is the one word that almost always comes to conversation when people mention why they disdain or rejected the church. The mention of the word implies that there was once a genuine interest in what the church was centered around: Christ, His mission of love, and our resultant mission of love; but when stark disparities arose between the "talk" and the "walk," people were turned off and walked.
My friend Joe mentioned this experience last night at dinner, remarking that he had always been expecting a church to be passionate and proactive about going out and doing something good, vice showing up once a week and checking off their good deed for the day. It's an almost archetypal commentary, albeit with many singular exceptions.
Hypocrisy is, at its most distilled definition, saying one thing and doing another. The fact that the church is errant, that its members are sinful, does not alone make it hypocritical: we espouse a doctrine that claims that man is depraved and sinful and that our sinful nature is everything absolutely wrong in the world. Our story is a story about Christ's love, not our own. In fact, it's a story of the redemption of our fallen nature through no action of our own. If we sin, we are simply being consistent.
But we also preach a doctrine of love and redemption, and if people see us as hypocritical, it's because they expect that love is transformational. That if we as Christians really encountered and believed in this amazing, divine love that we claim to experience, on a daily basis, we would be different people altogether.
The broad fact that so many outsiders see Christians as hypocritical means that there could be a universal expectation or understanding that true love transforms people into their better selves, and if you believe in good creation, into who they were meant to be. In this age of deconstruction and relativity, I think that a universal assumption like that is remarkable.
In this discourse, I sort of bastardized a lot of significant parts of our theology. The Bible does speak to Christians walking by the guidance of the Holy Spirit to lead transformed and perfected lives of righteousness and love. It does espouse a definite morality for the adherence of its followers. It doesn't say we can get away with murder because we are fallen, but that we are through Christ "a new creation." But the point still stands: people expect the love we talk about to be life-changing and epic. People are interested in the idea of life-changing love. Aren't we supposed to have the ultimate answer for that? If there's hypocrisy anywhere, there it is.
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Why?
Some people keep prayer journals, to archive their thoughts and experiences with God and with life. I think I'd lose an actual journal if I kept one, but it's a lot harder to misplace the Internet. So here are my thoughts about God and about life. I am not always right, but I am always honest. I put them online because I think real community begins when we open doors that we normally keep shut.
2 comments:
"In this age of deconstruction and relativity, I think that a universal assumption like that is remarkable."
I'm not sure this is true. In this age, nothing from authority is to be trusted, but almost everything goes, and people still want to believe that there is good in every being, and that love is good.
So...as Christians, we should be transformed. But we claim we're sinful too, and I believe most Christians I know walk in humility - we don't brag that we're being perfected from our sinfulness ("work out your salvation in fear and trembling", after all). But most non-religious people are the same - they mess up, and they admit they're messed up, but they're not usually called hypocrites. Why then the claim of hypocrisy for us?
In general, I'm not sure the condemnation of hypocrisy should always be taken at face value all the time, though often, there is genuine hypocrisy (as news agencies publicizing scandals like to remind us). Apart from this, I can see a few different reasons why we'd be called hypocrites (apart from actual hypocrisy).
1) We don't pay attention. We might be caught up in something else, or may be too. I remember being very caught up in having so much fun at college fellowships that I often forgot to think of my neighbor first. Case in point: during dinner and Bible study at a friend's house, I was so engrossed in socializing ("fellowshipping") that I just came in with friends, ate at their place, talked, and left. I was a pretty discourteous guest.
2) There's some sort of mis-communication. For example, differing perspectives can lead to misunderstanding - consider Christian views on homosexual behavior. Some believe that the sin does not define the person, and thus seek to love the person while not accepting his lifestyle, whereas from a different perspective, rejecting a lifestyle is equivalent to rejecting a person.
3) The sin of ignorance - even dedicated, God fearing believers have immature and incomplete minds, and may misunderstand what it means to follow and love God and people. What is to love God - to read the Bible, or to help someone in need? To pray, or spend time with friends? To serve in the church or serve in the community? I think the answer's both, but we may default more to the former (more obviously spiritual) choice to be safe, which keeps us from showing the world how we're trying to serve it.
(A few of these are ideas from blog posts by Richard Beck - "Moral BS", "flies, morality and attention", and "the bait and switch of contemporary christianity").
I don't think that charges of hypocrisy are reliant on Christians not being perfect. There's a bit of a “who are you to tell me how to live” reaction directed at vocal Christians who don't seem to be better people than your average non-Christian, but I think it's mostly a sense that some Christians are more tolerant of the sorts of sins they commit than they are of the sorts of sins that others commit, when it seems (to outsiders) that a fair-minded interpretation of what Jesus taught would either consider the two sorts of sins as comparably bad or would consider the Christians' sins as worse. Another way of putting it is that Christians are perceived as being less concerned with being better people themselves than they are with telling others how to live.
So people often say that it's hypocritical of some Christians to so strongly oppose gay marriage while not being nearly as loud about divorce rates. The idea is that it's very convenient for straight people to ignore their own, more significant, contributions to the “breakdown of traditional marriage” or similar in favor of going out and putting all of the blame on a scapegoat. Christians tend to be against marijuana legalization, but you don't see nearly as much support for bringing back Prohibition. Almost every time that you've got two comparable activities, both of which most Christians would agree are bad, the one that Christians don't engage in as much is the more strongly opposed.
More abstractly, Christians that spend more time going on about the evils of abortion than they do volunteering at soup kitchens can be seen as preferring haranguing others about their choices to doing uncontroversial good. They would rather spend time focusing on the wrongs others are doing than on the wrong they're doing themselves (taking a lack of charity as sinful, here). Of course, this just gets worse when there's genuine moral disagreement – if you think that Christians who oppose gay marriage on explicitly religious grounds are just expressing open bigotry, and you're at least vaguely aware that Christianity is supposed to be about loving thy neighbor, then it's very easy to see their mere labeling of themselves as Christians as hypocritical – the notion is that they're just using a noble system of belief as cover to act on prejudice and self-interest.
In short, hypocrisy isn't saying that the good is one thing and then doing something else. It's not hypocritical to have a humanly unattainable conception of the good. Hypocrisy is holding others to a higher standard than you hold yourself, ignoring your own rules when they become inconvenient for you personally, etc. For example, lots of people will tell you that Al Gore is a hypocrite. It's not because he doesn't live in the woods, but because he spends most of his energy trying to get people to have a significantly smaller environmental footprint than his own (that, in fact, the people he's haranguing already have a smaller footprint than he does).
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