Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is definitely one of the most referenced accusations against Christianity, and far from original. It has taken on even greater life as the advance of technology continues to make long-range communication to the masses more feasible and commonplace. Without publicity, scandals just wouldn't be as scandalous. (Better communication has also enabled opportunities for Christianity, too, so as with many things it's not inherently bad.) Hypocrisy is a sure way to raise someone's ire.

And it should! Christians don't like hypocrisy, either. No person with a shred or two of conscience enjoys being deceived. Jesus tossed the word "hypocrites" around all the time, often at the religious elite. As I have done thus far, I'm not going to try to prove that the attack under consideration is completely without merit. Instead, I'm going to add some perspective so that people can understand why hypocrisy does not prevent Christianity itself from being true and workable.

The most purely logical defense against hypocrisy is that failures, committed by people who claim a belief system, do not invalidate a belief system. Framed more classically, an ad hominem attack is a logical fallacy. Statements by pathological liars cannot be counted on to always be false, for example. Failures by people do not make Christianity false.

Sharp readers may have read the last sentence and immediately thought, "Moral failures do make Christianity false if one of the tenets of Christianity is that Christians (should) sin rarely if at all". To some degree, that is a valid criticism, but it is incomplete and inaccurate. Like any morality, Christianity has an Ideal which people are prone to fall short of. Indeed, moral failure seems to one of the prerequisites of being human (Christians identify this fact as congenital depravity). Other moral codes than Christianity's--whether more onerous, like religions that prescribe what clothes to wear, or less onerous, like the traffic code--are broken with disturbing regularity. Moral failure is not specific to Christianity, and Christians will make mistakes while living in the flesh, in this world. A Christian who can say, with a straight face, that he or she never commits wrongdoing, is a filthy hypocrite or deluded. The description "chief of sinners" was applied to one of the major apostles by himself.

Abstractly speaking, allowance and forgiveness for mistakes is part of Christianity, so those mistakes do not prove that someone is a hypocrite rather than a "real" Christian. Going beyond the abstract, this explanation can be unsatisfactory. When a "Holy Harry" or a "Godly Gloria" goes to church every Sunday, serves the community, participates in the neighborhood watch, refuses to let their kids play with other kids, and so on, but then has a juicy secret sin exposed, the hypocrite label can hardly be avoided. I have a few ways of interpreting the case in which an infamous misdeed has been performed by someone who clearly falls into the "Christian" category, at least outwardly.

1. One unlikely possibility is that the perpetrator simply was an amoral chameleon who indifferently adopted a Christian persona for selfish ends. Cult leaders, whose motivations are power and money, may be of this type.
   
2. A less insidious explanation is that the perpetrator believed in Christianity, but was not willing to undergo the "full treatment". Relax, conspiracy theorists, relax. All I mean by "full treatment" is the entirety of Christian teaching and practice. Like weight loss, holiness is not impossible. It merely requires stern dedication, willingness to obey directions or mull over advice, goal-driven desire, and other means as needed. The serious Christian should also be supported by and supporting of other Christians, and cultivating the habit of communicating with God in prayer and scripture and worship. Christians who don't demonstrate this level of commitment can't expect to "have it work". A half-Christian or one-hour-per-week Christian will probably yield to temptations that an earnest disciple of Christ would either shrug off or actively flee from.
   
3. The most distressing possibility (for Christians) is that the perpetrator had committed most facets of his or her life to God, perhaps even making numerous sacrifices, but purposefully kept a few unrepentant parts back, private from others and God and even the perpetrator's own conscience. Self-deception, in which one is a hypocrite to oneself, is surprisingly resilient. Someone can manage to keep the bad stuff separate for a long time. However, this is the realm of (sin) addiction, though the addiction may be emotional rather than physical, and an addiction tends to grow. The stress of both feeding it and keeping it dormant the rest of the time can wreck a person's moral center. Over time, the well-fed addiction may finally become public: the hypocritical inner self has escaped its cage. The wise don't need to go through this process to know how it works. They must keep in mind how necessary it is to stop it at the earliest stage.
   

The moral status of hypocrisy has another twist, one overlooked by many. In the simplest call of hypocrisy, there are two individuals: one is the accused, and the other is the accuser. The accuser would like other observers to believe that the accusation happens out of righteous anger, that is, a sense of justice. But I don't think that's true, or not in most cases I've experienced. A wrong action could be called out as wrong regardless of who performed it. A more specific call of hypocrisy isn't directed at the action, but at the hypocrite. The delicious satisfaction enjoyed by the accuser indicates that he or she feels rewarded by the hypocrite's action, in some way. By making the call of hypocrisy, the status of the accused drops, and the accuser's relative status increases. Someone who relishes making a call of hypocrisy is someone who cares more about his own status than about the fact that his fellow man failed. A happy muckraker is a person consumed by pride, with a craving for status. Hypocrisy is a serious matter. A call of hypocrisy should be a constructive rebuke to the hypocrite or a sorrowful warning to onlookers.

A suggested exercise: read the lyrics to the song Brother's Keeper by Rich Mullins.