III. Christian Hypocrisy

I used to find myself turning a number of experiences in churches over and over in my mind when I couldn’t sleep at night. Usually, all this was done in an effort to assess blame, trying in vain to formulate a final evaluation, trying to imagine how much braver and wiser I should have been; confessing to myself all the times I acted hypocritically and praying I might live more honestly in the future.

Such is the plight of the unfaithful, I suppose.

The sharpest of the impulses I felt is that I should have stood up more aggressively for my partner, for myself and, ironically, even for God. I allowed people to do and say things in the name of God, things that hurt people, because I wanted to fit in the community, I wanted to be seen as a man of God, a minister of the gospel. Because I needed this acceptance, and craved this respect; because I was too afraid to question authorities and beliefs, I promoted spiritual and emotional harm to those I was supposed to be serving. I’m dreadfully sorry. 

I’ve since vowed to take responsibility for my beliefs, my values; to forge my own ways of being in the world. I’ve given up the half-beliefs and blind faith.

I want to formulate or find something I can believe in. I want to say really ‘yes’ to the life I’ve been given. I don’t want to pretend I’ve found the meaning but to really find a meaning that is my own.

I was cursed with sleepless nights after leaving Christianity for a while — not that there was a shortage while I was still a believer. At first, I worried about whether or not I was wrong. If I’m honest, there were nights I was terrified of going to Hell. I hadn’t even believed in Hell for years while I was a Christian. At first, I found little cause for celebrating the loss of what had always given my life meaning. I mourned the death of my religiosity and wept bitterly at God’s departure. Although I’ve come to the conclusion that the Christian God isn’t real, the loss was very real.

Celebrity Christians, Church Fathers and even Jesus himself communicate the notion that Christianity is for the broken, that the Church is supposed to be some sort of hospital for sinners. Well, I think the Church is something more like a psych ward, full of sick people who aren’t well enough acquainted with their sickness. Tragically, Christians have traversed the entire earth dispensing what they think is a cure, all while spreading terrible illness.

Of course, the loaded alternative is always looming in the background. Have Christians shown generosity and kindness? Yes. Are they capable of profound honesty and even great humanitarian work? Obviously. I’m a critic of Christianity precisely because I seek to be truthful about it, I don’t have to ignore any of its goods or invent new evils in its name in order to criticize it. It is, as a postmodernist might say, autodeconstructive. It takes itself apart (indeed am I not an example of the Church taking itself apart?) It offers the tools for a proper analysis and the seeds of revolution within its own makeup. So I might make two points here regarding Christianity’s backward ethics:

First, good acts do not exist for their own sake in the Church. The New Testament is clear enough about this. The real purpose of acting with sacrificial benevolence toward other humans according to Jesus and his namesake is tied up with a vision of the afterlife; one I find to be grimly authoritarian and often simply predatory. A Christian does not love the world, rather it is like a child who is forced by a parent to behave kindly toward a disliked schoolmate. It is for the reputation of the Father and the promise of future rewards that Christians do good. Any exception is probably guilty of syncretism.

Second, how often do we see the ‘good’ deeds of powerful people justify their more dubitable choices? This is paradoxical but it is simply built into the logic of our society that a grand gesture — whether religious, romantic, idealist, humanitarian, sincere or even ostentatious — covers a multitude of sins. I think Trump’s persisting popularity with white evangelicals may be an excellent test case for this. Redemption is usually cheap if you are willing and clever. This is a hallmark of modern Evangelical Christianity: salvation is easy as A, B, C. So Christians sometimes act in especially humane ways — just like many seculars, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists seem to be able to do — but this does not wash away the grandiose sins committed in Jesus’ name. Nor does it serve as a good apologetic argument for the validity of Christianity’s truth-claims.

Bringing a charge of hypocrisy against Christians is beating a dead horse, it has basically always topped the charts for reasons Christians suck. For this to be such a common sentiment — found on the lips of such a diverse crowd as St. Augustine, Gandhi, DC Talk, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr.— it seems to be a uniquely Christian problem. Not that hypocrisy is exclusive to Christians, an obviously absurd claim, rather it’s a problem that has uniquely plagued the Church through its whole lifetime. 

So what is this particularly Christian hypocrisy? How is it so thoroughly ubiquitous that we find it in every age of the Church? Do not basically all major theologians in Christian history react to it in some form?

Hypocrisy is essential to the deep structure of Christian life.

For most of us, this hypocrisy lives below our awareness. We don’t know what we’re doing when we’re being hypocritical in a Christian way; Christian hypocrisy hides itself from the subject. Once this hypocrisy becomes detectable to the Christian, four actions present themselves. The Christian might choose to acknowledge the duplicity basic to Christian belief, which opens doors leading to knavish leadership, moral reform, or apostasy. For the average Christian however, all three of those options might be terrible. The easier path is to choose a type of blindness, a type of faith in denial.

The Church, then, is made up of four people:

1. cynics who know better but still pretend to believe for power, convenience or comfort
2. reformers who, digging their heels in, passionately insist on (their ideal form of) Christianity as the universal truth over and above all other truth claims
3. The negligent, those who choose not to inspect themselves, their history
4. The blissfully ignorant who lack even the impulse and/or tools to think critically of the faith passed down to them

The notion of the Church itself is a discourse in hypocrisy. Notice how quickly Jesus’ revolution betrayed itself. Jesus was executed as a Jewish political radical by the Roman Empire. Not three hundred years later, the Roman empire married itself to Christ’s legacy and began conducting its bloody campaigns under the symbol of the Cross, several of them massacring large numbers of Jews.

Ironically, Jesus’ executioners became the executors of his estate.

Christian hypocrisy goes all the way up and all the way down. It is hardwired into the experience of every believer and essentialized in the metaphysics of the Church. There is nowhere we might look and not find it.

As an abstract idea, the Church functions sort of like an ideological see-saw in the minds of Christians. On one side, we might put down the Church as a failure, an unfaithful spouse, even corrupted. This serves to elevate our particular form of Christianity and legitimate it as somehow original or authentic. Conversely, when our local experience of Christianity horrifies us, or is simply just uninteresting and dry, we might lift up the Church universal as some lofty, traditional key to our skepticism. Talk about the Church is usually ambiguous in this way, invoking a type of double-speak to cloak its embarrassing parts.

The Church promises what it cannot give. It writes enormous checks without the funds to back them up. This has always been the case, for it could hardly continue to function any other way. Sixteenth century catholics may have hated the Reformation but it mostly happened because the Church was brazen enough to officially sell afterlife insurance to peasants for actual money. 

I’ve often heard Christians referred to as the salt of the earth in reference to secular morality. A lot of believers, even brilliant ones, seem to think that if the Church ceased to exist, the world’s ethical conduct would crumble to either totalitarian slavery or anarchic chaos. As you might expect, I disagree wholeheartedly. Need I mention the Crusades, the Inquisition, Christian treatment of Jews, women, LGBT+ and minorities, or the heinous outcomes of mixing religion with military machines? Good historians cannot but draw a direct line between the holy war justifications of Christians and the type of fundamentalist religious terrorism close to the heart of life in our 21st century. Christians certainly don’t seem to fair better in the sphere of moral history than anyone else — prison statistics regarding religious preference show that, proportionally, Christians break the law in considerably larger numbers than do atheists.

If a politician claims to be a Christian, it does not indicate a high moral accountability but rather acts as a redeeming quality, excusing a great many indiscretions. 

If the Christian God exists, the history of the Church makes little sense. Jesus was supposed to return and didn’t, what a hypocrite. In lieu of his Second Coming, the Church has behaved no better than non-Christian institutions. However, if you think about the Church as simply an agent of world power in humanity’s story things seem to clear up.

Belief in something does not make you virtuous. Virtues take hard work, practice, sacrifice and a life-long commitment to human flourishing.

Christianity offers a machinery that allows morally mediocre people to believe they are virtuous, that they’ve found the answer to life’s mysteries, that they’ve been made clean. The Church provides us with a double-edged lie in order to pull this off. First, that we are, ontologically, sinners who owe God an impossible debt and second, belief in Jesus (which usually includes church participation) absolves that debt, leaving the believer in good standing with God, i.e. righteous.  In reality, churches are human institutions like any other, playing power games, relying on the generosity and capital of those who believe, speaking its own language and complete with its own set of rules and brands.

I’ve tried to make clear in earlier posts that I don’t believe in a monolithic Christianity, there is a myriad of Christianities. However, I would argue that hypocrisy is something they all have in common — albeit often a more sophisticated, subtle type of hypocrisy than the blatant bigotry and quackery associated with the term. 

I don’t believe that many Christians actually believe in what they profess to believe. And even less believe according to orthodox Christianity.

I stopped going to church because I don’t think Christians know anything about God. I also don’t think they know much about humanity or redemption; nor do I believe Christian love is lovely enough. I think I only have one life and I desperately wish to live it with honesty, ambition, humility, courage and love. To continue life as a Christian would be to live against those values.