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Hypocrisy and Sin

A Recap … In Case You've Been Vacationing on Pluto or Something

It's been a couple of weeks since Ted Haggard, then pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs and President of the National Association of Evangelicals, was accused of having a three-year relationship with "male escort" Mike Jones. When Jones discovered the identity of the man he'd formerly known only as "Art," he was offended by the inconsistency of Ted's condemning homosexuality from the pulpit and supporting the Colorado Marriage Amendment, yet participating in homosexual acts. So he went public.

The fallout from his decision has been widespread, and it has been thoroughly analyzed by the media, the Christian community and the homosexual community. So, by writing this article, I recognize that I am in danger of beating a horse that's already plenty dead, but that's not my aim. Rather than dredging up Ted's past one more time, I want to explore an issue raised by the dredging that's already been done.

I want to talk about hypocrisy.

What is Hypocrisy?

Webster tells us that hypocrisy is pretending to be something you're not. Or pretending to believe something you don't. Ted Haggard got accused of it. Christians get accused of it all the time. Sometimes I think those accusations are warranted, and sometimes I think they're not. Here's why:

The world thinks that Christians are saying, "I'm perfect, because I follow all the rules, and you need to be like me." And maybe some of us are saying that, but we shouldn't be. Christians are not perfect, and we'd have to have our heads buried pretty deep in the sand to deny that. What we're actually saying (or should be saying) is, "None of us is perfect, and Jesus is the only remedy for our spiritual sickness. I need Him as much as you do."

The difference is significant. If we take the first attitude, then of course the world feels unfairly judged by us. And unbelievers can rightly accuse us of being hypocrites when we fail to live up to our own standards. But when we have the second attitude, we are making Christ — not ourselves — the standard for goodness. And the wonderful news is that, though we all fail to measure up, He has already solved our spiritual problem by making up for what we lack through His death on the cross. It's not hypocrisy to admit we're broken and we need Him.

Hypocrisy is a terrible and dangerous thing, because it makes people miss the point of Christ's sacrifice and our faith in Him. Jesus spent a whole chapter in Matthew chastising the Pharisees for their hypocrisy because they were reducing the Kingdom of God to a list of picky statutes that came nowhere near God's heart. And though they were experts at guilting others into following these rules, they didn't live up to their own standards.¹

Where Hypocrisy Lives

We can tell from Jesus' words that hypocrisy goes hand-in-hand with legalism. For some reason, when we take God's good law, add to it our own minutia, and then appoint ourselves judges of whether others are sufficiently toeing the line, it always turns us into hypocrites. And just like the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, our hypocrisy skews the focus of the gospel. Instead of showing people how much we all need God, it makes them feel like they have to be perfect in order to come to God. Most people think, If that's the case, why bother?

And honestly, doesn't that feel like what happens on the playground in elementary school? This is my club. I made up the rules. If you don't follow the rules, you can't be in my club. Oh, and by the way, I can add more rules anytime I want. If I was on the outside looking in at Christianity and that's what I saw, I wouldn't want any part of it either.

But I don't think that's what's going on every time Christians are accused of hypocrisy. And I don't think it's the main point of the Ted Haggard story either. Please allow me to explain …

More to the Story

First, let me say that I'm not writing this to acquit Ted Haggard. If you argue that Ted allowed (or led) people to believe he was something that he wasn't, I won't shoot you down. I just think that slapping the label hypocrite on him doesn't account for a lot of what was going on spiritually in his life.

For example, in his letter to the New Life congregation,² Ted describes his struggle with temptation:

There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life. For extended periods of time, I would enjoy victory and rejoice in freedom. Then, from time to time, the dirt that I thought was gone would resurface, and I would find myself thinking thoughts and experiencing desires that were contrary to everything I believe and teach. Through the years, I've sought assistance in a variety of ways, with none of them proving to be effective in me.

Acknowledging a struggle and seeking assistance aren't typically the marks of someone who's pretending to be something he's not. Nor are they the marks of someone who is preaching what he doesn't believe. They are the marks of someone who is being honest about his own spiritual shortfall. The fact that New Life Church had an effective system for accountability and discipline set up before the crisis occurred also tells me that Haggard and his staff were pretty sober about the potential for any of us to fall into sin. They knew that even Christian leaders are fallible and sometimes need to be removed from positions of authority because of moral failure, and they made provision for that.

So why are people quick to call Ted a hypocrite and leave it at that? Though some may be trying to make an honest assessment of the issue, I think others are using the hypocrite brand as a spiritual cop-out. And that bothers me.

Judgment is a Bad Word

I submit that some of the people who are calling Ted a hypocrite just want to be able to condemn him without being implicated for their own sin. You see, if his only wrong was telling other people that there is a moral standard and then violating that standard himself, it's pretty easy for the rest of us to get off the hook. All we have to do is avoid telling others what to do, and then we can do anything we want.

But if the moral standard isn't something we made up — if it is objective and independent of humans — then we're all bound by it. And we can't condemn someone else without carefully examining our own lives first.³

In short, it's a lot more comfortable to call someone a hypocrite than to bare our own sinful lives before a perfect and holy God. If we're tempted to call Ted Haggard a hypocrite, we should examine our motives for doing so.

When I Point at Someone Else, There are Three Fingers Pointing Back at Me

My reason for digging deeper into this mess is just what I said before: If this is a broader sin problem — rather than simply a hypocrisy problem — then we're all either just as guilty or just as vulnerable as Ted. So it matters how we address his sin, because it says something about how we'll handle our own.

The first two right responses to sin are obvious, but worth mentioning because Ted and New Life have done an exemplary job of them: repentance and forgiveness. After his initial backpedaling before reporters, Ted really owned his sin. Read his letter to the congregation — he's not salacious, but he leaves no doubt that he was wrong, that his sin had serious consequences, and that he needs God's help to change. And I think the leadership and membership of New Life Church have done a great job at expressing forgiveness — not only toward Ted, but toward his accuser. In fact, they've done such a good job that I think they surprised the media, which is pretty hard to do.

An Ounce of Prevention

The other response we ought to have to our sin is confession. This is something that Ted didn't handle so successfully. If he had, he could have prevented the crisis that has played out in Colorado Springs this month. I don't mean confession as in going into a booth with a priest and listing your sins, although that may serve the purpose. I mean regularly letting someone else into the dark corners of your life.

Not that I think Ted should have been sharing the details of his dirt with his congregation each Sunday. But he should have been sharing those details with someone.⁴ Perhaps if he had, the simple act of bringing his sin into the light would have helped him to conquer it. Or maybe not. At the very least, regular confession to someone who had authority and influence in his life could have prevented him from continuing to lead New Life Church while his sin festered. It could have prevented his sin from hurting so many people so deeply.

And there's another layer here. For confession to be productive it means not just being honest, but also being vulnerable.

In his sermons, Ted told people the truth about the human need for grace. He didn't pretend he was exempt from that neediness. But he wasn't vulnerable enough to let people really see grace at work in his weakness. He didn't pretend to be perfect, but I'm sure that many who were watching him thought that he was nearly perfect — and that they could never attain his level of goodness.⁵

And here, I have to stop talking about Ted Haggard and start talking about myself, because I am just as guilty as he is. I can talk meaningfully about God's forgiveness, but unless I am willing to humble myself and ask others to forgive me when I fail them, forgiveness may never become more than a theory to them. Unless I'm willing to get real about my own sin — in very concrete terms — then I end up having the same effect on unbelievers as the Pharisees did in their day. I make people feel that they could never attain the perfection required of Christians, and that they shouldn't even bother. Which is the last thing I want to do.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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What does it take for us to avoid hypocrisy and sin in our own lives?

Join the discussion!

Letting this truth take hold in my life is scary, because it means letting down my guard and letting people see me as I really am — sinful. But if it makes God's grace real to another person, I think it's worth it.