trait but a fruit of the Spirit, alongside love, joy and peace, something cultivated in a person over time and under pressure, never merely performed on demand. It is patient where niceness is only polite. It tells the truth where niceness stays silent. It shows up for those niceness would rather not be seen with.
Dolly was not southern nice. She was kind. That is why she could hold a room full of people who despised one another without dissolving into either faction. Kindness allowed her to remain herself. Niceness would have required her to disappear.
Let us not merely celebrate Dolly Parton's life because she was a musical genius and an American icon. Let us imitate it, because she was a good person, and because this state, this city and this nation could use more of whatever she possessed.
What it means to honor one person without eclipsing another
Which brings me to something I cannot set aside. This past January, Dolly's 80th birthday fell on the same date as Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Gov. Bill Lee's office marked the occasion with a proclamation for Dolly Parton Day, and it became the day's headline, issued alongside the state's more routine MLK Day statement. I cannot speak to what was intended by that choice, whether it was a racial swipe at Dr. King's legacy, an ideological one, or simply an oversight by people who gave insufficient thought to what that date already carries in this country. What I can say is that it did not reflect who Dolly Parton actually was.
Dolly, in her full strength, would not have wanted her birthday to eclipse the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. on the one day set aside each year to hold his legacy before us. We should honor her. But not at the expense of dimming someone else's light, especially his.
The measure of kindness is who gets included
That is what I am asking our leaders to sit with. Niceness would let this pass without comment, because to name it might unsettle a room. Kindness affords no such luxury. It tells the truth, even about an oversight, because truth is what love requires. Dolly's kindness never asked her to erase anyone else to secure her own honor. If we are serious about restoring that spirit to our city, our county, our state and this nation, it must hold for everyone at the table, not only the guests who are easy to host.
That means it holds for Black lives. It holds for queer people. It holds for children who need a book in their hands before they ever walk into a kindergarten classroom, which, not by accident, was Dolly's own life's work through the Imagination Library. Genuine kindness does not get to choose whom it extends to. If it does, it was never kindness. It was merely good manners for people who already agreed with you.
Tennessee does not lack for niceness. What Dolly showed us is something rarer: a kindness that will carry us further, because it can withstand contact with the truth. Let us actually learn from her, not merely praise her for it.
Rev. Dr. Shane B. Scott is the senior pastor at First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Imitate Dolly Parton. Don't just celebrate her | Opinion
