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Why Religious Hypocrisy is Unavoidable (And Why It's Unacceptable)

Lots of people say that all Christians are hypocrites.

I agree with those people.

I’m both a Christian and a hypocrite.

I greatly wish that I were only one of those things, (or at least that I could convince you and everyone else of that fact), but that’s an impossibility and a pipe dream I gave up long ago.

I don’t revel in or celebrate this profound character defect but fully cop to it, because I know that most other people already have regarding me.

And I have some news for you, if you claim faith: you’re in this cramped, creaky boat right along with me.

Lots of statistics and anecdotal evidence show that people outside of Christianity count our personal duplicity as one of the strongest sources of contempt for believers and one of the main reasons they reject faith—and in some ways it isn’t at all fair.

It’s absolutely true, mind you, but it’s not fair. The odds are never really in our favor.

As for all people of faith, one of the fundamental parts of my spiritual journey is to discern what a perfect God is like, to somehow emulate that perfection in my own gritty, street-level existence, while simultaneously sharing with others why this is all valuable and important—and there’s the rub.

You see, the problem of religious hypocrisy is ultimately an issue of space.

While I seek to know and pursue and reflect something Divine, I do it all in a vacillating, impulsive, emotional container; one that is extremely vulnerable to climate and conditions, and wired for self-preservation and protection. So while the distance is sometimes only slight and other times quite massive, there will always be a chasm between my spiritual aspirations and words, and the rotten, horrible things I sometimes do.

But just because this is unavoidable doesn’t mean we who claim Jesus should get a pass.

Hypocrisy really matters for Christians because it really mattered to Jesus. Though he instructed and preached on all facets of our human condition during his life and ministry, he saved some of his toughest language and most pointed comments, not for acts of lust or vice or violence but for outwardly religious people living poorly in the shadows. He unleashed scathing rebukes for those who claimed moral superiority over others, while raising far hotter Hell than any of them.

And ultimately it’s that kind of misconduct that people particularly despise in followers of Jesus. Most people whether they are religious or not, are aware of their own tendencies to misalign word and deed when it is convenient for them.

It isn’t our duplicity alone that most damns us in their eyes, but our absolute refusal to admit any capacity for it, and for the specific variety of hypocrisy we often engage in; the kind that overspiritualizes and overvalues the perceived moral flaws in others, while underspiritualizing and minimizing our own.

That’s why in the days following the Josh Duggar revelations, you see people’s blood rightly boiling all over social media when an All-Star Bible-thumper like Mike Huckabee makes a statement like this:

Here the non-religious world witnesses a well-known, self-identified “man of God” handling the sexual misconduct by another, with some all is forgiven, spiritual kid gloves, while somehow framing the perpetrator and his concealers as the actual victims.

This is the kind of twisted moral blind spot that results in a Christian leader arguing that another Christian is a martyr simply by being made accountable for their admitted misdeeds.

And people outside of the Church know when something really stinks.

As we live and pursue faith, the longer we have our double-mindedness go unchallenged the more comfortable we become with an ever-blurring line between what we do and what we condemn. That’s why Michelle Duggar can have the stunning hubris to boldly and repeatedly crusade against alleged “predatory” LGBT folks, while housing actual sexual assault within her very home. People rightly see that this isn’t just someone with their own hidden mess, but someone driven and willing to sling filth upon others.

We who are Christians can’t hide from our duplicity. I know that I can’t escape mine. As long as I seek to follow Jesus, I will be a double-minded, two-faced, say one thing-do another hypocrite as I walk. 

I will be fully vulnerable to those who can see it in my life from a mile away even when I can’t—and who will call me out.

They can accuse me of denying my faith with my life and of being a stumbling block to their own path to God, and most likely be correct.

Yet I will still fight with everything within me to keep the ever-present space between what I wish to be and what I am fully in front of me, especially when I am prone to assess another’s moral worth in the process.

If I have to be a hypocrite, I will be one only despite a daily, brutal war not to be. 

 

 

 

 

 

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