It has become quite popular of late for freethinkers to go after Christians for the moral offense of hypocrisy, that is, failing to make one’s actions conform to the beliefs one claims to profess.
If the issue at hand is whether or not Davis is consistent in her professed religious values, then her actions are clearly relevant. After all, if a person claims to have a set of values and acts in ways that violate those values, then this provides legitimate grounds for accusations of hypocrisy and even of claims that the person does not really hold to that belief set. – Mike LaBossiere
“Critics are calling attention to the fact that Davis was married four times as evidence of hypocrisy.” – Libby Anne
It’s not “slut-shaming” to point out the hypocrisy of a woman who marries and divorces multiple times, then says her faith prevents her from allowing gay couples to marry once. It’s a fair point. It’s also fair to note that she probably signed marriage licenses for people of mixed faiths and people who were divorced — none of that set off those religious alarms. – Hemant Mehta
I guess I am shaming Kim, but it’s for her hypocrisy. – JT Eberhard
With all this hypocrisy-shaming going around, we should probably stop and ask ourselves if less hypocrisy and more consistency would actually make the world a better place, given the ideals embedded in the holy books which true believers claim to follow. If everyone who professes to follow Jesus took his advice to heart about the immorality of divorce—treating it as adultery—would that make our society a better place to live? If everyone who professes to be a Bible-believer took Leviticus 20:10 literally and sought to reinstitute the death penalty for adultery, would that make our society a better place to live? Given all the draconian punishments listed in the Bible and other holy books, do we really want to be encouraging people of faith to be fully consistent in making their actions comply with their stated beliefs?
I would argue that we humanists should focus on helping people form correct beliefs about morality, rather than faulting them for failing to live up to an ancient and barbarous moral code. Not all hypocrisy is necessarily harmful, and deviations from stated beliefs can actually make someone more benevolent if their stated beliefs were harmful in the first place. If this sounds too radical coming from me, take it from someone who really knows what he is talking about when it comes to moral progress over time:
“Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don’t, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
When someone professes beliefs which have been fixed for millennia, hypocrisy may well be their first step forward. Let us hope that fundamentalists can learn to more fully betray their inflexible moral codes by making compromises with modernity at every turn, that is, until they finally come around to a rational moral framework grounded in actual human needs rather than alleged divine commands.
