Dead Souls

The second of February is the fortieth day after Christmas and therefore the day on which the Church commemorates the Presentation of Jesus Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  This commemoration is popularly known as Candlemas from the tradition of blessing candles in Church on this day.  There is an ancient folk tradition that says that if it is a clear day on Candlemas it will be a long winter.  A tradition derived from this one says that a hibernating animal – which depends on where you live – will temporarily awaken on Candlemas to predict the remaining length of winter by whether or not he sees his shadow.  In North America, the hibernating animal is the groundhog or woodchuck.

 

This year Candlemas fell on a Sunday.  On most Sunday evenings a friend comes over to watch movies and the obvious choice was “Groundhog Day” the 1993 film by Harold Ramis in which Bill Murray plays a weatherman who goes to Punxsutawney, the small community in Pennsylvania where Groundhog Day is a much bigger deal than elsewhere, and becomes trapped in a personal time loop that forces him to relive the day over and over again.  The way in which Phil, Murray’s character who shares a name with the famous groundhog, responds to this dilemma evolves over the course of the movie.  At one point, fairly early in the plot, his response is gross self-indulgence since there are no consequences due to the slate constantly being wiped clean.  In this phase, the character of Rita portrayed by Andie MacDowell, watching him engage in reckless gluttony in the local diner, quotes Sir Walter Scott to him:

 

The wretch, concentered all in self,

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust, from whence he’s sprung

Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

In the movie, Phil’s response is to laugh and make a joke about having misheard Walter Scott as Willard Scott.  Watching the movie with my friend, my response was to point out that Rita had misapplied the lines she quoted.  The lines are from Canto VI of the Lay of the Last Minstrel and refer not to a hedonist but to the person lacking patriotism.  The first part of the Canto goes:

 

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,

 

After this comes the lines quoted in the movie.

Clearly Sir Walter Scott shared the opinion of Scottish-American, neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre that patriotism is a virtue as well he ought for that opinion is correct.  Note, however, that the correctness of the opinion depends on the definition of patriotism.  Nationalism, which is frequently confused with patriotism, is not a virtue.  It is not the opposite of a virtue, a vice, either, but this is only because it does not belong to the same general category, the habits of behaviour that make up character, of which virtue and vice are the good and bad subcategories.  Nationalism is an ideology.  An ideology is a formulaic substitute for a living tradition of thought (see the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics And Other Essays).  Shortcuts of this type are always bad. 

 

In a recent column Brian Lilley spoke of “national pride” and criticized those who have only recently started to display national pride as Canadians in response to Donald the Orange.   While Lilley’s argument is related to my main topic in this essay, I bring it up here to make the point that “national pride” is not a good way of describing the patriotism that is a virtue.  To be fair, Lilley did not equate patriotism with “national pride” but this is because the word patriotism does not appear in his column.  Pride appears four times and the adjective proud appears nine times.  While it is easy to see why Lilley would use these terms, since much of the column is appropriately critical of the attacks on Canada and her history, identity, and traditions that have been coming from the current Liberal government for the duration of the near-decade they have been in power, pride is not the right word.  It is the name of a vice, indeed, the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, rather than a virtue.

 

Fortunately, we do not have to look far and wide to find the right term.  Patriotism, correctly defined, is neither the ideology of nationalism that values one’s country for its perceived superiority to all others requiring that all others be insulted and subjugated nor the deadly sin of pride as directed towards one’s country, but simply love of one’s country. 

 

Love of one’s country is indeed a virtue.  Whereas pride is the worst of all sins, love is the highest of all virtues. Of course, the love that is the highest of all virtues is a specific kind of love.  The Seven Heavenly Virtues include the Four Cardinal Virtues of Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude and the Three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Love.  The Cardinal Virtues are habits that anyone can cultivate and so make up the best moral character that man can attain in his natural or unregenerate state.  While faith, hope, and love in a more general sense can be similarly cultivated, the Faith, Hope, and Love that make up the essence of Christian character must be imparted by the grace of God although the Christian is also expected to cultivate them.  Love is the greatest of the three as St. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 13:13, and therefore as Henry Drummond called it, “the greatest thing in the world”.  It incorporates the other two since they are built upon each other.  Natural loves are lesser than Christian Love or Charity, but they are still virtuous insomuch as they resemble, albeit imperfectly, the Theological Virtue.  Patriotism, the love of country, is such a love.  Edmund Burke famously described how it develops “To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle … of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love of our country and to mankind.”  The “little platoons” include one’s family and local community and is Burke had wanted to belabour the point he could have said that the first principle is love of one’s family, which develops into love of one’s local community, and then outward.

 

It has been heartwarming to see Canadians display their love of country over the last month or so in response to the repeated threats of Anschluss coming from America’s Fuhrer.  While not all of these displays have been in good taste they do all demonstrate that Captain Airhead’s efforts to kill Canadian patriotism by endlessly apologizing for past events that need no apologies, cancelling Canada’s founders and historical leaders such as Sir John A. Macdonald, and other such nonsense have failed.  This resurgence in Canadian public patriotism ought, therefore, to be welcomed by the “conservatives” who rightly despise Captain Airhead.  Oddly, however, it has not been so welcomed by many of them. 

 

In part this is due to the fact that Captain Airhead, the Liberals, the NDP, and their media supporters who were all on the “cancel Canada” bandwagon until yesterday are now wrapping themselves in the flag and these do deserve to be called out for this.  The right way to do so, however, is to say something to the effect of “you are rather late to the party, but thanks for showing up.”  To Brian Lilley’s credit, that is the gist of what he says in the column alluded to earlier.  Many other “conservatives”, however, have responded quite differently.  In his 2006 book, In Defence of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue, Jeremy Lott pointed out the difference between Jesus’ condemnation of hypocrisy and Modern condemnation of hypocrisy.  In condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, Jesus did not condemn them for the high moral standards they taught, but for falling short of those standards by sinning.  Moderns, however, when they condemn hypocrisy, condemn the moral standards rather than the sin.  The response of many “conservatives” to the newly discovered Canadian patriotism of progressives resembles this in that they seem to be criticizing the progressives more for their expression of patriotism today than for their lack of it yesterday.  One even quoted Samuel Johnson’s “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”  I refer him to the comments of James Boswell, whose record of the remark is the reason we are familiar with it today, as to what it means.  Dr. Johnson was not impugning love of country, but a kind of pseudo-patriotism which interestingly enough was associated with the founding of America.

 

It can hardly be a coincidence that these same “conservatives” have been rather less than patriotic in their response to the threats from south of the border.  The founder of one “conservative” independent online media company first responded to these threats by saying they should be treated as a joke and a funny one at that. Then, when Donald the Orange said last weekend that it was no joke,  she flip-flopped and criticized Captain Airhead for having initially done exactly that and said the Anschluss threat was a joke.  In between she conducted and published an interview with an immigrant from America who twelve years ago proved herself to be exactly the kind of immigrant we don’t need when she published a book proposing the merger of our country with her country of birth. 

 

The general response to these threats in this organization’s commentary has been to treat the American dictator as a reasonable man, with legitimate grievances, who can be negotiated with and to propose an economic merger between the two countries that falls short of a political merger.  Ironically, their website is promoting a children’s book they just published on the life of Sir John A. Macdonald intended to counter the negative propaganda about the Father of Confederation that progressives have been spewing based on their skewed narrative about the Indian Residential Schools.  The book was a good and patriotic response to this blood libel of our country.  Sir John must be spinning in his grave, however, at the thought that the defence of his memory could be merged with the idea of an economic union with the United States.  Sir John spent his entire career as Prime Minister promoting internal east-west trade within the Dominion and fighting the siren call of north-south trade because he knew that this was the greatest threat to the success of the Confederation Project.

 

Free trade is a good idea from an economic perspective, but each of the “free trade” agreements we have signed with the United States has been a terrible idea from a political perspective.  The kind of economic union these “conservatives” are promoting would be worse than all of the other “free trade” agreements, since the United State is currently led by a lawless megalomaniac, who respects neither the limits placed on his powers by his country’s constitution nor the agreements he has signed and cannot be trusted to keep his own word – the “free trade” agreement he is currently, and deceitfully, claiming is so “unfair” to his country is the one he himself negotiated – and who looks at tariffs and economic measures in general as weapons to accomplish what his predecessors accomplished by bullets and bombs.  By his predecessors I do not mean previous American presidents, but Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.  I recognized that this was what we were dealing with the moment he made his first “51^st state” remark and was confirmed in this when he doubled down on this talk after Captain Airhead announced his intention to resign.  No Canadian patriot could fail to recognize it today after he has continued to escalate his lies and rhetoric and threats for the last month.   Yes, the Left’s endless likeness of everyone they don’t like to Hitler has desensitized us to these comparisons, but let us not be like the villagers in Aesop’s story about the boy who cried wolf.  This time the wolf is real. The sort of things the Left objects to in Donald the Orange, his immigration policies, his termination of the racist, anti-white, policy of DEI, do not warrant a comparison with Hitler, but his threatening us with Anschluss, his demand for Lebensraum from Denmark, his intent to take back his “Danzig Corridor” from Panama, his finding his Sudetenland in Gaza, most certainly do, as does the insane personality cult his followers have developed into.

 

Canadian conservatives ought to be leading the renaissance of Canadian patriotism, and yes, Brian Lilley, you are right that it should not have taken something like Trump’s threats to bring that renaissance about.  Liberals have always been the party of Americanization in Canada.  Sadly, today’s conservatives are mostly neoconservatives.  David Warren once said that a conservative is a Tory who has lost his religion and a neoconservative is a conservative who has lost his memory.  On the authority of Sir Walter Scott I deduce from the disgusting anti-patriotism I have seen recently that many have lost their souls as well.

Hoist With His Own Petard Yet Again

When last I had cause to borrow the famous Shakespearean line in the title of this essay and apply it to Justin Trudeau aka Captain Airhead it was in reference to the scandal known as the "Kokanee Grope." Airhead, as you may recall, had made feminism a key element of his carefully constructed personal image and accordingly had adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards "sexual harassment", insisting that when a woman makes an accusation of sexual harassment she must be believed. He mercilessly enforced this standard on his ministers and MPs and demanded that the leaders of other parties do the same. Then it was revealed that he himself, twenty years earlier, had been accused of making inappropriate sexual advances to a female reporter in British Columbia. The accusation, which had appeared in a BC newspaper within days of the incident and before Trudeau had a political career to sabotage was highly credible compared to many similar accusations that were being made against others at the same time. Although Trudeau had told the press, when he first announced his zero-tolerance policy, that he would hold himself to the same standard, when the time came for him to do so, he instead made an excuse of the sort that he would never have accepted from anyone else. He failed to hold himself to his own standard.


Neither then nor now do I accept as valid the phony standard Airhead was applying to others. It is utter foolishness to say that whenever a woman makes an accusation of sexual misbehaviour against a man she must be believed. I personally know of instances where women have made false accusations of this nature out of spite and vindictiveness and ruined someone's life. I doubt that there is anyone, with the slightest degree of experience in the real world, who, if honest, could not testify to personal knowledge of at least one such case. It is that common. Making this sort of false accusation is a feminine weapon of choice in the "war of the sexes." Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar, someone who has led an extremely sheltered existence, or a stultus damnatus. It is absolutely insane to suggest that women should always be believed when they make accusations of this sort. It is also a huge violation of a long-standing, rightly-venerated, principle of our legal and judicial system that someone accused of a crime has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a fair trial in a court of law.


Although I have no respect for Trudeau's absurd feminist standard of behaviour - and refuse to pretend otherwise - since Trudeau claimed to believe in it, and made a huge show out of believing it, and of requiring others to adhere to it, it is only right that he be held to his own standard. He ought to have been made to resign the office of Her Majesty's Canadian Prime Minister since he would have demanded the resignation of anyone else in that situation.


My response to the recent revelation of photographs and a video of Captain Airhead in blackface on three separate occasions is no different. I do not accept Justin Trudeau's progressive moral standards in which racism is ranked as the worst of all evils, nor do I accept the progressive idea of what does and does not constitute racism, and, unlike the Conservative Party, its present leader, and "conservative" commentators in the main-stream media I refuse to pretend that I do so. There is nothing inherently and necessarily insulting to the people of one race in a member of another race's dressing up like one of them and incorporating skin colour makeup into the costume. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a moron, a fool, an idiot, and just plain stupid. Perhaps next progressives will be demanding that the actress who plays Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West in Stephen Schwartz’s hit Broadway musical version of Gregory Maguire’s Wicked owes Kermit the Frog an apology for wearing “greenface.”


Progressives, in maintaining that blackface is racist, point to the history of how it was used in the old minstrel shows in the days of slavery and segregation Suppose we concede that in these cases blackface was used to mock black people, kind of like how black comedians mock white people on a daily basis, and further concede that this mockery constituted racism. Note that these concessions are offered merely for the sake of making a point for to accept the progressive judgment that the mockery of blacks by whites is racist but the mockery of whites by blacks is okay requires that we accept progressivism’s application to race relations of Marxist theories that, in their original application to economic classes, have been thoroughly disproven, and are no more valid when re-applied to other areas of life. The concessions having been granted for the sake of argument, it in no way logically follows from blackface’s having been used in the past to mock black people in a racist way that each and every use of skin-darkening cosmetics in cosplay is therefore also racist. There is no way to connect the premise with the conclusion that does not involve a huge leap of invalid inductive reasoning. I defy you to find such a way. You cannot do it because it simply cannot be done. The progressives who insist that we accept the conclusion have never really tried to make the connection. They do not rely upon reason and argumentation but rather upon a form of bullying. "Either you agree with us or you are a racist too."


My point, in saying all of this, is not that Trudeau ought to be let off the hook in this latest scandal. I may not respect progressivism’s standards pertaining to racism but Trudeau certainly claims to do so. Indeed, antiracism has been as important an element of his constructed image as feminism, and he has not only professed to respect progressivism’s standards, but demanded that everyone else do so as well. He has been extremely, ahem, liberal in throwing the epithet “racist” at his critics on the right, and his campaign for re-election has largely been built upon the laughably ridiculous suggestion that Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party is some sort of front for neo-Nazism. If these photographs and video had involved a candidate of either the Conservative or People’s Party, no apology on the part of that candidate would have been good enough for Trudeau, he would have demanded that Scheer or Bernier throw the candidate under the bus, and then, after they had done so, would have continued to throw the photographs in their faces for the duration of the election campaign. I am neither guessing nor claiming access to divine middle knowledge here – it is a simple extrapolation from how Trudeau has always behaved in the past. Trudeau, who has been merciless in his judgement of others accused of racism, deserves no mercy now that these bizarre skeletons have been emerging from his own closet. My point is that Trudeau’s hypocrisy can be condemned without giving credit to progressivism’s absurd standards and rewarding its thuggish behaviour.


It would be most helpful here if we were to consider the nature of hypocrisy. Many think that hypocrisy is the failure to live up to one’s own moral standards. Hypocrisy is more than mere moral failure, however. Nobody perfectly lives up to his own moral standards – unless he has set the bar extremely low. Hypocrisy, as the term’s etymology suggests – it is derived from the Greek word for playing a role on stage – lies not in failing to live up to one’s standards but in pretending that one does so live up to them. It is putting on a big show about how superior and virtuous you are to all others. The word could almost have been coined just to describe Justin Trudeau and his “virtue-signaling.”


It follows, from what we have just seen, that hypocrisy is worse than mere moral failure because it magnifies moral failure by adding a layer of deception. This is not the only reason hypocrisy is worse than moral failure. Hypocrisy has been described as “the tribute vice pays to virtue” but the flip side to that is that fallen human nature being what it is, hypocrisy does not just bring discredit upon the hypocrite but upon moral standards themselves. As St. Paul put it in the second chapter of his epistle to the Romans:


Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law dishonourest thou God? For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written. (vv. 23-24)


Consider the generation that brought about the Sexual Revolution, and indeed, the general Moral Revolution, after the Second World War. Their most frequent accusation against older generations was of “hypocrisy.” By making this accusation, however, it was not the failure of their parents to live up to the traditional moral standards that they had inherited and were trying to pass on that the younger generation was attacking but the standards themselves. By contrast, when Jesus Christ condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees He upheld the Mosaic moral standards that the Pharisees taught while condemning their sinful actions and self-righteous posturing: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.” (Matt. 23:2-3). For an interesting extended discussion of this contrast between these two types of “anti-hypocrisy” see Jeremy Lott’s In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue (2006).


The traditional moral standards that the aforementioned generation used the hypocrisy of previous generations to attack were sound moral standards. They were for the most part the basic standards of Christendom, the rules which Christians and Jews both believe were handed down by God Himself at Mt. Sinai and which Christians believe were most fully explained in the teachings of Jesus Christ. In the teachings of Christianity these standards have the weight of divine authority behind them. They also – at least the commandments governing human interaction such as “thou shalt do no murder”, “thou shalt not commit adultery” and “thou shalt not steal” – are standards which in one form or another, have been a part of most if not all, moral codes in every society throughout human history. They also, therefore, carry the additional weight of a natural, moral, law testified to by near universal human recognition.


The progressive standards that Trudeau has been preaching in the most obnoxious way possible are not like this. “Thou shalt not be racist”, “thou shalt not be sexist”, “thou shalt not be homophobic”, etc. do not have the weight of divine authority. Nor do they, having been newly thought up within the last century, carry the weight of a natural law to which all human societies universally testify. Indeed, the exact opposite is the case. All human societies have historically promoted in-group loyalty, it being somewhat necessary for the cohesion apart from which no society could function. No human society has historically treated outsiders as having an equal claim on the benefits of membership with actual members and would have regarded anyone who suggested that they ought to be treated that way as being crazy.


The acceptance of progressivism’s new moral standards requires the belief that we have undergone some sort of massive, collective, quantum leap forward in moral understanding, starting about seven decades ago. Considering that these same decades have seen the desire to bring future generations into our world decrease dramatically, as indicated by decreasing fertility rates and the demand for contraceptive technology and abortion, the desire to leave this world increase, as indicated by rising suicide rates and the demand for euthanasia, and a huge increase in the use of substances that either induce an artificial euphoria or numb the senses as well as countless other ways of escaping reality, this seems highly unlikely. Leaving aside the consideration of these things as moral issues in their own right, collectively, they are all indicative of a major drop in happiness, which has been recognized since ancient times as the end to which morality is the means. This is hardly consistent with what would be expected from a quantum leap forward in moral thinking. The evidence rather suggests that we have been in a period of serious moral decay.


The progressive new morality is a poor substitute for the old, traditional, morality and not only because of its novelty and artificiality or for the reasons given in the last paragraph. The old rules – “thou shalt do no murder”, “thou shalt not commit adultery”, “thou shalt not steal”, etc. – forbade actions, specific actions, and were clear and unambiguous. While Jesus Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, taught that these commandments also forbid certain internal thoughts and attitudes, His point was that divine judgement is deeper and more thorough than human judgement. “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” (1 Sam. 16:7). Furthermore, to apply God’s commandments to the heart in the way of which He spoke simply means that when the commandment tells you that a particular act is wrong, it is as wrong to commit that act in your imagination as it is to commit it in actual deed. Anyone who knows the literal meaning of sins such as “adultery” and “murder”, can easily grasp what it means to commit these sins in one’s thoughts.


The exact opposite is the case for the progressive new morality. The sins this new morality prohibits – racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like, are first and foremost, thoughts and attitudes of the heart and mind. They are thought crimes. Since they cannot be seen by other human beings except through words and actions, they must be translated into rules governing words and actions. To make the prohibition of a thought crime your starting point, however, and from there extrapolate applications to words and deeds, is to give yourself license to forbid almost anything. In the 1960s the list of things considered to be “racist” was short, and the most prominent items on the list were various laws and other state policies believed to be unjust. Today, the list of things considered to be “racist” is encyclopedic in length, and the most prominent items are personal acts which, if they hurt others, hurt only their feelings. This is why totalitarian governments love to create thought crimes. This is why the prohibition of thought crime is bad morality.


Now, if someone is shown to be a hypocrite is his hypocrisy meliorated or worsened by the worthlessness of the moral standard he has violated?


The answer is that it is worsened. If that seems counterintuitive, remember the first point we made about hypocrisy – that it is not the same as mere moral failure. Mere moral failure may be meliorated if the standard one fails to live up to is not worth living up to in the first place. This is not true of hypocrisy because hypocrisy, the boasting of virtue one does not possess, the bald-faced contradiction of one’s projected image of oneself by one’s personal behaviour, is a composite evil that adds other layers of badness to moral failure, to which the badness of the professed moral standard becomes yet another layer. This is all the more true in this case because the bad moral standard in question exists for the very purpose of enabling progressives to get all puffed up over how much more morally enlightened they are than not only all living non-progressives but all past generations as well. In other words it exists to generate hypocrisy like that of Justin Trudeau.


It was refreshing last Wednesday and Thursday, to watch Captain Airhead finally make an apology for something he had done himself. He had avoided doing so in the Kokanee Grope scandal last year, and refused to do so in the SNC Lavalin scandal earlier this year. He much prefers to offer apologies on behalf of the country collectively for things done by previous generations, usually for things that don’t warrant an apology and to people who do not deserve one. The fact that he did not immediately resign his office and his leadership of the Liberal Party, withdraw from the election, and basically pay the same price he would have demanded of any of his subordinates in the same position, shows, however, that these apologies were as fake as any of the others and therefore, themselves, just further examples of his hypocrisy. When, on Friday morning, he gave a press conference in a desperate attempt to change the conversation, and announced his plan to fight gun crimes in Canada by banning weapons that have been used in high profile mass shootings elsewhere in the world but have not played a significant role in domestic gun violence, he came across as being as smug and self-righteous as ever.


Trudeau’s re-election campaign had, up to this point, largely consisted of throwing accusations of racism and white supremacy against the Conservatives. It is understandable, therefore, and was perhaps inevitable, that the response of the Conservative Party and small-c conservative commentators in the mainstream media to this scandal and the revelation of Trudeau’s hypocrisy could mostly be summarized in the words “Trudeau is bad because he is the real racist.” I firmly believe it to be a mistake to condemn Trudeau in such a way as to affirm the false progressive morality he preaches. The response of Maxime Bernier was the appropriate one. “I am not going to accuse @Justin Trudeau of being a racist”, the leader of the right-populist People’s Party tweeted out, “But he’s the master of identity politics and the Libs just spent months accusing everyone of being white supremacists. He definitely is the biggest hypocrite in the country.”


Quite right. For that reason, and for many others that need no further enumeration here, Trudeau is unfit for the position of Her Majesty’s Prime Minister in Canada. In the spirit of Evelyn Waugh let me add, that if the Liberals, who have been rallying behind the filius canis who is their disgraced leader, get elected again, the bulk of the populace of this, our fair Dominion, will have proven that they do not deserve the right to participate in the selection of Her Majesty’s Ministers.

Sin and Hypocrisy

Modern, progressive, thought is fundamentally and diametrically opposed to the doctrine of original sin. The most basic element of progressive thought is the idea that human evil and suffering is caused, not by a flaw in human nature, but by flaws in the organization of society, and that by correcting these flaws, man can build for himself Paradise upon earth. The doctrine of original sin, on the other hand, teaches that man is a fallen being, that the evils he commits and suffers arise out of his own flawed nature, and that he cannot break his own exile from Paradise but must trust in the grace and mercy of God. These two ideas are mutually incompatible and it is the latter, the doctrine of orthodox Christianity and an essential component of conservative thought, which most accurately describes man as he is in the world as it is.

The doctrine of original sin is predicated of man as a collective being. (1) It is the collective sin of our race, in which we each have an equal share. It is the same for any one person as it is for the next. Personal sin, on the other hand, refers to the sins which we each commit as individual persons. While one of the implications of original sin, is that each of us is guilty of personal sin, personal sin differs from person to person and is never exactly the same for any two individual people. Your personal sins are the sins which you have committed and for which you are accountable, whereas mine are the sins which I have committed and for which I am accountable.

If original sin is the realistic rain on the utopian parade of progressivism, personal sin is not exactly a popular concept with modern thought either. It is not that modern people think of themselves as perfect. That is far from being the case. “I’m not perfect” or “nobody’s perfect” are phrases that can be found on virtually everybody’s lips from time to time. Modern people do not like to think of their flaws and failings in terms of sin, however. In part this is because sin is a word with religious associations which seem antiquated to the modern secular mind. It is also because the word sin suggests the idea that one is responsible for one’s actions, and therefore guilty of one’s wrongdoing, for which one can and will be held accountable.

To be fair to modern man, these have never been popular ideas, at least when applied to one’s own self. Consider the words of Adam and Eve in response to God’s questioning in the Garden after the fall in the third chapter of Genesis. However one reads these chapters, literally or figuratively, the point is clearly there that passing the buck is as old as sin.

That having been said, sin is clearly one of those concepts that modern man considers himself too advanced to believe in anymore. Forty years ago a book was published that asked the question “Whatever Became of Sin?” (2) The author was Dr. Karl Menninger, a renowned psychiatrist and the co-founder with his father and brother, of the famous psychiatric clinic and foundation that bear their family name. According to Dr. Menninger, the concept of sin has been on the wane, first because as the modern state developed assuming much of the functions previously performed by the church, much socially undesirable behaviour was moved from the category of sin into the category of crime, and second because with the development of modern medical science, and particularly psychiatry, sinful behaviour has been further reclassified into the category of disease and its symptoms. Another factor he identified was the development of modern ways of regarding society as being collectively responsible for the erring actions of individuals.

Menninger did not see all of these developments as being entirely or even mostly negative – except perhaps the evolution of the modern state of which he wrote with an almost anarchist, individualist contempt. He nevertheless made the case that we still needed the concept of sin. Indeed, he wrote that it was “the only hopeful view.” (3) His reasoning was that since the world was still full of evil, we need the concept of sin, which allows responsibility for evil to be assigned but which also offers the possibilities of repentance, atonement, grace and forgiveness, to retain our sanity.

If the concept of sin has gone out of fashion as a way of thinking about and describing human behaviour that is undesirable and wrong, the same cannot be said of the concept of hypocrisy. The words hypocrisy and hypocrite are doing very well indeed, especially as terms of abuse for those who still hold to the old-fashioned ideas of sin and righteousness.

Hypocrisy is a charge which secular society and unbelievers like to throw against the Christian church and against Christian believers, perhaps without full comprehension of what it is that they are accusing Christians and the church. Often it seems as if those leveling the charge seem to think that the definition of a hypocrite is “a religious person who commits a sin.” This is not what the word means at all.

Hypocrisy was originally a Greek word. It was formed by adding the prefix hypo, which means under, to the verb krino, which means to separate, decide, distinguish or pass judgement. In the old Ionic dialect used by Homer, this compound originally meant to reply or to give an answer. In the later Attic dialect however, i.e., that spoken in Athens at the height of its classical civilization in the period before, during, and just after the Peloponnesian War, the word had been adopted as a technical term for use in the theatre. In this period, when Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were writing their great tragedies for the Athenian stage, the word hypocrisis referred to the work of actors in performing these plays. This usage evolved from the original meaning of the word because it literally described what an actor was doing in the play’s dialogue – answering or replying to the other speakers.

In English, we do not speak of the performing of a role on stage as hypocrisy, nor do we speak of the performers as hypocrites. Instead we use the words acting and actor to describe these things. The meaning of our English word hypocrisy is a metaphorical extension of the idea of acting. An actor is someone who pretends to be someone he is not, the character he is assigned in the play in which he is performing. A hypocrite is also someone who plays a role. He is someone who pretends to be more righteous or virtuous than he actually is. This is what Jesus Christ meant when He denounced the scribes and Pharisees, calling them hypocrites. Christ may not have been the first to use the word in this way but it is through His use that it became the word’s primary meaning.

If hypocrisy is putting on an act of being more righteous than you actually are is secular society’s charge that the church is full of hypocrisy accurate?

Sadly, it often is. Individual Christians and the organized church are frequently guilty of hiding their sins and putting on a front of righteousness. That such would be the case is indirectly suggested by the words of Jesus Himself. He would hardly have gone to such lengths to warn His disciples against the leaven of the scribes and Pharisees if He did not think them susceptible to that leaven. Where the charge falls short of hitting its mark is in the unspoken assumption that there is less hypocrisy outside the church than there is inside it.

In my first semester at Providence College there was a class that if I remember correctly was mandatory for all freshmen that was kind of an introductory course to apologetics and evangelism. Part of the course dealt with common excuses given for rejecting the gospel. When our professor, Stan Hamm, asked us how we would respond to someone who says “the church is full of hypocrites”, I blurted out “there is always room for more!”

While I had obviously said that as a wiseass remark, it does actually answer the excuse in a way. Hypocrisy, the pretence of being a better person than one actually is, is a ubiquitous trait of humanity, not just of the religious and it is often best exemplified by those who use the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse to avoid believing the gospel themselves. Indeed, in using the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse for not joining it, one is implicitly claiming to be non-hypocritical, to be completely transparent, open, and honest, which is itself almost certainly a pretence, and therefore, arguably the ultimate form of hypocrisy, being a hypocrite about not being a hypocrite.

In fact, an argument can be made that there is far less hypocrisy within the church than there is outside it. Those who level accusations of hypocrisy against the church when Christians are caught in sin often seem to assume that Christians purport to be sinlessly perfect and demand that others be as well. Yet the very opposite is the case. By the terms of orthodox Christian doctrine, one cannot be a Christian without confessing oneself to be a sinner.

Think about it. A popular method of sharing the gospel, among North American evangelicals, presents the way of salvation as the ABCs of Christianity. While this is not a sterling example of Christian orthodoxy – it distorts the gospel by presenting it as a series of steps that you have to follow in order to obtain salvation rather than a message of good news about how God has given us salvation in Jesus Christ – the A, in the ABCs, always stands for admitting that you are a sinner. (4)

In more traditional Protestant theology, divine revelation is regarded as being divided into two messages, Law and Gospel. The Law tells us what God demands of us, the Gospel tells us what God in His grace has done for us in Jesus Christ. The practical function of the Law is to show us our need for the Gospel – to show us that we are sinners, who cannot meet God’s righteous demands, and must therefore trust in the salvation God has provided in Christ.

In liturgical churches, a general confession and absolution of sin is made every time the Mass is celebrated. In the traditional order of the Latin Mass this was the very first thing that was done after the asperges, before even the introit. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer it is the first part of the eucharistic liturgy following the readings and the sermon. A general confession of sin is also made in the liturgy of the divine office and the private confession and absolution of specific sins is also encouraged by many churches, most obviously the Roman.

Christianity, in other words, is all about acknowledging one’s sins and trusting in God’s forgiveness. To the extent, therefore, that a person believes in and practices this religion of confession of sin and reception of divine forgiveness through faith, he is likely to be less of hypocrite rather than more of one.

Hypocrisy, let me reiterate, is more than just falling short of the moral standards one believes in or which are taught by the religion to which one belongs. The word that best describes that is actually the word with the discussion of which we began this essay, i.e., sin. (5) That confession of sin is one of the most fundamental elements of Christianity is the best answer to the charge that the Christian church is uniquely hypocritical, for hypocrisy is pretending to a righteousness one does not possess, a universal human trait that is lessened, somewhat, by Christianity’s requirement that one confess one’s sins.

To be fair, those to whom hypocrisy is the first thing that comes to mind when the church is mentioned could respond to the preceding argument by saying that it is the preachy attitude of the church combined with the sins of its members that they consider to be hypocritical. A response like this could be a legitimate complaint about the manner in which Christian moral truths are sometimes presented. It could also be a complaint that would be made regardless of the manner in which the message is presented because of a notion that as long as the church and its members are themselves imperfect people they have no right to proclaim moral truths.

If, however, imperfect people and institutions are disqualified from preaching moral truths, then nobody is left to preach them. Imperfect preachers are the only kind available. About twenty years ago I read a book, lent to me by my pastor at the time, in which the author made this point in a way that I have never forgotten. The author, Dr. R. C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries, wrote:

No minister is worthy of his calling. Every preacher is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, the more faithful a preacher is to the Word of God in his preaching, the more liable he is to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful a man is to the Word of God, the higher the message is that he will preach. The higher the message, the further he will be from obeying it himself. (6)

Dr. Sproul is a well-known Reformed theologian, that is, a Calvinist. Calvinism, like all human attempts at understanding God, has its strengths and weaknesses. The holiness of God, that which sets Him above and apart from sinful man, which makes His grace amazing indeed, is one of the areas in which Calvinism tends to be strong and this was the subject of the book. This paragraph about the imperfection of preachers, and how the better they are at doing their job, the further they themselves are from that which they preach, comes at the end of a chapter based upon the propher Isaiah’s experience in the sixth chapter of the book bearing his name. Summoned into the presence of God, He declared God to be thrice holy, and himself to be undone. Yet, when God asked who would go and speak His message, the man of “unclean lips” volunteered and God accepted his service.

A few years ago I ran across another book whose author tackled the question of which is preferable, an imperfect testimony to moral truth or no testimony at all, and argued for the former. Among the points Jeremy Lott made in the provocatively titled In Defense of Hypocrisy, were that accusations of hypocrisy are often also examples of it, that many things that we would probably classify as examples of hypocrisy don’t actually meet the criteria for inclusion in that category, and that other things which are hypocrisies we are actually better off with than without. Examples of the latter would be the variations on “looking the other way” that are necessary for unwritten rules to work. In his sixth chapter, he made a compelling case for the idea that society is far more tolerable when unwritten rules – which often contradict the written rules, hence the need for the hypocrisy – are in operation, than when everything is done strictly by the book.

What I found to be the most interesting argument in the book, however, was an argument in the fourth chapter about religious hypocrisy, in which Lott traced the antihypocrisy movement back to its Founder, Who was, of course, also the Founder of the institution most often accused of hypocrisy. If the church has often been guilty of distorting Christ’s message and failing abysmally to follow His teachings – and, being composed of sinful human beings, of course, it has – the antihypocrisy movement has not done any better. Indeed, it has inverted His condemnation of hypocrisy. Whereas Jesus condemned the Pharisees for not living up to the standards of the Mosaic Law they preached, contemporary antihypocrites condemn the preaching of moral standards that one cannot live up to. Or as Lott put it “the bone that he couldn’t swallow was that they were far too self-serving in their reading, not necessarily that they were too demanding”. (7)

To make his point, he asked a fascinating “what if” question:

If the teachers of the law had ceased to teach and the priests had locked up the temple, would the preacher from Nazareth have said, Well, at least they aren’t being hypocrites? Not unless he suddenly decided to depart from the tone and tenor of everything he’d ever said in public. The Jesus of the Gospels would have raged against them twice as hard for abandoning even the trappings of religion. (8)

This reasoning seems iron-clad to me, especially when one considers that Jesus, while condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, told His listeners they still had to respect their authority and obey the Law they taught (Matthew 23:2-3).

The contemporary antihypocrites, whose objection is to the preaching of moral standards rather than the failing to live up to them, would presumably not look askance at the disappearance of the concept of sin. If, however, Dr. Menninger was correct in regarding the concept of sin as the only way of thinking about evil in the world that provides us with hope, and if Jeremy Lott is correct in arguing that some kinds of hypocrisy actually make society more tolerable, we have good reason to regard the moral thinking of today as being greatly inferior to that of about seventy years ago. Perhaps it is time we turn back the clock.

(1) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2013/09/original-sin-and-free-will.html

(2) Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became Of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973).

(3) Ibid., p. 188.

(4) The B is for believe, but the C varies, in some versions being call upon the Lord, in others confess Christ, in yet others commit yourself to Christ.

(5) The technical term for the study of the concept of sin is hamartiology. This comes from the most basic Greek word for sin, hamartia. Its verbal cognate, hamartano was the word the Greeks used for falling short of your target when throwing a spear, and thus by extension, failing to meet your goals.

(6) R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1985, 1993), p. 50.

(7) Jeremy Lott, In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue (Nashville: Nelson Current, 2006) p. 108.

(8) Ibid. Bold indicates italics in original.