Hypocrisy Is the Road to Holiness for Most of Us

By JASON SCOTT JONES Published on September 30, 2024

Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. (Ecclesiastes 4: 1)

A French wit once remarked: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” That quip expresses a profoundly Christian insight. Every last one of us is a sinner, and the greatest saints saw that most clearly. (See Saint Paul, who called himself “the worst of sinners.”)

That wasn’t posturing or false humility, but the fruit of a conscience made more sensitive by God’s grace, which looked back and inward at the real flaws it saw. That’s why Mother Teresa confessed her sins each and every week (“Because I need to,” she said). But Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi breeze through life without a twinge of guilt. It must feel nice ….

Apart from becoming absolutely perfect, there’s only one way on this earth to avoid some taint of hypocrisy, and it’s the path that modern people seem to prefer: abandon all standards so you cannot possibly fall short of them. Lower the bar so far that it’s impossible not to clear it.

Replace the standard of “What is right?” with “What seems to work at the moment,” and WHAM: You’re immune to the charge of hypocrisy. Instead, you’ve made yourself a conscienceless sociopath. Which seems like a poor trade to make, but it’s the one modern political thinkers accepted in the wake of Machiavelli, whose impatience with empty talk of “virtue” led him to embrace cynicism instead.

The political system that people made out of Machiavelli’s embittered stance got the fancy name “Realpolitik,” but all it amounts to really is “Whatever you can get away with.” That’s hardly a philosophy worth of the name.

Our Glorious Global Double Standards

Most of us don’t go full Machiavelli, but instead we pick and choose. We maintain high ethical standards and strive to practice empathy for some people and groups, but not for others. We decide which sets of people deserve to be treated according to Christian ethics … and which ones simply don’t. They don’t get to fly up in the first-class, Golden Rule section. We shove them back into Realpolitik coach, where we grant them the same treatment any pagan would. We rightly speak up for victims of abuse when they happen to fall inside our “circle of concern.” But when we see innocents suffer who belong to other groups, we shrug and quote Frank Sinatra:

That’s life (that’s life)

That’s what all the people say

You’re riding high in April, shot down in May.

Just a few exquisite examples of the double standards we practice:

The Democratic party is quick to demonize blue-collar Americans who complain about the mass influx of unskilled immigrants it permitted when the Biden/Harris administration opened our borders. Where are the pro-immigrant activists when it turns out that some 320,000 immigrant children have gone missing, and are likely being exploited?

Neoconservatives of the Dick Cheney/David French stripe (who now back Kamala Harris) claim to be concerned about the lives and freedom of people in Ukraine. So why are they opposed to any cease-fire deal that might stop the slaughter, which has already claimed a million casualties in a war that never should have happened — except that Western policymakers torpedoed a compromise peace deal?

Conservative Catholics praise the anti-globalist, pro-natalist policies of Hungary and Russia. And rightly so. But they fall suddenly silent when you point out that both countries are blocking Christian Armenia from getting the weapons it needs to stop a vicious jihad waged by Azerbaijan against Christian civilians.

Christian Zionists rightly condemn the vicious attacks on civilians committed by Hamas. But when you point to the mass destruction of Christian churches and communities in Gaza by poorly trained IDF soldiers, they shrug: “collateral damage.”

The United Arab Emirates pours money into groups protesting the conditions of Palestinians in Israel’s occupied territories. But it’s also pouring weapons in a vicious civil war in Sudan, helping Arabized jihadis victimize black Christians and Muslims who soon will face a full-on famine.

Turkey speaks up at the slightest hint of Islamophobia in Europe, but keeps mum about the ongoing genocide waged by its ally China against the Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, who languish in concentration camps.

Iran, which claims to be the global champion of Muslims, viciously mistreats Hazara refugees from Afghanistan, making it illegal even to sell them bread when they’re starving.

Virtue, Without All the Signaling

As head of the Vulnerable People Project, it’s my job to practice empathy toward anyone who needs it — even if he’s not part of one of my favorite religious or ethnic groups. I’ve written here about how my work on behalf of Afghans abandoned by Biden’s surrender and civilians starving in Gaza forced me to confront my own prejudicesabout people from that part of the world.

I’m not going to tell you that you should actively prefer people radically different from you, that you ought to care about foreign Muslims more than American Christians. Or that you should dump your own kids in pagan, dangerous public schools out of a sense of “solidarity” or something like it — as Christianity Today now teaches.

That’s the woke gospel of Victimism, which seeks to virtue-signal like the worst Pharisees whom Jesus scorned. Instead, I want to urge everyone to be a slightly better class of hypocrite. Don’t embrace grim Realpolitik for one group, and the Golden Rule for another. Even if you do, quite naturally, care more for suffering people who share your faith or citizenship, don’t stop at that. Challenge yourself to remember the common humanity we share with every soul God has created. Don’t callously embrace policies for alien strangers that would appall you if you had to endure them. In other words, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

The eventual deathbed convert Oscar Wilde had a famously complex relationship with the moral law. But in one of his plays, he included a line that I think could inspire us here: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

I’ll repurpose that line this way: We are all hypocrites, but some of us are looking at the Cross.