After I wrote about the values and ideas that I have taken from Christianity, I happened to read Nathaniel Manderson’s essay in Salon, which was a bit of a righteous rant based on Matthew 23, a longish speech by Jesus of Nazareth condemning hypocrisy. I ended my essay with a brief and (sadly) flippant reference to how much I loathe hypocrisy but made a poor job of linking it to the things I took from Christianity when I left that belief system behind.
Since then, I have been thinking both about what I might have said about my feelings regarding hypocrisy and Manderson’s essay. On the one hand, Manderson’s essay resonated with me very strongly. Manderson’s condemnation of the followers of Jesus who ignore his speech as reported in Matthew 23 fit very neatly with my own sense that many of the Christians that I have encountered personally and read about almost daily in the news are indeed hypocrites. Reading Manderson’s essay also reminded me that, in my youth, when I believed most strongly in Christianity and the inerrancy of the Bible and tried very hard to be the kind of person that Jesus/God would want me to be, this passage had strongly affected me. Indeed, with the reminder from Manderson, I realized that this is where I would have learned about hypocrisy and internalized the loathing thereof into my own personal value system.
I can now more clearly assert that loathing hypocrisy is a value that I took from Christianity. Indeed, it is the very reason that I left the church of my youth: I found myself to be a hypocrite and felt that I no longer deserved the fellowship of my church. In this same period, I was reading Emerson and beginning to think in more naturalistic terms, but the impetus to leave the church was definitely and purely a matter of those strong “Woe unto you” statements in Matthew 23 applied to my own self.
So what happened? In a nutshell, I was attending various churches in Houston as a singer. I sang in their choirs, but as often as possible I “brought the special music” for the day’s service. At some point, I sat in the choir loft of some church and realized that I didn’t care about the sermon, felt no bond to the congregants in the room, and really just wanted to get to the podium and sing my solo. Singing was my joy. My pride. My whited sepulcher. I saw that in myself, believed myself to be a hypocrite, and punished myself for it by leaving the church so that I would not be tempted to sing from pride and vanity.
Well, I was young. Young people often see things in black and white, and I was no different. I can see now that I pretty much cut off my nose to spite my face with this decision. It was, however, a genuine reflection of a sincere belief that a hypocrite was not the person I wanted to be.
These days, however, I still hope not to be a hypocrite, and I am still angered by hypocrisy when I see others espousing one standard and then acting on another, lesser standard. I think of it as a special form of lying. Looking around me, I see hypocrisy most clearly in Christians, admittedly because I am biased. This is likely also because I am tarring all Christians with the same brush, something I truly do not wish to do. Manderson wrote about evangelical Christians, and he wrote about the kinds of beliefs that I held when I was young, which gave his essay a special resonance with me. Those beliefs are not, in a surprisingly large part, what progressive Christians believe or practice. Modern evangelicals, especially those who follow the so-called prosperity gospel, also seem to have moved away from “that old time religion,” albeit more in the direction of commerce and social control.
As an Ethical Humanist, two things come to mind: One, I think I need to work on my tendency to homogenize all Christians, and, two, Ethical Culture has a role to play in calling out hypocrisy in favor of truth. It is the first that I will focus on here, but, as I explore, as I plan to do, our commitment to try to act with integrity, I think avoiding hypocrisy and calling it out will both be strong components of our actions.
We may think that identity labels can help us in dealing with others in a respectful way. It does seem to be true that knowing that someone is, for example, of Jewish heritage may help remind us to be mindful that some foods might be better left off the menu or that some dates should be avoided for meetings. But not everyone of Jewish heritage is the same in their beliefs or their practices or their experiences. Someone of Jewish heritage may also carry more than one “identity”: female, transgender, third generation Dutch, lawyer, even Republican. The list could go on. We are each of us complex intersections of our cultural and personal histories. Applying one label to a person can easily lead us to forget that there may be other important labels to consider and, more importantly, that the person before us is more than just a set of labels or, worse, the stereotypes that go along with them.
I do know that all Christians are not the same. Christians in more mainstream traditions have a broader view of society and their place in it. Christians in Europe are more often more secular in their world view. I would like to remove a few of my stereotypes so that I can feel as well as show more respect (and not be a hypocrite in faking my respect). The way to do that may include more interfaith work with, say GreenFaith, the Poor People’s Campaign, or even Revolutionary Love, although each of these very worthy organizations make me uncomfortable when their religiosity is expressed in mostly Christian terms.
My past experience with Christianity was narrow, limited by the doctrines (and policies) of the Southern Baptist Convention. In later years, I did have occasion to work with “the faith community” in the effort to gain better access to medications for Texans living with HIV and AIDS. That experience, however, could be described (as I thought of it, in military terms) as a war on two fronts. While there were allies for the work in the broader Christian community (and indeed with people of other faith traditions), there were also strong opponents who were also “people of faith,” ranting about sins and punishment rather than compassion and care. O ye hypocrites! These religious views often distracted attention from the important work of improving both prevention and treatment for HIV through public funding. I have no doubt that both periods of contact with these Christians influenced my perception of those who believed in this tradition and biased me against the tradition as anti-science and completely hypocritical in proclaiming love with such hate.
At this point, the “war” is within me. Looking for peace rather than victory, I want to be open to seeing that “diversity in the creed,” using Felix Adler’s framework, should not become a barrier to working together when there is “unanimity in the deed.” I think, however, that what I am looking for goes beyond the practical matter of working with people whose beliefs I will tolerate. Tolerance cannot help but include an element of rejection: “I don’t like what you believe but I will put up with it so we can work together for a common goal.” That is utilitarian and makes me look at people as a means, not an end, when it is the reverse that I would hope to practice.
This need to go further comes, I think, from my understanding of religion. Religion is nothing more than a human construct which functions to serve human needs. It is vitally important to humans to have this particular kind of construct--it explains the universe and one’s place in it, it provides a basis for human relations, it provides the means to reinforce other structures, such as those for economic and political processes--but there is no single such construct for all humans. Respecting the diversity in individuals--the unique and complex intersections of their various labels--I would also hope to respect the constructs and solutions which they have chosen to meet their personal needs (which include their individual needs as well as the needs of the communities they seek to construct or maintain).
Respect implies acceptance more than tolerance. What I would hope to find in true respect is an acceptance that embraces not only the wide variation in belief that goes with the various constructs that are called “religion,” but also accepts my own need to hold my own such constructs, different and evolving as they are, without rating those who hold different constructs with evaluative comparisons. That is to say, I would hope to accept that different is neither better nor worse but merely different and to do so with a compassionate recognition that human needs can be addressed in different ways. What would be important in my understanding, then, is not one or another answer to the question of how the universe came to be but that those who need the comfort of an answer to what is still an unknown can find the comfort that they need in whatever answer they can accept.
Such an idealized version of respect may not, however, survive its encounter with reality.
What happens when I believe that some element of a construct will cause harm to others? Can I still respect the construct and condemn the harm? Am I hypocritical to claim to respect another’s belief and yet seek to oppose its practice?
Here’s a reality check. The Muslim practice of requiring women to wear veils is nuanced. Neither the same veil nor the same rules for wearing the veil apply from one sect of Islam to another nor in different geographic locations for members of the same sect. I can accept the various social functions of veiling and whatever ideological justifications are given for veiling as merely different from my own views until the requirement to veil butts up against my own closely held belief that a woman has the right to control her own body, including what she chooses to cover it with. My limit faces both directions. The shift in political winds in France has led to a secular government’s ban on a specific religious garb for women. I would oppose the government’s right to interfere in the woman’s choice. The shift in political winds in Afghanistan has led to increased control by the Taliban and a requirement that women, who had been free of the veil for a number of years, must now again don the veil--and the severe restrictions that go with it--against their will. Again, I would oppose that government’s right to interfere in a woman’s choice.
If I wish to avoid hypocrisy, I need to find a more nuanced construct that allows me to affirm my support for the right to believe differently than I do, but that also allows me to confront a point when competing constructs come into conflict. To respect the beliefs of others, to accept their right to believe whatever they need to believe in order to live their lives with the hope and comfort that religious beliefs can afford, is not the same as accepting the validity of those beliefs. More importantly, it is not the same as accepting that those beliefs can and should be carried out in actions that violate my own beliefs about causing harm to other human beings or the environment on which we all depend for life.
So here’s a construct that may serve to get me to what I want to be. Religion, as a category of human constructs, has important functions to serve for humans and their various social structures. Cohesion and survival of these various human societies will depend on their various systems of belief (constructed religions) that may (or may not) include a deity, reverence and obedience to some ideal or principle (often expressed as a deity), and conformity to a varying set of rules, prohibitions, rituals, etc. That my own break with one of those constructed systems of belief came with a tiny bit of a bang, influenced significantly by the Sage of Concord, but with more than a few emotional scars is, in fact, a personal problem, which I may still have to work out for myself. However, my Ethical understanding of hypocrisy is leading me to an understanding that the “creed,” whatever it may be, is secondary to the “deed,” whatever it may be, when there is an opportunity to work together for the common good. That means, I think, that I need to put my past experiences with a specific religion aside in order to work/meet/get along with others who practice other religions for the common good of maintaining our social connection(s) within the broader framework of this modern nation state. This does not imply hypocritical and false “respect” but asserts the basic and fundamentally shared human solutions to human needs advanced to a more inclusive level that allows pluralism in the more particular details of belief with the occasional necessary adjustments to work/meet/get along.
