Reflecting on Religious Hypocrisy

As a human being, I have numerous blind spots, where ignorance conditions reactivity. I don’t love that, but I also don’t shy away from the reality.
Some of the points of activation I feel most deeply are around religious hypocrisy.

For most of my life, I would not have considered myself religious. I was brought up with moderately heavy Catholic influences that I was also somewhat shielded from, so I never felt particular pressure to identify with any particular religion. But I’ve had all kinds of experiences with individuals and groups of a religious character—especially those belonging to the dominant form in the United States and the West, which is, of course, Christianity. That happens to be where I’ve encountered the most frequent and flagrant displays of what I take to be religious hypocrisy.

What gets me the most is that many professed followers of Christ appear to be completely—aggressively, even menacingly—out of alignment with His actual teachings. That’s probably stating the obvious for those not indoctrinated by Christianity as prosperity gospel-slash-white nationalism.

Yet rather than experiencing this as purely oppositional—rooted in rightness and wrongness, self and other—my reactivity can be an opportunity to see it, in part, as my own hypocrisy: the creation of conceptual divisions based in a misrecognizing of what is circumstantial and conditioned, not fixed and absolute. Ignorance and hypocrisy aren’t somebody else’s problem. Ultimately, they’re my own. That’s an interesting thing to sit with.

Atheists have it easier in some ways: they can write the whole thing off. And I get it: religion foments systems of hierarchy and control. There can be positive aspects, but also tremendous harm, as we have seen over millennia.

Still, a sense of God, the feeling of one’s own ineffable connection to—or inseparability from—nonjudgmental acceptance and warmth, beyond division of self and other, without even the possibility of harm—remains a powerful inner magnet for many human beings. And it can motivate people to act in the world in ways that are genuinely beneficial and inspiring.

This doesn’t have anything to do with performative compassion. The recognition of inseparability and ephemerality is what opens the possibility of one’s own heart guiding one’s actions—unbounded, unlimited, unobstructed by conceptual limitations of self and other. That’s a bit different.

If I were a Christian, I would probably still practice along these lines, because I find it consistent with Christ’s teachings. To me, it doesn’t much matter if we call ourselves Christian, a Buddhist, or a ham sandwich—those distinctions are labels. What matters is whether our spirituality allows for greater opening, or helps us abide and be present to the sufferings and joys of existence (and not just our own).

So when I get driven a little crazy by pretenses to faith that don’t include works, or that traffic in the kinds of intolerance and cruelty that Christ stood against, I try to recognize my own tensions and hypocrisies within a space of loving acceptance—without trying to change or alter anything. In a relaxed way, those tensions reveal themselves as openness, allowing for a feeling of possibility to arise. Not bundled into any identity, not forced down anyone’s throat, not devised as a means to score points.

I’ll keep taking that medicine as often as I need to, because it’s good medicine.