A Typology: Part Four

The Milquetoasts
While I'm on a roll, let's talk the opposite of extremists: the people who are afraid to say or do anything.  The classic example is the Church in Laodicea mentioned in Revelation as being lukewarm and spewed out of God's mouth for being neither hot nor cold.  I'm going to shift back to talking pretty much exclusively about Christians now, because that's where I have standing.
I will admit as well, that I have sat the fence, declared my moderation and otherwise declined to take a stand in certain areas over the years, sometimes out of a real sense of neutrality, and sometimes because I just didn't want the trouble.
There is something to be said for diplomacy, courtesy and civilized discourse.  There is also a very real need to avoid naming people who disagree with you your enemy, and generally trying to walk a mile in the other's shoes.  But this too, can be taken too far.
Where extremists are violently and callously devoted to their own agenda, the milquetoasts are hypersensitive and avoid conflict, even healthy conflict, at all costs.  They are sort of the middle children of the faith community, constantly whining, "why can't we all just get along."
It's a fact, in families and in churches, that you can't expect to really be healthy if you don't deal with your troubles.  And I guess that is what really distinguishes a milquetoast from a moderate: where a moderate must have the courage to suffer slings and arrows from all directions and stubbornly insist on balance, a milquetoast doesn't want anyone to get their feelings hurt.
Milquetoasts would probably say that this little exercise in labelling and comparing that I'm up to right now is judgmental and maybe even hurtful.  While I take the point that generalizations and labels can be problematic, without them we would probably not be able to say anything with very much clarity at all.
The trick is then, to try and value all or as many different types of people as you can, even extremists and milquetoasts.  There have been times when people have made some declaration about being offended or marginalized, where my immediate reaction was: "you're just being hyper-sensitive," and of course I have to "check my privilege," or some such milquetoasty thing, and I hate to admit it, but they're right, they're annoying but they're right.  I am a middle class white American male, outside of Royalty, one of the most privileged classes of people ever, therefore I cannot, am not allowed to say certain things about people who are oppressed or marginalized.
I have learned this from milquetoasts.
I have learned to be careful about labels, generalizations and stereotypes.
If and when I engage in such things, like now, I try to be circumspect, and recognize some way in which the human beings who happen to fall in my self-defined categories are also children of God.
But I'm going to keep going with my typology, because I want to.