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That's where we find the antidote to religious hypocrisy. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Skypod brought to you by Holy Post Media. Earlier today, I was downtown Chicago to speak at the Chicago Fellowship. For those of you who don't know, I've been a part of a ministry called Chicago Fellowship for a number of years now, and I speak about once a month on Thursday mornings. You know what? I should just actually give a plug for Chicago Fellowship. So it's a ministry that's been around for a couple of decades, and it gathers together men from throughout the Chicago area, marketplace leaders, ministry leaders, young guys, older guys, bunch of us. And on Thursday mornings, we meet at a restaurant on Wacker Drive. It's in the city and 7:30 in the morning, so it's pretty early. And there's a number of speakers that contribute to the content of Chicago Fellowship. I'm one of them. Roughly once a month, and it's a talk, but also a lot of time around tables for discussion and gathering and building friendships and mentoring relationships. And it's a wonderful thing. I didn't start there as a speaker, I start just as an attender, but over the years grew more involved and now I'm a regular contributor to the thing. And we also have people online, by the way, who zoom in because they're not working in the city or they're elsewhere in the suburbs. And now we have people around the country that do this. So all that to say, if you want to know more about Chicago fellowship, go to chicagofellowship.com you can get past talks there, learn more about what we're doing, other things going on besides Thursday morning gatherings. But if you're in the area and interested in joining us, we'd love to have you or you're welcome to zoom in. I was down there this morning because it's Thursday and I was speaking. And the intent was originally that the talk I gave this morning at Chicago Fellowship would be recorded. And we were going to use that for the Sky Pot episode for today. And we had a bunch of audio issues. It was in and out. It was ugly, messy. We need to fix that. But it was fine for the people in the room. It wasn't great for recording it and using it for this episode. So I. I am instead sitting down in the studio at Holy Post Media to talk through the same ideas that I discussed this morning at Chicago Fellowship. But it did give me a chance to introduce all of you to Chicago Fellowship, and I hope you will engage with us. So here's what my talk was on this morning. And I thought this would make for a good conversation with all of you and a decent skydive where I go deep on a particular topic. I want to talk about hypocrisy. Before we get into the meat of it. I want to kind of give you some background on why this has been on my mind. So back in May, I saw an interview that Jake Tapper did on cnn, the State of the Union show. For those of you who want to go look this up or find the clip. It was May 25, 2025. Jake Tapper was interviewing Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, Republican, obviously a Trump supporter and advocate. And this was on the heels of some weird news that had been coming out about wheelings and dealings that Trump and his family had been doing with their private businesses and cryptocurrency and ETFs and all the stuff they're into and the way they're leveraging their position in the government now to regulate certain things in their favor and make all kinds of deals with various entities both in the US and globally. This of course happened during his first term as well. So here's the transcript. I'm going to read it for you. Jake Tapper asks Speaker Mike Johnson, I want to ask you about something else. President Trump held a closed door event Thursday night for top investors in his private cryptocurrency. We do not know who is there. The list has not been released. We do not know how much of the money came from outside the country. The president has of course, a huge role to play when it comes to regulating crypto. I really have a difficult time imagining that if this were a Democratic president doing the exact same thing, you wouldn't be outraged. You oversaw as Speaker a congressional investigation into President Biden's ties to his son Hunter's questionable business dealings to enrich him. You seem to think it's your responsibility to look into this sort of thing then. So that's Jake Tapper's question. What got me though is Speaker Johnson's response. So it's a little lengthy, but I think it's telling. Speaker Johnson responds, yes, Jake, the big important distinction is that the Biden crime family, as they are named, they earn that title because they use shell companies, fake LLCs, a series of what appeared to be money laundering operations. And Hunter Biden, of course, with his difficult past and his corruption in his past, the family on the public dole or on the president's dole. The president lied about his involvement in the Business dealings, all of that. The evidence just piled up, and we had great reason, I think, and a responsibility to investigate those things. The difference, of course, is that President Trump does everything out in the open. He's not trying to hide anything. There's no shell companies or fake LLCs or fake family businesses. Okay. I hope you understood what Mike Johnson's defense was. He's arguing, by the way, I did not share any of this political stuff at Chicago Fellowship. That's a sort of apolitical environment. But I'm just telling you this because this is what got me hooked initially a few months ago on this topic and why I want to expand on it. But Mike Johnson's defense is that President Biden and his family tried to cover up their corruption and therefore it needed to be investigated and brought out into the light. What he's saying is that President Trump and his family are not hiding their corruption. They're doing it out in the open, and somehow, therefore, it's okay, like, it doesn't need to be investigated. It's no big deal. And he goes on to basically say, let the people make their. Since everyone can see what's happening here, let the American people, let the voters decide whether or not they think this is a good idea or a bad idea. They'll hold them accountable. We don't have to in Congress, hold them accountable because it's again, out in the open. And this, this, this is something I've heard repeatedly during the Trump years, and I wouldn't say it's simply about Donald Trump. I think it occurs when we get deeply partisan in our identity and find out that someone on our team is doing something wrong. We will often throw out the, well, at least they're not a hypocrite defense. And I think one of the reasons that defense of Donald Trump find such resonance is that it taps into a certain ethic within Christian communities. As you know, statistically was it 82% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. A lot of conservative Christian people support this president and the argument that, well, he might be doing things that are shady, but at least he's not hiding it. At least he's not a hypocrite. I, I think that defense finds some traction in Christian communities for a number of reasons. First off, most Christian communities universally agree that hypocrisy is bad. Secondly, Scripture and Jesus in particular had a lot to say about hypocrisy. It is identified within the Gospels as a particularly egregious sin, and it was the sin practiced and criticized the most by Jesus, from the very people who betrayed and killed Jesus. Matthew 23 is a whole chapter of Jesus calling out the hypocrisy of the religious leaders. And so because hypocrisy is so explicitly identified in the Bible as a terrible sin, when the defense is made of Donald Trump or any politician that, well, at least they're not a hypocrite, some of us who are Christians go, yeah, okay, well, yeah, it could be worse. It could be worse. He could be a hypocrite. And we all know hypocrites are the worst of the worst. And so we tend not to even think more deeply than that about hypocrisy. It's just hypocrisy is bad. That's it. It's one dimensional. We don't give deeper thought to it. Well, I have, and I'm not the only one, but I have given deeper thought to this. So here's what I want to do today. I want to go first into a more nuanced understanding of hypocrisy. Yes, of course hypocrisy is bad, but is it really the worst? Are there things worse than hypocrisy? Are there any circumstances in which hypocrisy is actually excusable? If we all agree that hypocrisy is bad, then is that the end of the story? Or do we need to look more carefully at the particular situations in which we are claiming hypocrisy to understand really what's going on here? So that's the first thing I want to do is let's. In a weird way, I want to give a defense of hypocrisy and explain why it's bad but not the worst. And then here's the second thing. I want to look at two different types of hypocrisy. One that I think is most common to us, especially if you are a Christian or you're in a Christian community. There's a certain form of religious hypocrisy that many of us are very familiar with and we recognize it's problematic. But I want to look at another form of hypocrisy, a sort of non religious form of hypocrisy that we don't acknowledge as frequently that I think we also need to be guarded about and careful about and look at what does scripture say about those things and how can we protect ourselves? So make sense, two things. A deeper, more nuanced sort of defense of democracy, not democracy, of hypocrisy. And then looking at two forms of hypocrisy that we need to be aware of. Okay, let's begin with a definition, though. Again, if you're familiar with scripture, if you've been taught or heard preaching about hypocrisy, none of this is going to be terribly shocking to you. The word hypocrisy comes from a Greek word that refers to an actor, someone who's pretending to be someone they're not, or a person who wears a mask, as they often did in Greek dramas. They wore masks. So it's hiding the truth of who you are behind a facade to pretend to be something you're not. It's. It's fakery. It's being. What was the Catcher of the Rye? He claimed everybody was phony. Phony. It's being phony. Sorry, my mind froze on that. I haven't read Catcher in the Rye since high school. But that word comes of all time. It's being phony, pretending to be something you're not. All right, we obviously recognize that that inauthenticity in any context is probably bad. Jesus condemns it repeatedly. We'll get into some of those texts later. But I want to make a case that, number one, while bad, some hypocrisy is normal and in fact, a necessary stage through which we progress in our moral development. Number two, I want to argue that, again, while hypocrisy is bad, there are things worse than being a hypocrite. And then, number three, I want to look at what was it about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and the religious leaders that became the target of Jesus anger? So, all right, to start out, let me give you a hypothetical, a scenario that illustrates that hypocrisy, while bad, isn't the worst. Imagine two thieves go into an Apple Store, and the first thief browses through the Apple store, pretending to be a normal customer, looking at the phones, looking at the tablets, whatever they're doing, and then out of view of any cameras, hidden from the sight of any workers. This first thief, very carefully and subtly kind of pulls out some. Some pliers, some wire cutters from his jacket and starts snipping the security cords on these devices. I don't know how security works at an Apple Store. I'm guessing if you were to actually do that, it would set off Alar. But just for the sake of my illustration, let's pretend that's not the case. He starts clipping the security wires attached to these devices and very slyly, subtly, discreetly slipping these devices into his jacket pockets in ways that nobody would notice. And then after browsing for a little bit, he slips out the door and no one's the wiser. That's thief number one. Thief number two comes into the Apple store and, and does the complete opposite. He doesn't care who can see him. He doesn't care if the cameras are right on him in the plain sight of all of the geniuses, the genius bar people, whoever they call themselves at the Apple store. He just starts grabbing devices, ripping out the cords and shoving them into his backpack. Like everyone's just watching this. No attempt to hide it whatsoever. And then the second thief just marches right out the door. The alarms go crazy and everyone can see exactly what he's doing. So two thieves, both stealing, but doing it in two completely different ways. In this illustration, the first thief represents the hypocrite because he's trying to hide his true identity with a false mask. He's pretending to be a law abiding citizen, when in fact he's stealing. He's a robber, he's a thief. One of the things that's interesting about this first guy is by hiding and concealing his activity in a sort of indirect way, he's actually affirming the law. He's acknowledging that the law against stealing private property is good, that the law is righteous, that the law is correct, it is wrong to steal. That is precisely why he's trying to hide his activity and hide his true identity behind a false facade of being a law abiding citizen. This first thief has a moral compass. He knows what's right and wrong, which is precisely why he's trying to conceal his wrongness. There's an old quote, comes from a French, either a French philosopher or politician, I forget, and the quote is this. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. What that means is hypocrisy. Yeah, it's wrong, it's bad. Just as stealing is wrong, it's bad. But by pretending to not steal, by pretending to obey the law, you're actually affirming the rightness of the law. Or by pretending to have a virtue that you do not actually have, you are nonetheless affirming the value of the virtue you are pretending to have. So the thief that goes in and tries to hide his activity still has a moral compass, still has a sense of shame. In a weird way, the hypocrite affirms good things by pretending to have them. Even Though they don't. The second thief, on the other hand, has no sense of shame, has no moral compass, has no sense of right and wrong. Some people would look and go, well, yeah, but that second thief, the one who's openly breaking the law, he's authentic, he's refreshing. He's not like other criminals who try to conceal or cover up their wrongdoing. This is Mike Johnson's argument for Donald Trump. This is the argument we hear all the time for. For politicians who openly and brazenly either break the law or break norms and don't care. The idea is, well, the older breed of politicians, they used to cover up their corruption and now they're just doing it out in the open. Isn't that better for everyone to see? No, it's not. Because this second thief, who's openly stealing the devices, openly showing contempt for the law and the moral foundations that it stands on, by doing that, you're actually inspiring others to also disregard norms and laws and the moral foundations of the culture. It's a difference between the thief going in and suddenly stealing something and rioters just going, to hell with private property. We're just going to bust into whatever store we want and take whatever we want. Like, society would collapse in moments if everyone behaved that way. But that's what the behavior of the second thief is. Inspire. So what I'm trying to argue here is, yes, hypocrisy is bad. Stealing is bad even when you do it covertly. But doing it openly with contempt for the law is actually worse. Unshameful unrighteousness is worse than just hypocrisy. Sincere shamelessness is worse than having a moral compass and a sense of shame that seeks to hide or cover up your wrongdoing. Let me give you a completely different example. We would all, hopefully universally agree that committing adultery, you know, breaking your marriage vows is bad. It's wrong, it's dishonest, it's contemptible. All the things, not to mention sinful. If you believe marriage is a covenant that you make with your spouse, with God, all those things are horrible. And so when a person gets caught in adultery and they express shame or they've been hiding this relationship, we understand why, because they recognize what they've been doing is wrong. The Coldplay concert, right? The CEO and the head of HR that the camera was put on and suddenly their hidden relationship was exposed to the whole world, what's the first thing they did? They tried to hide it. They hid their faces. There's shame there because they know what they're doing is wrong. Are they hypocrites? 100%, yes. They're pretending that they're not doing something wrong. When they are doing something, it's awful. But in their shame, in their hypocrisy, they're acknowledging the wrongness of their behavior. There's a huge difference between that and the person who's married and just openly and flagrantly betrays their spouse and, I don't know, is openly on the dating apps and hooking up with all kinds of people in grotesque and immoral ways. Like, not only is that deeply a deep betrayal of their marriage vows, but it's contemptuous towards the institution of marriage itself. And it's saying this institution of pledging fidelity to another person is stupid and meaningless. And who cares? That's worse. They're both bad, but one is worse. So at least the person committing adultery who's hiding it is acknowledging the goodness of monogamy and is ashamed that they are not abiding by it, even though they may be trying to pretend that they are. So hypocrisy is bad. Sincere shamelessness is way worse. This is why the defense of Trump or anyone else, well, at least they're doing it out in the open, therefore we shouldn't be upset about it, is incredibly stupid. And it's not just in this case that Donald Trump is doing things that are harmful to the country or contemptuous of the law or breaking of norms that have sustained our government and democracy for 250 years. It's not just that. It's that there are people like Mike Johnson who know better, who are actively defending this and using the, well, at least it's not hypocritical defense, which I just find crazy on so many levels and bizarre. So if you're gonna condemn the thief who covertly steals things for being a hypocrite, but you're not gonna condemn the second thief who openly does it because they're a sociopath, then your moral compass is really broken too. And we're in deep trouble as a country if we think the only standard of accountability is did they try to hide it or not? Big, big problem. Okay, to continue down this nuanced understanding of hypocrisy, I also want you to understand under what circumstances might hypocrisy be not acceptable but understandable? Let me give you a different analogy. When a child is really little, I mean really little kid, and they can't yet speak adorable stage loved when my kids were that old. But one of the Things I loved is they would try to speak, they would imitate your words even though they couldn't quite get them. And they certainly didn't know sentence structure and all those things yet, but they would. They mimic back what they're trying to learn. Another example, my wife and I, right now, we are in the very early stages of trying to learn how to play golf, taking some golf lessons. We need a ton more. We've done a couple rounds out there. There's some friends of ours that are learning golf as well. Part of it is we're soon to be empty nesters and we're thinking through like, well, what are we going to do with our time and what thing can we waste our money on now that we don't have kids at home? Like golf, That's a quick way to waste your money. So we've gotten some of the gear, we've gotten some clubs you love here and there. We're slowly acquiring the gear to be golfers, but we can't play golf. We're not really golfers yet. We hope to be. We want to grow into the skill to be golfers, but until then, we might look like golfers, but we're not really golfers. Both of these examples, the golfing one or the baby that's imitating adult speech, they illustrate the idea that in many, many parts of development, we copy something or we pretend to be something before we really are. It's a normal part of learning, right? You copy someone else until you learn to be able to do it on your own, or you wear the gear before you actually acquire all the skills to fully play the sport. That's not kind of a contemptuous form of hypocrisy because it's understood, okay, they're trying, they're growing. They are imitating the virtue that they hope to one day possess, or they're imitating the skill they hope to truly internalize. In this regard, a season of hypocrisy can be an ordinary, maybe even a necessary, stage of moral development. We wouldn't come down hard on somebody who's just learning a new skill or learning a new ability because they're copying someone else or they're pretending to be something. No, that's just, that's just the way you learn. That's how it happens. The problem becomes, the danger arises when we put our emphasis, we shift our emphasis from actually developing the virtue that we want to possess, and instead we cultivate our ability to fake the virtue we want to possess. This was the form of hypocrisy. That the religious leaders of Jesus culture were guilty of and why he came down so hard on them. They became experts at appearing holy rather than actually becoming holy. And that's the perpetual form of hypocrisy that brings God's judgment and that we should have contempt for. But if it's just a stage you're moving through in your moral development, if it's just mimicry of something you hope to acquire or the copying of, of abilities that you see in other godly women and men that you want to emulate, that technically, you could say it's hypocrisy because you're acting the part. You're playing the part without truly having it internalized yet. But it's a step in the process. Very, very different than permanently faking it, permanently acting the part, not putting the effort and skill and sacrifice into actually acquiring the virtue, but just wanting to make sure everyone thinks you've acquired the virtue. There is a difference between those two things. Many of you are aware that in the military there's a certain form of hypocrisy that's especially egregious. It's known as stolen valor. It's when somebody claims military service or a military rank or award or medal of some kind that they didn't actually earn. And that's the contemptuous kind of hypocrisy we're talking about. So when someone presents themselves as godly and virtuous and knowledgeable about the Bible and a follower of Jesus and everything, but they don't actually possess those qualities, that's stolen valor. And the reason we want to steal it is because there are benefits to, in the military, for example, having a higher rank, there are benefits to having certain medals or awards like people give you honor and respect and deference if you have those things. But when it's stolen, it means you didn't actually put in the work to earn that rank or to earn that award, and that's why it's illegitimate. Likewise, there is a form of stolen valor in the religious life where I want all the respect and honor and credibility of somebody who looks godly and holy and a follower of Jesus. But I don't want to actually have to do the work to be those things. When I was thinking about this, one of the parallels that came to mind was Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously coined the term cheap grace. Don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post plus subscriber, so head over to HolyPost.com SkyPod and sign up for just $5 a month. 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