In Praise of Honest Hypocrisy

Why knowing that we are frauds might just save moral discourse

The Hypocrite’s Dilemma

Not long ago, the famous televangelist and preacher Jimmy Swaggert died. I say famous, but I should really say ‘notorious’. Swaggert was amongst the most well-known and well-paid of preachers in the 1970s and 80s. In 1986, he very publicly accused his fellow pastor Martin Gorman of having affairs.

Yet Swaggert was himself subsequently embroiled in a sex scandal involving prostitutes. He wept dramatically and profusely on his television show, wailing ‘I have sinned’, without ever being specific about what the sin was. He was defrocked by the Assemblies of God over his behaviour, but continued an independent ministry to the end of his days. In 1991, there was a second scandal involving a prostitute and Swaggert.

There are few sins that we disdain more than hypocrisy, as a general rule. One can’t help feeling appalled by men like Swaggert, not just because they slept with someone who wasn’t their wife, but because they made a fortune out of telling other people not to do this. His shtick was finger-wagging moral uprightness, but he was caught in the swill. Just as you can’t help feeling disgust at his behaviour, it is hard not to feel a sense of schadenfreude at his public fall.

We generally don’t mind people having their own moral standards, so long as they are consistent with them. Picking up women for paid sex isn’t the issue. Whether that’s right or wrong is up to you, by and large (we say). The deepest sin is not being true to your standards. The climate change activist who is discovered to be jet-setting all over the world. The anti-drugs campaigner who has something in their system. The Prime Minister who imposes COVID-19 rules and then happily breaks them.

Hypocrisy is repugnant. It’s simply wrong to say one thing and then do another, and we are right to despise it. But I want to argue here that it is also unavoidable. We can so loathe hypocrisy and so prize authenticity that we are left unable to say anything about right or wrong at all. If I am found to be breaking the moral code I preach, what then? Fear will drive me to silence. Or perhaps to cynicism. Can anyone ever sincerely say anything about what is right or wrong without exposing themselves to the same judgment?

Playing the part

The Greek word hypokrisis originally meant simply ‘playing a part’ or ‘a performance’ - something an actor might do. It was not a morally loaded term. The Greeks certainly had an awareness of - and a distaste for - what we now call ‘hypocrisy’, but that was not the word they used for it. The association of hypokrisis with ‘mere’ performance came about because of the low esteem in which the acting profession was held. A politician might be accused of being a ‘performer’, rather than the real deal.

By the time we get to the New Testament, a hypocrites is a person who only seems to be upright. They perform morality, perhaps, but only for the accolades. The term is at the centre of Jesus’ critique of the religious attitudes of the day. Hypocrites do their good works before men; Jesus tells his disciples to do their good works in secret, before God alone. He calls on us to remove the logs from our own eyes before calling attention to the specks in the eyes of others. The Pharisees undertake overly fussy moral and spiritual performance, but they overlook the real demands of justice and righteousness.

Hypocrisy as the Ultimate Vice

Jesus’ sharp words still resonate - and even more so in a world in which we’ve become highly attuned to any hint of hypocrisy. The stridency of the left in recent times has something to do with this. In the new religion of progressive politics, there is a puritanical strain that resembles the way more conservative communities once operated. Moral certainty about (say) the environment or about minority identities or about who has or hasn’t got a claim to rights has become more and more vehement. That is not to say anything about those issues per se, but only to notice that, along with moral certainty and earnestness, comes the risk that you will be discovered to be a hypocrite.

The louder you preach your message, the more likely your hypocrisy will be exposed - somehow, sometime.

It is not surprising that, in a culture where moral absolutism is common, we have developed the phenomenon of ‘virtue signalling’ (or rather, we’ve developed a new term for a practice that is as old as humankind). To say a gesture or a form of words is virtue signalling is to question its sincerity. It is a form of hypocrisy, that is to say. The signal is intended to demonstrate adherence to a moral position that confers the signaller with a credential as morally upright. But the suspicion is that it is only a signal.

To take one example, the practice of opening any speech, ceremony, seminar or programme with an acknowledgement of country (or even placing this at the bottom of an email template) is a gesture that costs very little but displays nothing about a person’s actual commitment to indigenous rights. Especially after Australians refused to vote for the Voice to Parliament in the Referendum of 2023, the ritual often feels more like a bid for moral approval from the non-indigenous community than it does an actual gesture of respect.

The corporate endorsement of causes is another example of moral behaviour that feels like a performance. It would be one thing for an airline to loudly proclaim its LGBTQI+ credentials. But for it to continue to do business in the Arab world with entities that were not exactly exemplary on human rights would seem like a double standard. What’s more, it then casts suspicion on the sincerity of all the rainbow-swooshing. If you believed in your position, wouldn’t you hold it when it cost you? Can we really believe in corporate virtue when the profit motive is never far away?

Honest hypocrisy?

The authentic moral position - and I would say the only wise one - is to embrace our hypocrisy honestly. This is because any moral vision worth having exceeds our practice. We are fundamentally moral beings. But at the same time, we are also moral failures. Of course, I would argue that we are made this way by a creator who has a personal, and thus moral, character. God is good, and calls us to be like him.

But I think an entirely secular argument could be made to the same point. We are moral because that’s what keeps us in community. As social beings, we need a moral sense because we need to know how to live with one another practically and peaceably. Morality helps us survive.

However, we also live with divided wills. We have the strange sense of being pulled in more than one direction by ourselves. We are not merely creatures of instinct. We have instincts, but also have reason and the faculty we might call a ‘conscience’. There is something given to us in the gift of self-consciousness that makes it so. We can conduct an inner dialogue between our different selves - or at least, that is the way it feels.

This is the brilliant anthropological insight of St Paul in Romans 7 - a passage that attracted novelist Saul Bellow in his novel Henderson the Rain King. ‘The good I would do I do not do’, writes Paul, ‘and that I would not do - this I do!’ The German reformer Martin Luther spoke of ‘the incurvature of the self’ as the essence of sin: the self turned in on itself. It is an inward war.

I know this sense of inner doubleness well. I know it is right to be generous, but I am stingy. I know that it is right to treat others equally, but I confess that I know the misogyny and racism of my heart. I struggle to be patient, or to not have contempt for others. I know that it is right to care about the earth, but I mostly care about my own convenience and comfort. I know how right it is to forgive, but I nurse my wounds and grievances. I hate snobbishness, yet I am a snob. I hate pettiness in others, yet I find pettiness in myself. The more I try to be good, the less I am convinced that I am. As CS Lewis says, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good”.

The Gift of Knowing You’re a Hypocrite

But knowing that you’re a hypocrite is a kind of gift. It makes it possible for us to talk about right and wrong - which we must do - without claiming that we are always in the right (or ever in it). We can acknowledge the human struggle to find the right course of action and to stick to it, even as we say what we are convinced is right.

The crucial difference here is our awareness of our hypocrisy. Knowing our moral frailty shouldn’t silence us. But it will change the tone. There’s truth in confessing, ‘I too fall short, but this matters.’ I don’t have to feign moral superiority. I can switch from condemnation to empathic support for those who have failed.

It is a story told of the English martyr John Bradford that when he saw a criminal being led to the chopping block, he cried out, ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford’. Bradford was well-known for his saintly character. But he could observe the condemned criminal from no sense of moral higher ground, even as he might condemn their behaviour.

Whether the story is true or not, it illustrates the point well. Moral humility, which should come from an honest self-reflection, allows us no point for self-righteousness. We aren’t better than other people. We may not do what they do, but we don’t get to count ourselves righteous because they are not. We do not get to give ourselves a moral tick, just because we feel good about ourselves. The only way that is possible is by lowering our moral standards. Anyone can get over a low-enough bar.

I was once on a radio panel with a self-proclaimed ‘ethicist’. The conversation came around to the fate of those convicted of child abuse. The ethicist said that child abusers were sub-human, such was the horror of their crimes. My response was not in any way to lessen the horror. On the contrary, we need to face the terrifying truth that we share humanity even with the child abuser. We cannot discard him from the human race. We have to face the reality that such a person is one of us. And really, could we confidently say that, given the same experience of life, we wouldn’t become what he has become?

That thought is not the same as saying ‘every perpetrator is a victim of their circumstances’. Neither is it simply saying that our behaviour is determined for us by forces that lie deep in the mists of time. I think that kind of fatalism is irresponsible cleverness, at best an intellectual trick to play on undergraduates. Maybe free will is an illusion, but it is the illusion with which we have to deal - in taking responsibility for our decisions and in holding others accountable.

Rather, the point of humanising the perpetrators of terrible crimes, even as they dehumanise their victims, is to remember the barbarity of which we are all capable, no matter how civilised we are. As the scholar George Steiner once wrote:

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

If I speak out, then, against genocide, I do not do so because I would never participate in such a thing, but exactly because I fear that I would.

Hypocrisy Is Human—But Not the Last Word

GK Chesterton once famously respond for a request to write an essay entitled ‘What’s wrong with the world?’ with two words:

I am.

That response has the humility to start with the world in me rather than the world. If I am to protest at injustice, I must protest first against my own injustice. We speak the truth not because we are righteous but because the truth is. We have no other place to stand. Otherwise, silence is the best policy.

But all is not lost, even for hypocrites. Divine grace is offered not just to the tax collector but to the Pharisee who realises his mistake. If we can reckon with our hypocrisy honestly, then we are not far from the Kingdom of God.