Beyond Grievance Cultures

A Christian’s Take on Our Politically Polarized Society and How to Move Forward

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Introduction

Political polarization has become extreme in America yet has room to get even worse. I live in Canada where this is also true, if less dramatically so. Nobody seems to know what to do about it, however. News anchors or pundits will pause briefly to point out the trend in a regretful tone before going back to their talking points. It feels as though a fuse has been lit somewhere along the way, and we’re all clenching our teeth wondering when the bomb will explode.

Some attribute the worsening political climate to a changed media landscape, and I think they have a point. The news used to try to reach as broad an audience as possible through neutral-sounding reporting. Now competing cable news companies sell outrage to partisan audiences, an effective means of capturing and holding people’s attention. This is also true in the online world. Outrage generates clicks and views and social media companies or online news sites profit as a result.

Anger in itself is not a bad thing and can spark positive change. It communicates passion, rallying supporters and causing offending parties to second-guess their actions. There are lots of good reasons to be angry in this broken world, and anger can be softened by addressing legitimate grievances and delivering justice. More on this later.

However, anger is also addictive. It feels good to hold onto grievances, real or imagined, as this distracts us from self-reflection. These grievances may be our own but can also be those of others on whose behalf we become indignant. In the modern media environment, there is a never-ending stream of grievances to hear about and fixate on, voicing our solidarity with perceived victims and our contempt for perceived culprits.

‘Grievance culture’ is a culture which fosters a collective addiction to seeking out and holding onto grievances, onto anger directed at a common enemy, for the purposes of avoiding responsibility within one’s in-group.

Anger is most credible when it is used sparingly, against specific evil words and actions, at potentially great cost to oneself, by those who seek justice eventually leading, if possible, to reconciliation. Grievance cultures, in contrast, are infused with excessive and constant outrage against other people groups, by partisan hypocrites who seek disproportionate punishment of opponents and special lenience for themselves; nurturing, exaggerating or even inventing grievances to leverage maximum political and personal gain.

Anger is addictive, as mentioned above, because it distracts us from the discomfort of self-reflection. It allows us to see ourselves either as righteous warriors against evil or as righteous victims in our struggle against evil, while overlooking our own flaws or the flaws of our ‘team.’ The heat of anger allows us to ignore the unblinking glare of moral responsibility and the annoying tug of our conscience towards self-reflection. The wrath of God has shifted to someone else, or so we tell ourselves. The more frequently we get high on outrage, the more we can ignore our own need for self-improvement. Anger addiction, like all addictions, is a comfort zone in that regard. Grievance culture is a collective reinforcement of this comfort zone, a collective high that makes it easier for individuals to avoid self-reflection.

Self-reflection is uncomfortable from both a moral and intellectual standpoint. As we settle into our preferred patterns of behaviour and thought over time, we don’t want to go back to uncertainty about who we are vs. who we should be, or how we understand the world vs. how we should understand it. ‘At base I’m a good person who subscribes to generally the right beliefs. No need to think about changing my heart or mind.’

No need to think much at all in the current political climate. Now more than ever we live in a world that tells us, ‘don’t think, react – especially in anger.’ There are forces that are cynically fanning the flames of grievance culture to manipulate us for power, profit and influence.

The best way to do this is to divide people into two opposing tribes (this is quite natural for us to begin with, so it really just takes a push in that direction). The bigger the tribes, the better – the opposing tribe is thus always available to be responsible for your grievances, and there is no doubt as to who is causing them (it’s not Tribe A, so it must be Tribe B). It’s also easier to hold long-term grudges and compound them over time.

At some point the enmity spills over into tribal warfare. Grievance culture and tribal warfare feed each other – clinging to grievances creates excessive conflict; excessive conflict creates more grievances to cling to.  This positive feedback loop can spiral out of control quickly, as a brief glance at any history book (or news channel) will tell you.

We as a society appear not to have a strong enough philosophical foundation to resist the downward spiral. People in opposing political tribes (left-wing / liberal / progressive vs. right-wing / conservative / traditionalist, broadly speaking) are drifting further apart emotionally, less and less willing to even associate with those of opposing political affiliation. Yet it’s not only people, but ideas that are drifting apart. This is because out of pride, nobody wants to admit that their opponents might be right about something. We will therefore double down on positions that are less than well thought out, moving towards extremes. Values which should complement each other are distorted and pitted against each other. Partisans are practically living in different universes, with the bridge between them getting stretched thinner over time, threatening to snap. For some it already has snapped, as they have cut ties with friends and family members over political views.

This division is a huge impediment to positive change, which requires sober minds capable of seeking common ground, solving problems creatively and compromising where possible – not minds constantly drunk on outrage (though, as mentioned above, anger when focused appropriately can be a powerful tool for sparking change). Addressing grievance culture is thus a precondition for solving the more tangible problems that we face.

To address it we will look at three vices which feed anger addiction, touched on obliquely in the earlier description of grievance culture. The chief vice is hypocrisy, along with its two children: contempt for others and self-pity. These vices, inhabiting every human heart to varying degrees, represent different tactics that we employ to avoid moral responsibility, enhancing the heady, addictive nature of anger to distract us from self-reflection. They essentially turn us into chronic virtue-signalers who wear the mask of either righteous warrior or righteous victim to avoid responsibility for ourselves and our tribe, which we will discuss shortly.

As a Christian it has been disturbing to see considerable swathes of American – Canadian Christianity being consumed by grievance culture in recent years, since I strongly believe that Christianity gives us powerful weapons to combat the vices mentioned above and thereby neutralize anger addiction.

In the face of partisan media fostering the development and entrenchment of opposing grievance cultures, we need better philosophy to chase out the stale ideas and attitudes that have allowed this to happen. Philosophy is concerned, in part, with what our values should be and what our attitude should be – towards life, towards others, and towards ourselves. Though we live in an increasingly secular society, Western thought is steeped in Christian philosophy, and I think it will be useful to revisit some of these concepts and associated biblical excerpts as a frame of reference. One need not be a Christian to explore these concepts; that is just the framework that I am familiar with, which I have used to string these concepts together in a way that is hopefully meaningful and useful.

As a final note before we get into it, I will anticipate an inevitable accusation by fellow Christians, which is that I am trying to reduce Christianity to a philosophy. That is not my goal; I just believe that if Christianity is true it should represent the height of moral philosophy, and that is what I am attempting to illuminate. Many biblical concepts can be explained in universal terms, and it is useful to do so for those who have been put off or confused by religious jargon. If the doctrines are not true and God does not exist then I suppose you can believe whatever philosophy you want. But if they are true then the philosophy becomes all the more important, because it is arriving at objective moral truths.

The Vices of Grievance Culture

Hypocrisy

At the heart of grievance culture is the vice of hypocrisy, which is the main vice that keeps us from changing and growing as people. Hypocrisy is about pretense: putting on a mask to hide our deficiencies from others and – perhaps especially – from our own conscience, so we don’t have to address these deficiencies, pretending that we are beyond reproach.  It signals virtue without pursuing and implementing virtue. We want to be perceived as virtuous without actually being virtuous, because the latter is often difficult and potentially costly to us. We talk a good game but don’t walk the walk. We say we have certain values and standards but don’t act on them. We insist that other people need to change and grow but do nothing to change and grow ourselves.

In our virtue signalling we make token offerings to our conscience (or to God, or to moral responsibility), presenting it with something easy to soften its harsh glare. Hypocrisy is the original vice of Cain, who literally made a token offering to God out of his crops, while his brother Abel made a wholehearted offering from the best of his flock¹. Cain wanted God to perceive him as virtuous for going through the bare-minimum motions and became enraged when God saw through him and knew that his heart wasn’t in it. In his anger and jealousy, he killed Abel, resenting his brother’s better offering.

There are many kinds of token offerings we can make to moral responsibility. Quite often, paying lip service to – or wearing the trappings of – a certain religion, tradition, political party, or cause serves as such. Token good deeds which are easy for us to perform may also suffice.

In the gospels, Jesus often butted heads with the religious leaders and teachers of his homeland of Judea, especially members of an influential, popular sect known as the Pharisees. He generally agreed with the teachings of the Pharisees (an interesting theory is that he was a Pharisee, or at least most closely aligned with them), but frequently criticized them for not practicing what they preached:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.’²

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”³

There was a disconnect between the lofty self-image of these religious leaders and their true selves. Their minimally decent character paired with token good deeds and ritualism did not even begin to justify their self-hype. This is true of all of us.

One frequent token offering we make to moral responsibility, which is particularly natural and attractive to us, is righteous indignation (anger). The sense of ‘being in the right’ while someone else is ‘in the wrong’ is rather intoxicating, as we can fixate on that fact and ignore other instances where we might be in the wrong or need to improve. We are basically saying to moral responsibility, ‘look over here at how right I am compared to those people.’ The comparison serves as the token offering.

Righteous indignation has two modes: attack or defense. It can fixate on the perceived culprit of a grievance or on the perceived victim. It can put the culprit on a pedestal to be condemned (they’re in the wrong), or the victim on a pedestal to be vindicated (they / we are in the right). These are not inherently invalid expressions of anger. But when employed by hypocrisy, anger is allowed to follow the path of least resistance. It is allowed to entertain the vices of contempt for others and self-pity: the sword and shield of hypocrisy. Whoever wields the sword of contempt becomes a righteous warrior who disproportionately punishes one’s opponents for their transgressions (declaring their inherent wrongness), and whoever wields the shield of self-pity becomes a righteous victim who disproportionately defends themselves or their tribe, using their grievances to afford themselves special lenience or compensation (declaring their inherent rightness). Let’s delve into these two vices.  

Contempt for others

Contempt for others (as opposed to contempt for actions or beliefs) means viewing others as lesser or even worthless and/or irredeemable. It is a deflection tactic to focus the glare of moral responsibility on the utter evil of the offender (not on you). It inappropriately devalues or ‘writes off’ other human beings, setting their ‘wrongness’ in stone so that we can compare ourselves favourably to them, essentially pretending that they are more evil or worthless than they are. As the sword of hypocrisy, it viciously cuts down opponents for the smallest of transgressions, while excusing the same, similar or worse transgressions in ourselves or our tribe. It employs a double standard where any transgression by our opponents, however small, is viewed as an expression of their lesser worth, while any transgression on our part, however large, does not define us. It essentially reduces our opponents to their transgressions, to the point of viewing them as devils and not as human beings.

Jesus spoke out against this contempt-based double standard which criticizes the smallest of flaws in others while excusing glaring flaws in ourselves or our team:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”⁴

Contempt for others comes with a sense of relief, which explains its addictiveness. Have you ever heard your parents yelling and been relieved to hear that they were angrily calling for your sibling, not you? Or have you ever experienced a feeling of relief when your co-worker makes a mistake, while your work is sound? Contempt for others functions the same way. Somebody else is on the chopping block, thank God.

We are thus incentivized to look for reasons to put other people on the chopping block. By doing so we can turn around to moral responsibility / God / our conscience and say ‘see? At least I’m not as bad as that. I’m not the one who needs to change and grow as a person.’

Some of the reasons to put others on the chopping block are obvious. It’s easy to bring up examples of the worst of the worst: serial killers, rapists, terrorists, genocidal dictators, etc., and think ourselves decent people by comparison. ‘At least I’m not as bad as that piece of shit.’ This is one of the most obvious moral comfort zones available to us.

Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is about this tendency to compare ourselves to worse people:

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”⁵

Tax collectors were not the good guys, as they often defrauded poor taxpayers to enrich themselves. Yet Jesus’ point is that the Pharisee comparing themselves favorably to such a man, while bragging about a few token good deeds, was just them being a shallow hypocrite to avoid personal growth. The sinful tax collector expressed humility and repentance while the ‘decent person’ expressed hubris, and that hubris has no place in the Kingdom of God.

The Pharisee’s prayer (‘Thank you God that I am not like so and so’) is something that we will get back to, as it can easily be modified to reflect current attitudes on all sides of the political spectrum, as we blame all the evil in society on our political opponents while praising our own side. For contempt is greedy – it does not limit itself to targeting the worst of the worst. It’s always looking for reasons to denigrate others, which could be as trivial as their driving skills (explaining the ubiquitous road rage on our streets). Within grievance cultures, too, the bar for ‘POS’ is lowered so that we can apply our contempt to an entire group of people. Our contempt is based on some perceived deficiency in the values or character of members of an enemy tribe (whether this perception is grounded in reality or not – contempt is more than happy to exaggerate or even invent deficiencies in our opponents). In fact, the primary grievance of a grievance culture is that the enemy tribe is ruining society because of their deficiencies. Any other grievance, legitimate or not, merely supports that overarching impression. The enemy tribe is a threat to society and must be defeated. In polarized times, this perception of threat steadily increases until it boils over into bitter conflict.

Thus we become righteous warriors in a tribal conflict, caught up in the heat of the battle. In a battle there is no time for self-reflection, so we eagerly march to war. The enemy tribe represents an easy and permanent target for our anger to latch onto. In our eyes they represent all that is wrong with society. In this way we attempt to sequester evil, creating scapegoats which must be punished, shunned, exiled or destroyed, and then all will be right in the world (except even when these conditions are met, grievance cultures will simply find a new target within the in-group to scapegoat, because that is the whole point). This scapegoating, rooted in contempt, is responsible for the worst atrocities humanity has known – all the sickening crimes against humanity which are recreated daily in this world.

Aldous Huxley described the vice of contempt for others quite well:

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. […] To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”⁶

It’s also worth noting that contempt for others is not only directed at moral lapses, but intellectual ones. We zero in on the dumbest thing our opponent said so that we can write them off as ‘irredeemably stupid’ and not have to listen to anything else they say. This serves as a deflection tactic from having to defend our own shaky beliefs and weak arguments.

The result of this knee-jerk dismissal of our opponents’ arguments is that when they say something reasonable, something we would normally agree with, we are forced to double down on the extreme opposite. This is how extreme ideologies become entrenched. It’s also how one may end up flip-flopping on their original position over time, without realizing it. One’s position becomes a relative response to whatever the enemy is currently saying, a reactionary response rooted in contempt rather than a measured response based on solid principles.

Self-pity

Self-pity means obsessing over our hurt or weakness, dwelling in feelings of victimhood or helplessness, essentially pretending we are more hard-done-by than we are. By doing so we can make excuses to moral responsibility for why we should be exempt from its demands – why we are unable to change and grow as people. It emphasizes, exaggerates or even invents grievances to obtain maximum leverage, maximum exemption from responsibility. As the shield of hypocrisy, it defends us against accusations by our enemies (or our conscience), seeking special lenience for our bad character and behavior. It employs a double standard where we consider ourselves fundamentally more deserving of leniency than our opponents, for the same or similar transgressions, as we are in the ‘right’ tribe with the ‘right’ grievances (or often the ‘first’ grievance, i.e. ‘they started it’). We use our grievances to set our ‘rightness’ in stone and present that as a token offering to moral responsibility.

Self-pity, like contempt for others, comes with a sense of relief, lending to its addictiveness. Its appeal is similar to that of taking a sick day from work – it’s not nice to be sick, but it is kind of nice to not have to work for a day while we are pampered by those who are taking care of us. Self-pity milks our infirmities so that we get more days off ‘work’, which in this analogy is equivalent to moral responsibility or accountability. The ball is in someone else’s court today (especially our opponents’). This suspended accountability at best allows us to refrain from self-improvement, and at worst absolves us of atrocities against those whom we say are victimizing us. There is thus an incentive to lower the bar for what constitutes personal hardship or harm, thereby lowering the bar for resentful anger towards others or towards life in general.

Jesus had many teachings which sound quite harsh which I think are meant to shock our frequently self-pitying sensibilities, where we make every excuse under the sun to avoid doing what is right. For instance, ‘whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.’⁷ Or ‘if your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.’⁸ Which is certainly hyperbolic but makes the point that doing what is right often requires sacrifice and self-discipline, which we naturally shy away from. We make excuses for why it is too hard for us to do what is right, why we are too weak or hard-done-by.

This is not to trivialize real hurt that people experience, which can be not only physically but psychologically debilitating and depression-inducing, seriously affecting a person’s ability to think about anything except putting one foot in front of the other. Healing from this requires time and resources – physical, social and spiritual resources. Getting some of those resources may require self-advocacy – communicating our grievances so that they can be resolved.

But self-pity is quite different from self-advocacy. The latter seeks to solve a problem while the former dwells on the problem for selfish purposes. In the same vein, grievance cultures do not actually want to resolve grievances as much as they claim to. They promote dwelling on pain because it gives us leverage, both from a moral standpoint (the ball is in someone else’s court), and a practical standpoint – our opponents owe us, and we can use that fact to win personal compensation or political battles for our tribe. The bar for what constitutes ‘hurt’ keeps getting lowered in this environment to increase the leverage and therefore the potential gains. Self-pity thrives in tribal warfare, as both sides are looking for any bit of leverage they can get to advance their position, not wanting to give the other side a square inch out of fear that the tide of the conflict might turn.

This is where the ‘righteous victim’ comes in. If contempt for others turns people into righteous warriors whose role is to rail against the deficiencies of their enemies, self-pity turns people into righteous victims whose role is to sit on a pedestal, broadcasting their grievances to amass leverage for the tribe, excusing its own failings so it can maintain a competitive advantage in tribal warfare.

In the intellectual sphere, self-pity makes excuses for its own weak arguments and dishonest rhetorical tactics by loudly decrying the ‘unfairness’ or ‘bias’ or ‘agenda’ of the other side. It’s ok for us to be dishonest because they were first. They have a sinister agenda which is trying to slander, mischaracterize and marginalize us, so the ball is in their court, not ours. We’re off the hook for our own intellectual sleaziness.

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Contempt for others and self-pity work in tandem to avoid moral and intellectual responsibility, especially in the context of tribal warfare. The righteous warrior whips up animosity towards the enemy and indulges in punishing them, while the righteous victim broadcasts their grievances to gain support for the war effort, excusing the behaviour and rhetoric of their own soldiers and propagandists. In fact, the two vices feed each other. By emphasizing, exaggerating or even inventing the evil motives, words and actions of our enemies, we give ourselves greater cause to feel victimized by them. By emphasizing, exaggerating or even inventing harms against ourselves and our tribe, we give ourselves more reasons to hate our enemies.

Hell, Sin and Hypocrisy

Grievance culture is one of the many forms of hell that we create for ourselves here on Earth. I don’t know how hell manifests after death (we’ll discuss this a bit more later), but it begins here and now. The essence of hell is the pain and dysfunction we create for ourselves and others by clinging to sin.

Sin is a concept that is much maligned, partly due to religious people who have overused it to judge others, but it’s a simple concept which essentially means ‘to err’ or ‘to miss the mark’⁹. If we’re honest, we ‘err’ all the time, every day, and are thus ‘sinners.’ We make the wrong decision or fail to do the right thing in many instances, often because the right thing is harder to do and it’s easier to remain in our status quo with its vices, some of which we may also enjoy.

Hypocrisy is the chief vice which keeps us in hell, clinging to our sins to our own detriment. One might say it is the flagship vice of our sinful nature. It’s the one that allows us to pretend everything is fine when it’s not – that we don’t need to address our sin, that we don’t need to change and grow as a person. We don’t want to admit we’re in hell, whether because of pride, guilt, laziness, or fear of change. So we just keep making our token offerings to moral responsibility while continuing to indulge in our sins. We stagnate in our personal hell, creating more problems for ourselves and others.

Accordingly, hypocrisy does not like to acknowledge the presence or even existence of something greater than ourselves, than our current state of being, because then we might see where we really are and admit that we need to change. Our gaze shies away from what is good and true and noble, because that makes us feel insecure about our deficiencies. It shies away from the moral responsibilities that might lay a claim on us, because the thought of that makes us uncomfortable. Instead we cast our gaze downward in contempt, at those who are purportedly below us, and satisfy our conscience with that comparison. Or we look inward and backward in self-pity, focusing on past grievances which exempt us from changing and growing as people, or on our weaknesses which prevent us from doing so. Hypocrisy is the trap of looking downward, inward and backward, which keeps us wallowing in our vices in hell.

Faith Rooted in Love – the Antidote to Grievance Culture

The virtue of faith

The virtue of faith is the counter to the vice of hypocrisy. If hypocrisy is the trap of looking downward, inward and backward in order to remain in our status quo, faith is the art of looking upward, outward and forward. It looks upward, humbly acknowledging and pursuing something greater than ourselves. It looks forward towards positive change and growth in ourselves and our communities. It looks outward at our moral responsibilities towards other people and strives to carry them out, instead of making excuses.

The first step is looking upward. We need to recognize that there exists supreme goodness and truth in life and have the humility to acknowledge that we fall short of that. Not everyone has that ability (currently), and I think that’s why faith is described as a ‘gift’ in Scripture. Not everyone has the inclination to fix their gaze on something above them. As Lewis put it: ‘a proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.’¹⁰ Seeking help, inspiration and wisdom from something greater than ourselves is a must, as we do not have all the answers for what it takes to change and grow as a person. We need to tap into, connect with something which is far more admirable and wise than ourselves, something which has gone before us and which will outlast us, whether you want to think of it as some conception of the divine, ancient wisdom, or the accumulated knowledge of our species over time.

In Christianity, what we ‘connect with’ is God himself. One analogy Jesus uses is that he is ‘the vine, and you are the branches.’¹¹ Each of us is an individual branch connected to a central vine through which we are able to thrive, and without which we are merely isolated, dead plant matter. By becoming connected to the vine, we are now able to grow and ‘produce fruit’.

That’s just one of the many plant metaphors in the gospels which highlight the importance of not only individual but collective growth (for example, one parable compares the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed which, though the smallest of seeds, grows into a tree whose branches birds come to perch in¹² – a community of growth-oriented people who support each other and provide a haven for others). Faith is the mechanism by which we tap into this spiritual growth potential, individually and collectively, by orienting our hearts and minds towards something greater than or above ourselves. It represents a growth-oriented attitude or mindset, one which is not content to wallow in the muck of our sins (like hypocrisy is), but desires to rise above them.

In the gospels, there are numerous accounts of people coming to Jesus for help because there was something about him that made them hope and believe that change was possible, that he could lift them out of the muck of their present circumstances. Many of these accounts have to do with miraculous healings of the blind, lame and leprous, for instance, but these healings illustrate a deeper lesson which has to do with spiritual sickness and healing. Those who literally approached, called out to, or reached out to Jesus did so with a posture of humility, acutely aware of their own need for help. And this is the posture sinners should have towards the divine, or towards that which is supremely admirable. We need help from above to rise above our vices. And not only help, but first forgiveness, otherwise we will be shackled to the guilt of our past mistakes. Accordingly, there are gospel accounts of people coming to Jesus seeking absolution, like the ‘sinful woman’ who tearfully washed Jesus’ feet with her hair. His response to her was ‘go in peace. Your sins are forgiven.’¹³

For people who demonstrated a willingness to get out of the pit they found themselves in, Jesus’ response was to heal and forgive them. And that is the sweetness of the gospel, which means ‘the good news.’ We are not shackled to our past. If we want to change and grow as people; if we want to move forward, we are able to do so through something greater than ourselves which lifts us out of the pit. We are not doomed to hell because of our past sins. There is hope for us.

Indeed Hebrews 11 defines faith as ‘confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.’¹⁴ This may sound like wishful thinking to some, but it just means that we have become captivated by something which gives us hope that a better reality is possible, though things may seem bleak now, though we may not see goodness around us or within us. We orient ourselves towards this better reality, towards the promises of God, instead of resigning ourselves to the way that we are or the way that the world is. By looking upward towards God, goodness and truth for absolution and help, we are now able to look forward to a better reality where goodness and truth reign in our lives.

With this vision in mind, we look outward at our moral responsibilities towards other people, actively working towards a better world. The kingdom of heaven is not only something we look forward to, but something which we seek to enact in the present. We want to see tangible evidence of greater goodness in our lives and in our communities, because we believe that what is good, true and noble is more important to pursue than anything else, and will ultimately outlast everything else.

Differently put, faith is all about the pursuit of righteousness. Humans are not meant to be spiritually static. We are meant to advance and mature in righteousness, individually and collectively, just as a plant sprouts and grows from a seed, and just as a creature grows from an embryo. And this is meant to be ‘tangible’ righteousness, not merely an abstract ‘imputed righteousness’ that Christians often talk about, where God has declared us righteous through faith because he sees Christ’s righteousness when he looks at us. That is a valid and biblical Christian perspective, but it also must be stressed that this ‘imputed’ righteousness is inseparable from ‘tangible’ righteousness. The gospels use the analogy of ‘bearing fruit.’ A branch which is connected to the vine will inevitably, necessarily bear fruit if given the opportunity. A person imputed with God’s righteousness will inevitably, necessarily produce tangible acts of righteousness.

And they do so through faith. I believe that faith is not merely a vehicle to imputed righteousness, but an actual component of righteousness, a flagship virtue if you will which opposes our flagship vice of hypocrisy. While people of faith will never have perfectly ‘right’ character or behaviour in this life, they are on the ‘right’ path in that they seek to grow as people and to do what is right. In this way faith could perhaps be thought of as the ‘attitude’ component of righteousness – an attitude which is humble, penitent, hopeful, positive and persistent in its pursuit of righteousness. An attitude which, again, looks upward, outward and forward instead of downward, inward and backward, which seeks to rise above our sinful ways by reaching out to something greater than ourselves. Thus in a way, righteousness lies in its pursuit, more than they say that happiness does, and faith is the key virtue which is all about that pursuit. ‘The righteous will live by faith’¹⁵ in part because faith is a key component of righteousness.

Supporting the importance of the ‘pursuit of righteousness,’ in the beatitudes Jesus says: ‘blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.’¹⁶ Those who seek and desire righteousness will find it. That desire is fundamental, and something that we are going to explore further. Faith is fundamentally a matter of the heart, not just the head (i.e. believing certain doctrines without proof, which is how faith is often understood by those outside the church but also sometimes inside the church). It involves a heart which desires to be forgiven, to improve and to do what is right, in contrast to hypocrisy which only cares about the perception of righteousness and makes token offerings to God and moral responsibility. Faith represents the heart of Abel, not the heart of Cain.

By faith Abel brought God a better offering than Cain did. By faith he was commended as righteous, when God spoke well of his offerings.¹⁷

People of faith make whole-hearted offerings to God, like Abel. They offer the best of themselves, as Abel offered the best of his flock, in the pursuit of what is good and true, believing that that is the best way forward. Another of the beatitudes says: ‘blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’¹⁸ And another of Jesus’ sayings is that ‘a good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart.’¹⁹ It’s not that they are perfect, nor will they be in this life. But the ‘good’ man has undergone a transformation. He was once in a state of spiritual-moral death, a stagnant, hellish mode of being where he wallowed in his vices while pretending it was no big deal. But now God has awakened the hope and desire for change within him, opening the door to a spiritual life, which is all about healing, transformation and growth, from which good deeds naturally sprout. And that is not something for the ‘good’ man to be conceited about, because that transformation, that ‘heart transplant’ is a gift from God.

Not everyone has this gift, this right attitude or ‘heart’ which is oriented towards growth and righteousness, and of those who do, some have more of it than others. This is what the Parable of the Talents is about. Two servants are entrusted with different sums of money by their master, and both produce a return on the money through careful investments and business activities. Meanwhile a third servant, who was entrusted with the lowest amount of money (a single talent), merely buried his money in the ground, giving a self-pitying excuse as to why he could not produce a return²⁰. The parable illustrates that some people have varying levels of faith which result in good deeds, while others have so little faith that they are in danger of producing no fruit.

Some, in fact many of those people are Christians. Indeed, I often see the third servant in myself, where I get complacent and too absorbed in my own affairs, too comfortable with my own flaws and weaknesses, instead of stepping out of my comfort zone in faith to be a better person and do good in the world. Hypocrisy is the path of least resistance while faith is an uphill battle.

Love

Because hypocrisy is the path of least resistance, the current against which faith has to swim, faith needs something to sustain it. Life is a long, tiring slog if you are constantly trying to go against the grain of your own hypocrisy. So the object of our faith must evoke a sense of wonder, of awe, of reverence, or of gratitude that compels us to stay in the game, that keeps our heart in working order. In other words, we must possess a deep love of that which is admirable and virtuous.

Indeed, Jesus said that the most important commandment is ‘to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’²¹

Some may have trouble understanding how one ‘loves’ a transcendent being. I could begin to speak in terms of having a personal relationship with one’s Creator, a heavenly Father who has forgiven his children’s sins and restored us into right relationship with him. But keeping with the philosophical bent of this essay for the moment: to understand the directive to ‘love God’ in philosophical terms, replace ‘God’ with ‘that which is supremely admirable and virtuous.’ Because that’s in part how Christians perceive God: not as some invisible dude in the sky, but as the ‘ground of being’ and the source of all virtue. Anybody who loves what is good and true is at least in part loving God, because those are his attributes. Accordingly, there are biblical verses which suggest that pursuing God and pursuing virtue are in large part equivalent (otherwise the latter would be idolatrous). For instance Proverbs 21:21 which states ‘whoever pursues righteousness and love finds life, prosperity and honour.’²²

In other words, we must care about virtue more than our own selfish interests, sacrificing our ego in the pursuit of that which is good and true. Faith and love go hand in hand: faith reaches out to, pursues something better because it has become captivated by virtue in some form. Where hypocrisy says ‘good enough’, faith rooted in love says ‘not good enough, I must do better because I have been compelled to love what is virtuous more than my pride.’ Hypocrisy does not really care about virtue, while faith rooted in love deeply cares about virtue, enough to continually pursue it even at our own expense.

The second greatest commandment, which Jesus said is ‘like the first’ is to ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’²³ I think the reason Jesus said the two commandments are alike is that obedience to the second commandment proceeds from obedience to the first. Both are about combating hypocrisy: if we care about virtue and not merely the perception of virtue, we will not use double standards on our neighbour. We will not inappropriately devalue them to inflate our ego, nor will we demand special lenience compared to them. We will treat them fairly, and even mercifully, just as we want to be treated fairly and mercifully. In other words, if we love what is right we will treat people rightly.

Also notice, keeping in mind our earlier description of faith, that the first and second commandments could be described as: ‘look upward at God (as your superior) and outward at your neighbour (as your equal).’ Love is about focusing on something outside of ourselves, in contrast to pride and hypocrisy which are focused on how much better I am than my neighbour (forgetting there is something above us), and how important my needs and grievances are compared to my neighbour’s (forgetting that they, too, are valuable in God’s eyes and have their own needs and grievances).

How any individual comes to love God / virtue and their neighbour at the expense of their ego is a bit of a mystery. They may learn to love through some religious instruction which captivated them as they grew up. They may learn from the example of someone else who treated them with fairness, kindness, and mercy, or who stood up for others, or who stood up for what is right regardless of the consequences. They may learn from some captivating philosophy. They may even learn from stories which portray a better reality than what they are currently experiencing. In all these scenarios, there is some agent – whether some religion, tradition, philosophy, role model, or story – which shows us the beauty of virtue, painting the picture that this is something valuable to pursue. This virtue becomes the object of our faith, where we hope and believe that, through the help of all these agents of virtue who have gone before us, who have opened windows for us into what is good and true; through the help of virtue itself which now inhabits our minds and hearts, we can become someone who embodies this virtue better, that we can live in a world where this virtue becomes more commonplace.

Thus faith, the pursuit of righteousness, is not about ‘self-help’, which implies that you are clever or adept at following some religious or philosophical rulebook to become a better person. It’s about a transformation sparked by virtue which has captivated us, compelling us to humbly pursue this object of our faith, becoming a better person in the process.

For Christians, the object of our faith, whom we view as the ultimate embodiment of virtue and thus the ultimate object of faith, is of course the person of Christ – and not only the virtue he embodied through his teachings and example, but he himself who empowers us to be better people; to love God and others more consistently over time. Jesus claimed to be the ‘light of the world’²⁴ and the ‘bread of life’,²⁵ among other metaphors (we touched on the vine and branch metaphor earlier), and indeed the central ritual of Christianity (Communion / the Eucharist) is about consuming the ‘flesh and blood’ of Christ on a regular basis, almost like taking our prescribed spiritual meds. The idea is that people are incomplete without God and find spiritual healing and fulfilment in God (who has atoned for our sins to make this possible).

This speaks to the ‘relational’ aspect of love for God touched on earlier. The gospel can be explained in terms of the restoration of a ruptured relationship between God and humanity. It is this relationship being made ‘right’ which is the source of ‘righteousness.’ Alone we are not enough, but God is, so by being close to God we become more like him.

And that’s where the philosophical explanations of the gospel reach their limit. If God does not exist to be in restored relationship with humanity, through which we are supernaturally forgiven, transformed, and empowered, then the object of our faith is reduced to the picture of virtue painted by the teachings and example of Jesus as told by the gospel authors, which carries far less weight. However, this still has some philosophical value. If I found out tomorrow that Christianity is untrue, I would not consider it a waste of time to have attempted to follow the Christ of the gospels, because to me he is such a captivating figure.

And though I believe that Jesus is the ultimate object of faith, I also believe that God grants measures of love and faith to people of all backgrounds, even those outside the church, who may have learned to love through some other avenue – who by grace have caught a glimpse of that which is supremely admirable and virtuous and stepped out in faith to pursue it. I have to imagine that God reveals himself in various ways to people, for one through the ‘agents of virtue’ mentioned above, such as the best of other religions and traditions, or perhaps even through nature itself as Paul argues in Romans 1:19-20²⁶ (Except while Paul argues that people are ‘without excuse’ for not glorifying God because God has made his eternal power and divine nature plain to them through Creation, perhaps that same evidence of eternal power and divine nature sparks faith in some, as they come to appreciate the beauty of life, goodness and truth bestowed on them by the Creator). I personally hope and suspect that God will treat many such people as though their faith was placed in Christ, because to the degree that their faith was placed in goodness and truth, it was placed in Christ (yet I also believe it is better to explicitly place one’s faith in Christ given the knowledge and opportunity to do so).

Meanwhile, there are many self-proclaimed Christians who never really learned to love what is good and true, or perhaps who did once but are now mired in hypocrisy. To them loving God is about paying lip service to certain Christian doctrines and traditions while disparaging those who don’t fit their mold. Their version of faith is not rooted in love and looks nothing like how love is described in the Bible.

The apostle Paul described love and stressed its paramount importance in his first letter to the Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects,²⁷ always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.²⁸

Read that last paragraph and then compare it to the vices we have been discussing. Most notably love is not easily angered. If we love God and virtue, we will be less tempted to let our anger follow the path of least resistance towards the addictive vices of contempt for others and self-pity, the former of which causes us to dishonor others and delight in evil, while the latter causes us to be self-seeking, envious, and keep extensive records of wrongs. If we love our neighbour, we will be less tempted to view them merely as scapegoats to compare ourselves to in anger, uttering proud boasts that we are better than them. To draw closer to God is to become ‘slow to anger,’²⁹ because God, who is love,³⁰ is slow to anger.

However we learn to love, it is what grounds and sustains our faith, causing us to trust, hope and persevere in what is good and true, even bearing much hardship for the sake of righteousness. Pursuing a version of righteousness that does not include a sense of wonder at the beauty of life, virtue and truth, that does not value human life or relationships, would be worthless. And that beauty, once recognized, inspires our continued pursuit of righteousness. Exercising our faith is not merely a cold duty but a fiery urge born of love that we have received from God and from others. We are filled up with love so that we may overflow.

This doesn’t mean that every day we will ‘feel like’ pursuing virtue and truth, and treating our neighbour with dignity and respect. Which brings up an important point, which is that love may involve feelings, but it is more than that. Our culture tends to view love as feelings of affection, whether towards a lover, a family member, friend, etc. And depending on what definition of love you’re using that may be valid (see Lewis’ ‘The Four Loves’). But love in the sense of ‘loving God and loving one’s neighbour as oneself’ involves a commitment to doing what is right by God and by our neighbour. Feelings of affection, desire, wonder, reverence, gratitude, etc. certainly help initiate and sustain this commitment (as we remember the taste of love that we have received from God and others), but the commitment must persist even when we don’t feel like it.

The pursuit of truth

A parallel to the pursuit of righteousness is the pursuit of truth. The pursuit of truth also requires faith of a kind. We humbly recognize that there is some deficiency or incompleteness in our knowledge, and we place our trust in a source of knowledge or method of investigation, hoping and believing that the truth is knowable or discoverable. This faith is sparked and sustained by an insatiable curiosity or love of learning.

If we place our trust in a religious source of knowledge, there is a certain humility to that. We recognize our limitations to figure out the truth on our own, so we turn to divine revelation. However, that humility evaporates the moment that we start to excoriate others for not trusting the same source as us. On the one hand, we are saying that we don’t trust our own assessment of the world and need to defer to divine revelation, and on the other hand, we’re saying that you should accept without question our assessment of what constitutes divine revelation.

There is a different kind of humility in constantly questioning our own assumptions and beliefs; in other words, in critical thinking – the ability to be critical of what we currently believe. Critical thinking is a cornerstone of the scientific method, which forms tentative conclusions from the best available evidence, but refines or rejects these conclusions the moment that new evidence emerges. Placing our faith in the scientific method is a different way to pursue the truth. This faith has been borne out in many subjects, as pioneers of various scientific disciplines have made mind-boggling advancements in our understanding of the world, stepping out into the unknown with the hope that some sense could be made of it. This scientific method, despite its massive success, is something that religious doctrine is often afraid of, because doctrines make definite claims that can be subjected to scrutiny.

I find that Christians are often obsessed with ‘being right’ at the expense of humility, endlessly codifying and sub-dividing to get the perfect doctrine, fearing that doubt in any aspect will become a slippery slope to the rejection of the entire religion. But I think it is better to be humble and wrong than to be prideful and right, because humility pursues what is right and is open to correction, whereas pride clings to any small measure of validation while ignoring other errors and inconsistencies. Hypocrisy in the intellectual sphere is the pretense of honest or unbiased thought, not actually caring about the truth, only the perception of credibility so we don’t have to question our beliefs.

My own approach to the tension between religious doctrine and critical thinking is the following:

I have no problem believing in God, miracles, or revealed truth – and in fact I do – but I cannot know for sure if many of the historical or doctrinal claims of Christianity are correct. I see transcendent, as-yet unmatched beauty in the narrative of the Christian faith, especially in the words and actions of Jesus as reported by the gospel authors, and believe that it accurately describes human nature while giving us a means to rise above its darkest parts. As an ongoing life exercise I am operating as though the core tenets of Christianity are true, attempting to apply the teachings of Jesus to my life. I believe that many of the tenets of the Christian faith are reasonable to believe in if one allows for the existence of God, but by its own principle of humility it is not bad to admit when we have trouble believing a given tenet.

And again, there is also a certain humility in trusting some form of authority over one’s own ability to think critically. ‘I’ll trust my church leaders or certain theologians who know what they’re talking about more than I do.’ But, as mentioned, this humility evaporates the moment that one begins to bludgeon others for being hesitant to accept the same authorities.

This perspective will be distasteful to Christians who believe that their tradition or biblical interpretation represents God’s direct, straightforward, factual word to humanity that can be believed with absolute certainty. I simply do not believe that we have been granted absolute certainty in most matters, including the question of biblical historicity or inerrancy. However, that does not absolve us from taking to heart the moral and spiritual lessons that can be gleaned from the Bible. To that point, I feel that the philosophy outlined in this essay is consistent with biblical texts and human experience such that I have observed.

Faith does the hard thing

Hypocrisy is about doing the easy thing – taking moral and intellectual shortcuts, inhabiting moral and intellectual comfort zones. We’ve already discussed how that laziness manifests as contempt for others and self-pity. Double standards are easier to apply than consistent standards.

Faith perceives these double standards that we normally operate by and strives for a better mode of being, believing that we can break out of that pattern individually and collectively, dominant though that pattern may be in the world:

• Against contempt for others, faith (rooted in love) refuses to debase the humanity of our enemies, instead affirming the unconditional value of other human beings and their potential for redemption.
• Against self-pity, faith (rooted in love) stops making excuses for the moral and intellectual failings of ourselves and our tribe, instead acknowledging them, seeing the need and potential for growth in ourselves and our community and exercising personal and tribal responsibility.

Let’s explore the above two points in more detail.

Affirming the unconditional value of human beings

It’s natural to assume that a person’s value is tied to their actions. While we all start out with an equal inherent value, it seems intuitive that this value can be degraded or upgraded by a person’s conduct in life, with the most evil of actions turning people into ‘pieces of shit’ deserving of nothing but the strongest contempt. Extreme examples are genocidal dictators, terrorists, war criminals, serial killers and rapists, etc. It is quite common for people to compare themselves to these evildoers, as that is one of the easiest moral comfort zones available to us: ‘at least I’m generally an upstanding member of society unlike those monsters!’

Christianity, in contrast, takes an extreme view on the matter: human value is unconditional; in other words, independent of our actions. Besides the concept that goes back to Genesis 1 that every human being is created in the image of God³¹, and thus has special honour and significance bestowed on them by God, Christianity goes further in insisting that Christ died for all sinners. Therefore all sinners have value to God, even the worst ones, meaning that we should also view other sinners as valuable. In that sense the crucifixion neutralizes the hypocrisy of contempt for others by lumping us all in the same boat: Christ died for you, meaning you’re a sinner; and he died for your enemy, meaning they’re redeemable.

Whether the thought of Christ dying for sinners moves you to tears or makes you scoff at the absurdity of the notion, the point is that our natural tendency to evaluate worth by actions is challenged. We are meant to take a step back and reflect on our common humanity. At base am I really so different from those evildoers? Given slightly different circumstances or upbringing or environment or brain chemistry, could I have committed similar horrors?

One of the starker lessons of the 20^th century, with the industrialization of warfare and mass slaughters, is that the average human is capable of great evil. Therefore denying the humanity of evildoers is, in a way, denying our own humanity. In our minds we are human and they are subhuman, but in reality they are human, and by our relative measures that would make us more than human. But it is hubris to elevate ourselves to that standing. As Jesus says in the gospels: ‘everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.’³²

If we declare others to be worthless, we risk falling on our own sword. Jesus taught that ‘the measure you use will be the measure you receive,’³³ and that ‘if you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven.’³⁴ Or ‘anyone who says ‘You fool!’ is in danger of hellfire.’³⁵ It’s not the anger that is necessarily the problem, or the word ‘fool,’ but the fact that your anger is rooted in contempt. Treat others as though they are worthless because of their sin, and God could easily treat you as though you are worthless because of your sin.

Consider Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep, where the shepherd leaves 99 sheep to search for one that has gone missing.³⁶ Or the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the father throws a party for his foolish son who finally came to his senses and returned home after squandering his inheritance.³⁷ The Father loved his son the same whether he was obedient or disobedient, and rejoiced when he turned away from his foolishness.

Or as another analogy, think of humans as coins of the same value. We all come out of the mint worth $1, let’s say (so we’re all loonies in Canadian-speak). Over time some coins become more tarnished than others, but that does not change their value – it simply obscures the image on the coin, the image of God that we are minted with. That tarnish can be polished to make the coin bright once more, and the bright coin can’t then say to a tarnished coin ‘I’m worth more than you,’ because it is objectively not.

You may not agree that even the worst evildoers have value. But the thing is, we have a strong tendency to devalue others in the first place, not only the ‘worst of the worst.’ We discussed the incentives for contempt and scapegoating earlier. Within grievance cultures, the bar for ‘piece of shit’ is drastically lowered so that we can demonize an entire group of people to feel good about ourselves. So I think you might agree that our perception of other people’s value is often skewed by selfish motivations, and that is something to be corrected.

It’s not even that the ‘POS’ pejorative is necessarily that bad in the heat of the moment upon witnessing evil behavior or rhetoric. We need to respond strongly to evil to show solidarity with its victims, and that is a strong reaction. But that reaction should not become a settled philosophical position used to dehumanize our enemies. Faith reaches out to a higher standard than our knee-jerk contempt, resisting the devaluation of other sinners on the basis of our common humanity and the possibility of redemption. Faith does the hard thing, visualizing the potential for change and growth even in our enemies, resisting the path of least resistance that grievance culture wishes you to take. It fights the strong compulsion to look downward at others and instead looks outward at others as equals who are eligible for compassion and even mercy.

This is part of what it means to love your neighbour as yourself. We don’t have to ‘like’ someone, but we must acknowledge their value and their potential for change and growth, because we want others to see that in us. Thomas Aquinas wrote, ‘to love is to will the good of another.’ We may not ever be ‘friends’ with someone who has wronged us or others (not in this life anyway), but we wish for them to change and grow to their full potential, and treat them accordingly to facilitate that. This calls to mind the book of Jonah, where the prophet Jonah did not want to preach to Nineveh because he didn’t want them to repent and be spared from destruction. He had contempt for his enemies. But God saw their potential for change and growth and basically forced Jonah kicking and screaming to preach to them, and to Jonah’s consternation, they did repent.

You will receive scorn and even abuse from your fellow tribespeople for treating the enemy with dignity, adhering to a higher standard than them (not dissimilar to how Cain attacked Abel for making a better offering), but if it must be so it must be so. The bottom line is that we need to hit the brakes on the powerful compulsion to be a righteous warrior against a deficient enemy tribe, letting go of our contempt.

But even as we learn to love our enemies, letting go of our contempt, this doesn’t mean we stop fighting injustice; it just means we change the focus of our fight. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:12:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.³⁸

Essentially, according to Paul our fight is against demonic power, not people. You could interpret ‘demonic power’ as forces which keep us bound to our sins; forces which keep us locked in our own hell. So far as it depends on us, we strive to fight not bad people, but bad ideas, attitudes, practices and systems. Obviously, sometimes in self-defence or in defence of the weak, it is necessary to literally fight other people. But that’s not our goal. We recognize that utopia will not be achieved by punishing, isolating, or killing off the enemy. Or even necessarily by defeating them at the ballot box. Major divisions do not go away simply by winning elections. In Canada and the States, at least, we’ve kind of reached a situation where the populace flips back and forth between opposing parties which try to undo everything that the last party implemented. Extreme rhetoric and dislike for the other party prevents acceptable middle ground from being negotiated. A lack of respectful debate dumbs down policy discussions into mud-slinging fights.

By shifting the focus of our anger to bad ideas, attitudes, practices and systems (including those within our own ranks) we remove the addictive temptation of scapegoating an enemy rival and lay the groundwork for real progress through communication and negotiation.

Exercising personal and tribal responsibility

Personal responsibility is an easy enough concept to understand…instead of constantly blaming outside factors for our lack of character and sub-par behaviour, we work on our flaws so that we can become better people who have a positive impact on those around us and on society in general.

Tribal responsibility means challenging wrong behaviour and rhetoric within our tribe so that it can become better as a whole. One’s ‘tribe’, for the purposes of this discussion, could be just about any group of people one shares an affinity with, whom we generally view in a positive light and with whom we have some solidarity. A tribe can be ethnic, national, familial, religious, ideological, political, sports-based, or just about anything you can think of that unites people.

I find there are many people who are pretty good at personal responsibility who, frankly, suck at tribal responsibility. That might be because personal responsibility is a feature of most worldviews, since self-improvement is just a part of growing up. But it’s harder to criticize our tribe, mainly because we want to fit in and our identity is tied to it. There’s a fear that by criticizing our tribe, we will lose not only the support of our fellow tribespeople but lose ourselves in a sense. Our values and beliefs, which are sacred to us, are tied to our tribe. Therefore the tribe must be defended at all costs, especially during tribal warfare when the tribe is being attacked.

Nevertheless, tribal responsibility is a moral duty. If our tribe is in the wrong, we are in the best position to correct it. Our criticisms carry the most weight because they come from a place of love for our tribe, meaning we are the least biased against the tribe compared to outsiders. So we need to get over our fear of criticizing our own tribe, and this is where faith comes in. Faith rooted in love – love not only of God/virtue but of our fellow tribespeople – trusts that criticizing our tribe when warranted is ultimately the best thing for everyone, even though it causes pain within the tribe right now, possibly hurting the feelings of our friends and neighbours, costing us a comfortable position amongst them, not to mention costing the tribe leverage in the culture war. Faith does the hard thing, looking past the temporary pain to a future that is brighter for everyone. Instead of looking only inward at what seems best for our tribe, we look outward at its moral responsibilities towards others which are being neglected, or the pain it is causing others. Instead of looking backward at past grievances which allegedly justify the tribe’s current behaviour, we look forward towards change and growth in our community. Faith visualizes this potential for change and acts to bring that about, even if we never see it ourselves.

Jesus, in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets, practiced tribal responsibility by criticizing his own people (the Jews), particularly the religious leaders and teachers of his time.

Now, before I go on, I would like to point out that Jesus’ example of tribal responsibility has been horribly misunderstood by Christians over the past two millennia, who have scapegoated Jewish people instead of applying Jesus’ example, which would mean exercising tribal responsibility within the church. There is no place for anti-Semitism within the church.

So, Jesus held his people to a very high standard (see the Sermon on the Mount). This is despite the fact that the Jews are ‘God’s chosen people.’ That privilege did not give them special lenience in Jesus’ eyes; rather, Jesus taught that ‘from he to whom much is given, much will be demanded’³⁹. Their privilege actually meant that they were more responsible for behaving morally than outsiders were. Conservative Christians, as the more ardent defenders of traditional systems which have accumulated privilege over time, should take note.

On the flip side, Jesus held his people to high moral standards despite the fact that they were an oppressed people group, under occupation by often brutal Roman overlords. Jesus did not side with ‘the Revolution’ of the time (the Zealot movement), and preached the advent of ‘the kingdom of heaven’ which is ‘in your midst’⁴⁰ rather than the re-establishment of the kingdom of Israel by overthrowing the Romans. Even Roman oppression was not an excuse for his people to neglect personal and collective moral responsibility. Liberal Christians, as the more ardent defenders of the underprivileged or oppressed classes, should take note of that aspect of Jesus’ example.

The religious leaders and teachers did not appreciate Jesus calling out their lacklustre spiritual leadership. They doubtless viewed him as a traitor for calling out their flaws rather than focusing on the Roman threat, and ironically teamed up with said mortal enemies to have him killed.

The lesson here is that tribal responsibility is a lonely, uncomfortable and potentially dangerous calling, one which will earn you only contempt from your tribe, which views you as a traitor, and mockery from the enemy tribe, which doesn’t care about what happens to you but will appreciate the infighting sparked by your rebukes. When Jesus was executed only a few loyal followers were left at the foot of the cross. The gospels of Mark and Matthew have Jesus crying ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’⁴¹ moments before breathing his last breath (echoing Psalm 22⁴², which Christians have taken as fulfilment of a Messianic prophecy).

Jesus’ rejection by his own people is accentuated in the account of Barabbas, a Jewish revolutionary against Rome. The Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, offered to release either Barabbas or Jesus as a show of good faith at Passover. The Jewish religious leaders incited the crowds to choose Barabbas.⁴³ The lesson here, again badly misinterpreted by Christians throughout the centuries, is not that the Jewish people are particularly evil for rejecting Jesus, but that we all tend to choose Barabbas figures. We want someone who goes to bat for us and our tribe (like a revolutionary), not someone who tells us we need to be saved from sin, meaning that we and our people are sinners. Not someone who preaches repentance, meaning that we and our people are on the wrong path. 

I’ve always wondered why it was necessary for God to have a ‘chosen people’ if, from the Christian perspective, the end result was going to be a universal religion anyway. One possible reason is that having a tribe is a universal human experience, so Jesus had to be relatable in that sense.  But the usual human hope is that one’s God will go to bat for their tribe, vanquishing the enemy tribe and making theirs dominant (indeed, this is what the Jews in Jesus’ day expected of the Messiah). Evidently Jesus had something different in mind for his tribe. By exercising tribal responsibility, Jesus provided a blueprint for all of us tribal-minded people to follow. He died because he challenged his tribe to be better, serving as an example for people of all tribes, everywhere, to do the right thing regardless of what their tribe demands of them, thus laying the foundation for a universal religion (which other members of his tribe – the apostles, disciples and others – had the privilege of starting up and preserving. And one of these, the apostle Paul, understood the assignment when he wrote: ‘what business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside?’⁴⁴)

I would go so far as to consider ‘Tribal Responsibility’ an atonement theory. Atonement theories (literally ‘at-one-ment’) try to make sense of how Jesus’ death makes us ‘one’ with God again, having been alienated from him due to sin.  In the case of Tribal Responsibility, Jesus’ willingness to challenge his own people to be better, even though it cost him his life, humbles our proud tribal mindset and prompts us to do the same. Then, by ‘picking up our crosses’ and following Jesus’ example, we renounce tribal hypocrisy and unite with the One who loves all his children, no matter which tribe they are from. In faith we recognize that our sacrifice is the right thing to do for everyone, including our tribe. We believe that when our tribe is spiritually healthy, everyone benefits. We are paving the way for a brighter future, though we may not see it yet (and maybe we won’t in this life). Through this demonstration of self-sacrifice in the pursuit of tribal responsibility as the path to a better future, the crucifixion neutralizes tribal self-pity, just as it neutralizes contempt for others by showing the enemy tribe to be redeemable. The cross deals a fatal blow to tribal hypocrisy, and hypocrisy in general, allowing us to approach God in faith.

Compassion, Challenge and Growth

To summarize the previous section in different words, one might say that faith does the hard thing by having compassion for the humanity of other sinners, especially those in an enemy tribe, and embracing challenge when it comes to ourselves and our tribe.

Compassion and challenge are two fundamental values which, in the right proportions, promote growth. I’ll define ‘compassion’ as a feeling of concern towards those who need help in some way (instruction, resources, healing, even forgiveness). I’ll define ‘challenge’ as a call or invitation to be better in some way, or to take part in something noble. Compassion grounds us, lets us know we are loved and have a place to grow, while challenge lets us know we have a duty or role to play which we are not currently fulfilling, spurring us towards greater things which will ultimately benefit society. Compassion is the rich soil in which we are planted, while challenge is the bright sun which invites us to extend our shoots towards it. Every individual needs a healthy mix of both in order to grow.

And we want every individual to grow. As we’ve discussed, to love others is to want them to grow to their full potential, regardless of how we currently feel about them. Recall the many plant metaphors in the gospels when it comes to faith and the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is full of growth-oriented people, each a branch that is connected to the vine (Christ).

But hypocrisy is selective about applying compassion and challenge. It challenges others but not oneself or one’s tribe. It has compassion for oneself and one’s tribe but not for others. Moreover, it distorts each of these values, abusing them for selfish purposes. It turns challenge into contempt for others, and it turns compassion into excessive pity and self-pity. Instead of warm sunlight inviting a shoot to grow, so to speak, you get harsh sunlight scorching it. Instead of rich soil providing a place for a plant to grow, you get waterlogged soil smothering it. In either case growth is inhibited.

Grievance cultures, being full of hypocrisy, do not promote growth. They do not promote a healthy mix of compassion and challenge; they value one at the expense of the other, distorting and pitting these values against each other.

Right- and Left-Wing Grievance Cultures

I have found that liberals tend to value compassion more than challenge, while conservatives tend to value challenge more than compassion. The same is true for women and men respectively (with many exceptions), probably for reasons of both nature and nurture, which may explain why more women identify as liberal than men and more men identify as conservative than women.⁴⁵ But this essay will focus on political divides, not the battle of the sexes.

I wrote earlier that contempt within grievance cultures is based on the perceived deficiency in the values or character of your opponents, leading to them threatening / ruining society. Liberal contempt for conservatives is then based on their perception of conservative compassion deficiency, while conservative contempt for liberals is based on their perception of liberal challenge deficiency. This is reflected in the pejoratives that either side uses against the other, e.g. ‘bigots’ vs. ‘snowflakes.’ As these two fundamental values are pitted against each other in tribal political warfare, they become increasingly isolated and distorted, when they should complement each other. In tribal warfare, nobody wants to admit that their opponent might be right about something (out of pride or fear of losing leverage), so they double down on more extreme positions instead of finding common ground. Challenge, instead of merely directing someone to their duty, becomes about blasting and degrading those who are weak or who fail to fit the mold of tradition, like an abusive father (or like scorching sunlight which kills a plant, as in the above analogy). Compassion, instead of merely showing pity towards those who need help, becomes about coddling those who need to grow, like an overprotective mother, or like soil which becomes too waterlogged, keeping a young shoot from growing. More bluntly stated, challenge without compassion turns you into an asshole who goes out of their way to pick fights with and find flaws in others, while compassion without challenge turns you into a coward who chronically avoids telling people what they need to hear.

Since challenge is susceptible to contempt, while compassion is susceptible to excessive pity and self-pity, I think it’s fair to say that contempt for others is a more ‘natural’ right-wing vice while self-pity is a more ‘natural’ left-wing vice. Yet you may have encountered some quite contempt-filled liberals and some quite self-pitying conservatives. This should not be a surprise. Hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug of grievance culture. Whatever values you champion become merely cudgels to be used in the culture war, rather than sincerely held convictions. Without integrity, there is nothing stopping you from eventually embracing your opponents’ vices. This is especially true because these vices feed each other, as mentioned earlier. Increase contempt for the enemy by looking for every little thing to criticize, and you’ll feel more hard done by. Increase self-pity by lowering the bar for what constitutes harm, and you’ll hate the enemy more. Both conservative and liberal grievance culture warriors eventually wield the sword and the shield of hypocrisy, regardless of which one is more natural to them. Each becomes like their enemy, sometimes worse. Liberals who are always sounding off about ‘bigots’ can be some of the most hateful, toxic people around, and conservatives who are always sounding off about ‘snowflakes’ can be some of the most sensitive, whiny, cowardly people around.

***

The following sections will attempt to describe the nature of right- and left-wing grievance cultures in America and Canada by examining each side’s relationship to contempt for others and self-pity. We’ll look at how these vices contribute to the decay of moral and intellectual integrity on either side of the political divide.

This decay is not necessarily ‘equal’ on both sides, as grievance cultures can vary in their intensity and in the overall legitimacy of their grievances. Moreover, the intensity and legitimacy of grievances are not necessarily proportional. For instance, at this moment in time, it is my opinion that right-wing grievance culture is especially potent and dangerous in America, with fewer legitimate grievances (and more fabricated ones) than left-wing grievance culture. Perhaps this is because right-wing grievance culture has been actively – and maybe intentionally – cultivated over the past decades by entities like Fox News, a process which has been accelerated through the MAGA movement. Nevertheless, left-wing grievance culture is also widespread, has been growing in intensity and scale, and frequently flares up in extreme ways. Also it is more dominant in Canada, where I live, so keep in mind that my examples draw from that reality, not just the US reality. We need to look at the whole picture of how we got here, regardless of whether one side is currently worse or not. The pendulum can always swing back the other way easily and quickly enough.  It can also be difficult to compare left- and right-wing grievance cultures, since they err in different ways with different consequences. But the one commonality is human nature – both liberals and conservatives are humans with the same fundamental vices.

Conservative contempt for others

The first significant ‘challenge’ that a person comes across in life is to navigate the complex set of pre-existing rules and norms in society. A challenge-oriented person is likely to grit their teeth and adhere to even the most challenging rules. It’s kind of this ‘it is what it is, I’ll eat what I’m served’ mentality. Alternatively, if they have a rebellious streak they may buck the norms any chance they get because they see that as a challenge. But I think the former is more common because children are usually taught to view the pre-existing norms favorably. The result is that these people (whom we call conservatives) tend to value tradition and a sense of duty towards pre-existing norms. Embracing one’s duty is the way we become stronger and more unified as a society, much like a sports team becomes better when players train hard and play their positions well. The conservative goal is to create resilient people who can withstand adversity in a harsh world and contribute to society. Conservatives are more likely, for example, to glorify the military and patriotism, advocate for teens leaving the house at 18, and use language like ‘getting over it’, ‘toughening up’, ‘tough love,’ etc. Society needs to prepare people to fulfil their role.

Conservative contempt thus targets those who have apparently failed to answer the call of challenge: those who seem not to be fulfilling their duty with respect to traditions and norms, whether as a citizen, parent, employee, member of a religion, etc. The norms have kept the ship afloat over time and must be upheld. Those who fail to live up to them are seen as useless. Those who reject them are seen as a threat. Essentially, conservative contempt targets the ‘weak’ and the ‘different’, punishing any lapse in duty, however minor, and any deviation from norms, however benign. This is how we keep society healthy, or how we return to an idealized past where the norms were upheld (how we ‘make society great again’). The ‘weak’ category has corresponded, at various places and times, to people like the homeless, the poor, drug addicts, the disabled, the mentally ill, etc. The ‘different’ category has corresponded to leftists, young upstarts, people of other races, cultures, or religions, public intellectuals, etc.

Contempt for the weak is like telling someone with a broken arm to just ‘get over it.’ The problem will only get worse if they try to use the arm as they normally do. Contempt for the different is like yelling at someone who speaks a different language. Nothing constructive can happen until an effort is made to understand the other language. But contempt doesn’t care. People are viewed not as inherently valuable individuals but as cogs in a social machine that works for the majority, and if the cog is defective or doesn’t fit, it can be discarded. At its worst, this sort of attitude has led to atrocities like the Holocaust.

American right-wing grievance culture is not as advanced as Nazi Germany, but there are similarities, and if left unaddressed it could get there with the right triggers. There is enough hatred out there towards liberals, immigrants, trans and queer people, drug addicts, etc. It is not uncommon to hear such people referred to as ‘demonic’ by religious right-wingers. On the fringes (but not fringe enough), there are outlandish conspiracy theories which serve as moral and intellectual comfort zones. If your enemies are inhuman pedophile monsters who kill babies in bloody satanic rituals (rhetoric reminiscent of anti-Semitic ‘blood libel’), you don’t need to think about the character, behaviour and arguments of your own side. You can spend all your energy as a righteous warrior on the attack.

Of course, most conservatives do not outright embrace the most extreme rhetoric and conspiracy theories. The more ‘mainstream’ rhetoric is spouted by entities like Fox News. Most of their ire is directed at ‘the Left’ and Democrat politicians, who are moving the country further away from an idealized past. In fact, that seems to be the main point of the network: not to report on the news with a conservative slant, but to use current events as a pretext to talk about liberal stupidity, liberal corruption, liberal hypocrisy, liberal malice, liberal incompetence, etc., to show what a threat liberals are to society – in contrast to the good, patriotic conservatives who resist them. And despite this naked partisan cheerleading, the primetime hosts also try to convince viewers that they are less hypocritical than the ‘mainstream media’ because they are honest about their naked partisanship, which is presented as just their ‘opinion’ and not necessarily as ‘the facts.’ But if you’re aware of your partisan double standards and make no attempt to correct for them, that makes you more of a hypocrite, not less.

The whole charade calls to mind the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector:

“Thank God that I am not like those godless liberal snowflakes! I’m a proud, flag-waving American; I work hard; I support the military, the economy and blue-collar workers; I go to church, support traditional values and vote for the right party.” 

Note that none of these emphases are necessarily wrong – it’s just that these are the shallow comparisons conservatives make to avoid addressing the bad behavior and rhetoric that they and their tribe engage in. Constant whataboutism is the name of the game, the default response to any criticism. By bombarding viewers with liberal transgressions, real or invented, right-wing media provides a constant deflection from addressing the sins of their own party (including various crimes committed by Republican politicians, ranging from abuses of power to sexual and financial crimes). That way their viewers keep voting Republican, even if their own candidate is the unrepentant mascot of the seven deadly sins.

By keeping viewers wrapped around the pointed fingers of rabid pundits, right-wing media conditions conservatives to bark at liberals on TV like a dog at the mailman. Instead of focusing on living out the values they were raised with, they are trained to reflexively attack whatever the enemy is doing or saying, and are thus easily steered into extreme and contradictory stances. In other words, by inflaming contempt-filled anger in its viewers, right-wing media turns them into reactionary, not principled people. Outlets like Fox News have been responsible for converting significant swathes of Christians across several generations into easily-manipulated outrage addicts, seriously deficient in the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.⁴⁶ This is not to say that everyone who watches Fox News is like that, but that is the path you are on if you are watching this stuff religiously and aren’t exceptionally self-controlled and self-aware.

Trumpism / MAGA is the perfect complement to Fox News. The movement is popular precisely because of the way that legitimate criticisms bounce off of Trump. He merely dismisses them as ‘fake news’ or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ and deflects by furiously attacking anyone who makes them. This is an attractive thing for conservatives, who are sick of listening to criticisms of conservatism, religion or tradition by liberals, who impudently allege that the ‘good old days’ had their problems which linger to this day. It’s tempting to just brush it all off like Trump does, instead of engaging with criticisms. And not only does he brush off criticisms; he mocks the people who make them in an entertaining manner, making his supporters laugh, further earning their starry-eyed devotion that overlooks all flaws.

For the purposes of this essay, my problem is not necessarily with past Trump ‘voters’ nor necessarily with policies enacted by Trump. It would be foolish and arrogant to claim that all his administration’s policies were / are wrong, as I am no expert in running a country. Certainly, bad character has led and will always lead to bad policies (e.g. giving ICE the green light to terrorize civilians, cutting life-saving charitable aid, implementing tariffs to strong-arm allies while threatening annexation), and will cast doubt on the motivations behind every policy. It is highly naïve to imagine otherwise (to all the people who said ‘we elected a president, not a pastor’ and that character doesn’t matter as long as the policies are good). But it would also be foolish to say that every policy is completely bad. Some of them may redress excesses of previous administrations, however ham-fistedly they are implemented. There are valid debates to be had about things like globalism vs. national interest, manufacturing vs. outsourcing, appropriate levels of military spending, appropriate degrees of taxation and regulation, appropriate levels of immigration and border security, etc. I’m chiefly criticizing the contempt for self-reflection that seems fundamental to the Trumpist movement; the reactionary, hypocritical whataboutism, the constant indignation that is hyper-focused on liberal sins (many of which are exaggerated or invented) as a means of downplaying or ignoring conservative sins, for the purposes of amassing and clinging to power. It’s for those reasons that MAGA is a bona fide grievance culture, full of hypocrisy and idolatry which puts its party and its messiah (Trump) before what is good and true.

Liberal self-pity

The righteous victim in liberal thought is anyone who apparently lacks the privileges of the majority; victims of oppressive traditional systems that favour the majority. Left-wing ideology focuses on what has gone wrong in the past and how to fix it, looking forward to an ideal future rather than romanticizing the past. In this utopian future, the marginalized will be brought into the fold and the privileged will be humbled, and all will be well because of that. Compassion is the central value being extolled: telling the marginalized they have a place in society, gathering in rather than shunning or expelling.

The targets of this compassion are, once again, the ‘weak and the different.’ The homeless, refugee, poor, sick, addicts, disabled, mentally ill. People of different faiths, races and cultures (with respect to the Western majority), people with different sexual orientations or gender identities, people with non-traditional ideas, and so on.

Caring for the marginalized and disenfranchised is a noble pursuit for which there is a great deal of precedent in the Christian tradition, rooted in the example and teachings of Jesus. Those who lack the privileges of the majority tend to have more legitimate grievances than those belonging to the majority, which must be addressed.

However, left-wing grievance culture enshrines weakness and difference for the sake of maintaining permanent leverage over the privileged classes, who are said to represent everything wrong with society. Liberal righteous victims define themselves by their disadvantages relative to the majority to portray themselves as fundamental or permanent victims. They portray themselves as more helpless, innocent and fragile than they really are to increase the sense of oppression and gain more moral and political leverage. This grants them exemption from moral responsibility, from the need to change and grow as a person. They are too hard-done-by to have to think about change and growth. Moreover, merely by existing as a member of a victim class, they are part of the virtuous ‘resistance’ against privileged systems, in relation to which they can cement their role as victims. Meanwhile, their more privileged ‘allies’ can claim moral superiority and ignore their own need to change and grow merely by voicing support for this ‘resistance.’

Patriarchy, systemic racism, and oligarchy are examples of said privileged systems which oppress the victim classes. And it’s not that these systems do not exist and are not a problem, but I think they are made out to be more sinister, pervasive, permanent and controlling than they are, like the dark side of the Force, to increase the sense of threat for political leverage. When we speak of ‘systems’ we speak of physical realities enforced by human attitudes. Change attitudes and the physical realities can be changed. But ironically, attitudes won’t be changed as easily if you overstate your case for political leverage, because many people who might otherwise be sympathetic will be put off by that and assume you are always exaggerating (like the boy who cried wolf).

The left-wing obsession with class and privilege is a vehicle for this exaggeration. It’s convenient because privileged and underprivileged categories will always exist, and therefore there will always be something to pick fights about. To this end left-wing grievance culture seeks to ‘classify’ people based on their privilege or lack thereof. This relates to the concept of ‘intersectionality.’ Privileges and disadvantages intersect or stack, like stats in a video game, to determine one’s permanent privilege status. At the top of the hierarchy are rich, healthy, white, straight, Christian men (who are the worst villains), while at the bottom are poor, disabled, neurodivergent, non-binary, queer, non-Christian, darker-skinned, immigrant women. In progressive circles it almost appears to be a badge of honour to possess as many intersecting disadvantages as possible, because then you are amassing leverage for the cause. It’s as though you are a decorated general in the progressive movement, with a medal for each disadvantage, each of which serves as a token offering to moral responsibility (this phenomenon has also been referred to as the ‘Oppression Olympics’ or as ‘Identity Politics’).

By defining oneself by one’s permanent victim status, one quickly veers from self-advocacy to self-pity. If you believe that you are ‘fundamentally’ a victim, no amount of progress will be enough, and you will see oppression everywhere, in every interaction, as an insurmountable fixture of reality rather than a pattern of discrete grievances which can be resolved in time. This outlook breeds despair and resentment, in which case a person is now doubly disadvantaged – having no hope to overcome the real barriers that they experience, and wasting energy blaming a myriad of intersecting factors for their situation instead of doing what they can to improve it.

This is why, while I will not say that grievance culture causes depression to the same degree as other factors, it certainly reinforces it, contributing to a general gloomy pall over society. The situation is painted to be as dire as possible to maintain leverage in political struggles. Advocates for mental health should be interested in resisting grievance culture for this reason.

But as someone who is quite high up on the intersectional totem pole, it is neither my place, nor my desire, nor my job to define where the line is between self-advocacy and self-pity when it comes to the under-privileged. In general, I think it is best for the privileged to try to discern the self-advocacy in the complaints of the less privileged, while the less privileged should try to discern the self-pity in the complaints of fellow members of a less privileged group. This ensures that both parties are coming to the table in good faith.

For instance, when you consider support initiatives for the disadvantaged, I’d like to err on the side of perceiving self-advocacy rather than self-pity. Like Affirmative Action in the States, or financial support for indigenous groups in Canada. Yet wherever the line between self-advocacy and self-pity is, it is sometimes rather obvious when it has been crossed, and egregiously so, which will serve as an extreme example of how self-pity harms society. These examples have to do with crime, specifically violent crime, excused by self-pity.

Here in Canada much has been made of our ‘revolving door’ justice system, where race factors into sentencing of criminals. For instance, if one is part of a ‘vulnerable population’ and commits a crime, even a violent crime, judges may factor that in and give a lighter sentence or grant them bail or parole despite repeat offences. Some in this situation have gone on to commit heinous crimes while out on bail or parole (e.g. Miles Sanderson, an indigenous man on parole who went on a stabbing spree in 2022 that left 11 dead). Legislation had previously been introduced by the Liberal government to make these race-based judgments because of ‘the disproportionate impacts that the bail system has on these populations.’ Moreover, a ‘principle of restraint’ was introduced to favour release at the earliest opportunity over detention.⁴⁷

The problem is that this line of thinking does nobody any good in these cases – neither the victims, the perpetrators, or their community members (who are more often than not the victims). It may make the incarcerated minority stats look better, which the Liberals can cynically point to to say that they’ve made progress, but they haven’t made progress. What they’ve done is give credence to self-pitying excuses that people with criminal proclivities always use to justify their actions, whether they’re a minority or not. Rather than learning to face up to what they have done and change their behaviour, criminals will be incentivized to keep employing these self-pitying excuses as they re-offend. Encouraging one form of evil (violent self-pity) to combat another (discrimination) simply shifts the problem instead of solving it. And now even the current Liberal government under prime minister Mark Carney has admitted the need for bail reform.⁴⁸

Other examples of violence excused or downplayed by the Left include the BLM riots of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, when people were shot and killed during riots including black police officer David Dorn⁴⁹, and on a much more extreme note the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7^th, 2023. I remember guests on CBC quickly pointing out that these atrocities did not ‘happen in a vacuum’, as though anything could mitigate the evil on display that day, and this language was later repeated by the UN secretary general⁵⁰. But Western liberals have been weirdly tolerant of Hamas supporters or apologists in their ranks, simply because Muslims face discrimination in the West and Palestinians are the underdog in a clash between two religious fundamentalist grievance cultures (a clash in which, to be clear, Israel has also committed inexcusable war crimes against Palestinians, often equal in malice and greater in scope than October 7^th). It’s an example of how the Left may uncritically accept ‘diverse’ viewpoints even when those differences clash with liberal values.

White liberals are not wrong to criticize fellow white people for discrimination or racist sentiments, challenging them to self-reflect. In this regard, they do better than conservatives. Where they go too far is in sucking up too much oxygen from the room and not allowing minority or disadvantaged voices a platform who have constructive criticism for their people. These voices are crucial, because the reality is that, while historical disadvantages contribute greatly to disproportionate crime amongst disadvantaged groups, so does grievance culture when allowed to fester. That’s just human nature. Disadvantaged people are humans who have the same fundamental vices as everyone else. And people who are part of these communities are in the best position to resist grievance culture in their ranks (recall Tribal Responsibility).

If conservatism at its worst represents challenge at the expense of compassion, then progressivism at its worst represents compassion at the expense of challenge. If extreme conservatism tells a person with a broken arm to just ‘fight through it,’ extreme progressivism tells the person they don’t need to do any physical therapy to heal properly, that they’re fine just the way they are, and that it’s ‘mean’ to tell them to do their exercises because that makes them uncomfortable. The result is that healing takes longer or the bone might not heal properly. In the context of disadvantaged communities with crime problems, failing to address the immorality of crime, especially violent crime, just contributes to more stagnation.

Self-pity on both sides of the political spectrum is probably also reinforced by the huge Western emphasis on individual rights. Rights are a good thing inasmuch as they protect us from exploitation, but an over-emphasis on rights means we are more often thinking about what the world owes us, rather than what we owe the world (which is exactly what self-pity does). With respect to many hot-button culture war issues, partisans are only thinking about exercising their rights, without asking themselves if something is actually ‘right.’ For example on the liberal side:

• I have the right to live as I please…but is it right to fritter away my life with various addictions? Drugs, video games, gambling, TV shows, etc.?
• I have the right to representation…but is it right to milk the system?
• I have the right to unionize and strike, but is it right to destroy my employer’s ability to earn revenue while demanding a bigger slice of the pie, all while dragging the company’s name through the mud in the public eye?
• I have the right to my body…but is it right to kill the fetus in my womb?

Conservative self-pity

Conservative self-pity mirrors liberal self-pity, though conservatives would like to deny it. Conservatives also envision sinister, pervasive and controlling ‘systems’ in relation to which they can claim to be fundamental or permanent victims. For example, the ‘New World Order’, Globalism, the Deep State, Socialism, Secularism, etc. These systems are said to oppress the conservative righteous victim, who is usually described something like ‘the hard-working, church-going, salt-of-the Earth patriot who makes an honest living and leads a simple life.’ This simple way of life is threatened by elites who seek to belittle and marginalize average Americans in favour of the weak and the different, ne’er-do-wells and people of other faiths and cultures, supplanting stability in the name of diversity, all so they can sow division and take control of people who would otherwise be strong and free, grounded in their traditions. Traditional values are ‘under attack’.

Evidence for this ‘attack’ on tradition is continually sought for the purposes of obtaining more leverage in the culture war, and the bar for what constitutes this evidence is lowered. People saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’ is evidence for a ‘War on Christmas,’ for instance. In general, any move towards secularism or plurality is viewed as an attempt to marginalize religious conservatives, rather than simply being sensitive to the fact that there is a wide range of religious backgrounds in society. There seems to be great insecurity amongst conservatives that unless the country and its institutions are ‘officially’ Christian, Christianity will decline. The irony is that the more that Christians shove their religion down the throats of non-Christians, the more unpalatable it becomes to the masses. More importantly, the more Christianity is tied to a self-pitying grievance culture, the less authentically Christian it becomes. Christians in theory are supposed to be joyful even when undergoing hardship and persecution,⁵¹ and are supposed to keep ‘no record of wrongs.’⁵² Conservative self-pity keeps a long list of (supposed) wrongs committed by liberals to trot out at every opportunity for leverage.

The conservative persecution complex can be especially intense among Christians, because we are told in the Bible to expect persecution for following Jesus. Thus, some Christians see it everywhere. But even if persecution is expected, it doesn’t mean that any hostility we face is indicative of us following Jesus. Some (or most) of it may be due to the fact that Christians can be closed-minded, hostile and judgmental towards others first.

This is not to say that conservatives have no legitimate grievances. In parts of society that are now majority-liberal, there is a degree of bullying, demonization and marginalization of conservatives that goes on, as we will discuss later. There can also be a high degree of arrogance in liberal politics and institutions which leads to doubling down on ideas and policies which affect the average person negatively, and conservative (or non-conforming liberal) counterarguments are dismissed as mis- or dis-information.

But again it’s a bit like the boy who cried wolf. Because there is such a pronounced persecution complex on the Right, legitimate complaints are watered down by the constant griping and whining. Constant outrage loses credibility fast.

In the intellectual sphere, resentment is directed at an elitist liberal intelligentsia which has contempt for the ignorance and stupidity of conservative ‘rubes.’ As backlash, conservatives point out the lack of common sense, narrow-mindedness and arrogance of the ‘so-called experts’, and they’re not always wrong about that. But they go too far by developing this chip on their shoulders against all mainstream expertise, using the arrogance of the intelligentsia as an excuse to buoy their own arrogance, resenting the fact that someone claims to know better than them. Some of this resentment seems to be rooted in intellectual insecurity, especially if the person dropped out of high school or never went to college or university. That of course does not make them unintelligent, but it does make them easier prey for people who try to manipulate them by validating their intelligence. Conspiracy theorists appeal to people’s egos by telling them that they are part of the few who know what’s really going on, unlike the sheep who follow the mainstream narrative. Being anti-mainstream becomes an easy substitute for critical thinking, a sort of token offering to intellectual rigor.

Trumpism is steeped in self-pity, as its figurehead is steeped in self-pity, constantly whining about being maligned by the media, the Democrats and others. Nothing is ever his fault. Any criticism is ‘fake news’ or ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.’ Any failure of his administration is a result of Democrat sabotage, or the fault of his lackeys whom he readily throws under the bus. If he loses the election, it was rigged. Trump readily invents grievances and his followers eat it up. The victim complex allows them to excuse Trump’s various crimes and misdeeds, or those of other Republicans, normalizing corruption so that it can be employed to their advantage in the future. Lust for power, and the need to maintain a sense of moral superiority and leverage in the culture war, makes Republicans allergic to responsibility and accountability, excusing increasingly evil behavior and rhetoric, unable to stop the downward slide into depravity because they have conditioned themselves not to call out sin in their midst.

Finally, as with liberal self-pity, conservative self-pity is influenced by the Western emphasis on individual rights, such that partisans only think about exercising their rights, not about what is actually ‘right.’ For instance:

• I have the right to free speech…but is it right to blurt out whatever crude thought comes into our heads, aggressively challenging others without thinking about the effect of our words (or tone) on them? Similarly, is it right to be quick to share online content without considering the source, as long as it confirms our biases and strokes our ego?
• I have the right to amass wealth…but is it right to keep it all to myself while others are struggling to get by?
• I have the right to bear arms…but is it right to treat dangerous weapons like toys, use and store them carelessly, advocate for continued mass-production and easy access to them, wield them on a family Christmas card, etc.?
• I have the right to self-defence and to protect my property…but is it right to fantasize about shooting criminals (e.g. burglars and looters), and use violence as a first resort at any spectre of a threat (like some cops do)?
• I have the right to practice my religion…but is it right to do so in a showy, imposing manner which tries to pressure others into conforming rather than inviting them to participate?

***

Christians are supposed to be ‘shrewd as snakes and harmless as doves.’⁵³ Grievance culture gets us to abandon our moral and intellectual responsibilities, making us shrewd as pigeons and harmless as vipers. It’s how a society that is allegedly full of devout Christians can become base and brutal, emphasizing challenge to the complete exclusion of compassion (think Russia right now, which a disturbing number of conservatives in America and Canada express admiration for, probably because it is nominally Christian, authoritarian and majority white). Grievance cultures are responsible for the worst atrocities perpetrated by one group against another, including the war crimes committed by the Russian army against Ukrainians. Soldiers don the mask of righteous warrior to murder, rape and torture Ukrainian men, women and children, derisively referred to as ‘little Russians,’ then don the mask of righteous victim to avoid any accountability for their actions (they say that Ukrainians started it by being Nazis).

Liberal contempt for others

Liberal contempt for others mirrors conservative contempt for others, though liberals would like to deny it. As liberal / progressive ideas have gained in popularity over the past few decades, liberals have moved from a minority position to a majority position in many urban centers. Once you’re in the majority it’s easy to dismiss the concerns and opinions of those who are not. They are simply getting in the way of the progressive program.

This newer liberal ‘moral majority’ has its own version of ‘the weak and the different.’ The weak being the uneducated conservative ‘rubes’ who live in rural areas, and the different being the weirdo religious nuts and traditionalists who have failed to get with the times. These people are broken or defective cogs who don’t fit into the progressive vision of society, and they are holding society back from an ideal future by clinging to vestiges of an oppressive past. Also holding back society is anyone with any kind of privilege who fails to sufficiently disavow that privilege and prostrate themselves at the foot of the progressive movement, yielding to its demands.

These demands usually have something to do with protecting the disadvantaged – which sounds noble and can be – but liberal contempt is over-protective, like a momma bear slashing you to pieces for getting too close to her cubs. Any suggestion that the proposed protections are too extreme, too coddling – any kind of challenge directed towards the underprivileged, especially by the privileged but also by fellow members of an underprivileged group, is seen as ‘hateful’ or ‘self-hating’ (for example, referring to black conservatives as ‘Uncle Toms’ for criticizing BLM).

Those who aren’t on board with the ‘compassionate program’ must be chastised, punished, shunned or exiled. These are the scapegoats of left-wing contempt, in whom liberals attempt to sequester evil.   At its worst this impulse has led to the gulag. I’d imagine we’re a long way from that, but again, with the wrong attitude and the right triggers, society can devolve quickly, so it is necessary to address contempt-based scapegoating where it exists.

There has been much talk of ‘cancel culture’ in recent years, which has to do with progressives attempting to get people fired or de-platformed for things they have said or posted online. Conservatives have cried the blues about free speech in these instances, while liberals have been dismissive of their complaints, saying something like ‘you’re free to say whatever you want, but words and actions have consequences.’

To a certain degree, the liberal response is right. If you have a platform, the party hosting that platform is allowed to set its code of conduct and ban or fire you if you cross the line. But that line of reasoning gets a bit murky when a few social media corporations essentially control the digital public square and increasingly cave to progressive demands to censor certain views and ban certain people. And worse than de-platforming someone is trying to get them fired from a minimum wage job because they said something ignorant, obnoxious or offensive in their own time on the internet, by appealing to the large corporation they work for. By trying to prevent someone from earning a basic living, the message might as well be ‘go off into a corner and die.’

Despite railing against corporations in most other contexts, progressives love using corporate power to bully people they are ideologically opposed to. They try to pressure corporations to make political correctness (in the original sense of the term) a condition of employment. For instance, if you are uncomfortable with wearing the Pride Progress flag, many of them want you to be disciplined or even fired. As a more high-profile example, a couple of years ago some National Hockey League players declined to wear the Pride jersey on Pride night. It was amazing to see the number of commenters on social media who thought they should be suspended or even fired for that, and even in sports media there was talk of benching the players or heavily fining the team.⁵⁴ Thankfully the NHL did not cave to their wishes. Nobody should be forced to wear an emblem in support of any cause, no matter how noble. I support Ukraine’s defense efforts against Russia, for instance, but I would never force someone to wear the Ukrainian flag or else be fired (I also had no issue with Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem, by the way. It’s understandable that one might not be feeling ‘hurrah hurrah’ for their country at a given moment).

Now that liberals are in the majority in many areas, the language of ‘freedom and tolerance’ that was useful in gaining this cultural power is no longer needed, so it has been discarded in favour of ‘compliance and acceptance,’ as in the Pride Progress flag examples above. In other words, the liberal moral majority behaves at times similarly to how the conservative moral majority used to behave (and still does where it still holds sway). The result is that the language of freedom and tolerance has become more common on the Right in recent years…even if that just means tolerance of their ideas until they re-gain enough power to silence yours (which is, predictably, happening under the Trump administration, and now the cries of ‘freedom’ are much fainter or non-existent on the Right – an example of how partisans flip-flop on positions as needed for leverage in the culture war, rather than remaining consistent on principle).

The liberal moral majority was especially evident here in Canada during the pandemic. Masking, getting vaccinated, and following public health guidelines to a tee (all of which I did for the most part) seemed to become something more than simple health precautions, taking on the role of rituals to separate the holy from the unholy, the enlightened compassionate from the ignorant bigots. While implementing restrictions during a pandemic is not inherently extreme, there did seem to be an appetite for increasingly extreme measures (prolonged lockdowns, vaccine passports, policing family gatherings, curfews) as long as the right people were being punished. And when protestors converged on Ottawa and occupied Parliament Hill for a few weeks (the so-called ‘Freedom Convoy’), many liberals were quick to excuse the Emergencies Act which eventually shut it down, the freezing of citizens’ bank accounts, and police violence which included injuring a woman with a walker.⁵⁵ Maybe not the most extreme example of police brutality, especially compared to what we’ve seen recently south of the border in Minnesota, but Liberals would still normally be outraged by such measures, which were indeed ruled in Federal Court to be unreasonable and in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.⁵⁶ But that is the hypocrisy of grievance culture on display – when you have little integrity, there is nothing stopping you from acting like you say your enemy does.

All this was done not only with a sense of moral superiority, but of intellectual superiority. The ‘trust the Science’ crowd makes its contempt for conservative ‘rubes’ obvious. It’s true that there is a lot of idiocy in right-wing conspiracy theorist circles, which was on full display during the Freedom Convoy. It’s also true that listening to scientists is a good idea. But progressives tend to use Science as a trump card, acting like it provides absolute certainty to justify policies that cannot be questioned by non-experts. Despite the idiotic elements of the Freedom Convoy, there were valid complaints at the core of it by people who were affected negatively by policies that, as part of the unwashed masses, they weren’t allowed to question.

Politics and Science make poor bedfellows in general. Science is after truth, making tentative conclusions based on the best available evidence, to be modified or rejected based on new or better data (or better interpretations of existing data). Politics is after power, and political actors need certainty to appear strong and thereby gain or maintain power. Thus the normal process of scientists questioning and debating other scientists is derailed.

Scientists are not immune from flawed reasoning, nor are they free from bias and groupthink, nor are they necessarily smarter than non-scientists, and so need peer review to keep their conclusions in check. When you dispense with peer review for political expediency, whichever conclusion best fits the dominant narrative is championed, and any dissent or counterargument, even by other scientists, is treated as ‘misinformation.’ During the pandemic accomplished scientists were accused of spreading misinformation for raising various questions and concerns which were later shown to be valid or reasonable, for instance about aerosol transmission of Covid⁵⁷, the efficacy of cloth mask mandates⁵⁸, increased risk of myocarditis in adolescent and young men after a second vaccine dose, in some circumstances outweighing the risk of natural infection,⁵⁹ and the lab leak hypothesis.⁶⁰ (Note that I am not a medical expert and as such I am not married to the linked arguments and opinions – I just currently believe that they highlight the progressive groupthink I am talking about.)

The liberal moral majority is perhaps most evident in the media, where a combination of left-leaning pundits, comedians, actors, artists, etc. interact in a highly visible bubble to create the impression that society is more left-leaning than it actually is. Furthermore, this elite club loves dunking on popular conservative figures, and conservative viewers feel attacked by extension. This is one large reason why Trump was elected in the first place. He’s a celebrity who chose to become a right-wing figurehead and go to war against the liberal bubble, competing with the ‘mainstream media’ for the oxygen in the room. Their insults simply deflect off him as he mocks them in return, to the delight of his supporters. Plus, the media blasting every little thing that Trump does turns liberal viewers into reactionaries, much as right-wing media does to its viewers. The same process happens online, where younger people read sensationalist headlines on Reddit and internalize them without delving any further. As odious as Trumpism is, losing your mind about every last tweet, or interpreting every statement in the worst possible light, is just tiresome to listen to, and actually allows Trump to garner some sympathy. People see the rhetoric for what it is: a virtue-signaling exercise.

In general much of society has grown tired of liberal virtue-signaling being blasted through the media (or social media) megaphone. There is pressure to conform to hysterical hyperbole about either the evil of conservatives and the privileged classes, or the innocence, fragility, helplessness, and suffering of the victim classes. If you object to participating in this gluttonous righteous indignation as either a righteous warrior or righteous victim, you’re not a true ‘ally’ of the progressive cause but a bigot or traitor who deserves to be ostracized. This culture of virtue-signaling and conformity has earned the label ‘woke’ from the Right. I don’t like using that word because of its overuse by conservatives to mean ‘anything liberal I don’t like,’ but it could be valid as shorthand for left-wing grievance culture. ‘Stay woke’ once meant being aware of the struggles that minorities and underprivileged people face, but ‘wokeness’ in the current form is a hyper-sensitivity to every perceived sleight against underprivileged people.

The virtue-signaling once again calls to mind the Pharisee’s prayer in Jesus’ parable:

‘Thank God I’m not like those ignorant conservative bigots! I trust the Science; I wear a mask in public and I’m up to date on my vaccines; I have empathy for the plight of women, oppressed peoples and minorities; and I believe in fighting climate change and protecting the environment.’

Again, nothing necessarily wrong with these individual emphases – they are just the bumper-sticker token offerings that progressives make to moral responsibility to avoid any accountability for the bad behavior, rhetoric and arguments on their own side.

Distortions of Love and Faith

The exercise of faith is hindered by certain distorted beliefs about faith and love on both the Right and the Left of the political spectrum, which keeps either side mired in hypocrisy.

Distortions of love and faith on the Christian Right

The conservative emphasis on ‘challenge’ often leads to the harshest or strictest possible interpretation of various concepts, which you’ll just have to ‘accept.’  There’s this sense that you need to conform to the cold, hard truth rather than making things up to make you feel better (which is rather ironic at times, but I digress…).

Accordingly, conservatives will frequently talk about ‘tough love’, which is about telling the truth to people regardless of how it makes them feel, because ultimately that is better for them. And yes, we should tell the truth to people even when it’s hard for us to say and hard for them to hear, because love wants what’s best for a person in the long run, and the truth points them in the right direction. But too often this ‘tough love’ comes with haughty overtones of contempt and is just a way for conservatives to blow off steam at another’s expense, looking down on them instead of upward at how far God is above us.  This is not love because it does not help people grow; it just breeds resentment and discouragement. To use an earlier analogy, it’s like the sun scorching a plant before it can grow. The Bible describes love much differently, saying that it is patient⁶¹, kind,⁶² gentle⁶³ and compassionate⁶⁴. Our tone matters almost as much as the words we say. We want to be spoken to with kindness and respect, so that is how we should speak to others. The only exception, as Jesus demonstrated in his interactions with certain religious figures, is when you are dealing with an exceptionally proud person whose ego must be brought down a peg before they will be receptive to change. Ironically, this sort of person is often the type to harp about ‘tough love’. (But also keep in mind that Jesus had a lot more license to rebuke others harshly than we do.)

Even when it comes to defining love, there can be a tendency in conservative Christian circles to make it into something cold and harsh rather than ‘warm and fuzzy.’ They may point to verses like 1 John 5:3 which states ‘this is love for God: to keep his commands’⁶⁵, and use that to argue that love isn’t about fickle ‘feelings’ but about a commitment to what is right. But the truth is that it is about both. Love involves strong feelings of admiration, awe, and gratitude towards God and affection towards others which help us obey God and pursue the good of others. The relationship between God and the church is described in the Bible as being like that between a groom and a bride, which obviously involves strong feelings as well as a deep commitment, which ultimately feed each other.

If love is merely a cold duty, it is an artificial love which must be continually propped up – by our limited mental fortitude, by a culture which enforces tradition, or by fear of consequences (i.e. hell) should we fail to do our duty or believe the right things. Fear of hell has certainly been a tool used by religious leaders to keep people in line, once again using the harshest possible interpretation of the concept (eternal conscious torment). It is easier to keep people in line with threats than it is to inspire them to love God and others. Then, to explain the absurdity of being tortured infinitely for a finite life, Christians have come up with convoluted explanations for why this makes sense, whether because of our ‘total depravity’ in Reformed / Calvinist circles (complete corruption of our nature and inability to choose what is good), or because ‘the smallest of sins against an infinitely holy God merits infinite punishment.’ It’s a double exaggeration in a way: you’d be damned to infinite torture for even the smallest of sins, but because you are so deplorable you definitely deserve it.

This is the picture of hell I was taught growing up, but I have since rejected this framing because it emphasizes God’s holiness at the expense of his justice. Since we are all born with a sinful nature through no fault of our own, it would be unjust to punish us for simply succumbing to our nature (i.e. for simple weakness). Where guilt comes in is when we are offered a cure and choose the disease, so to speak. We recognize that there is a better mode of being within our grasp, but we are too comfortable with our vices to resist them, wallowing in them and experiencing the attendant consequences of that. As the gospel of John puts it:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.⁶⁶

That’s hell, fundamentally – a state of being where we fester in darkness because we love the darkness. We love indulging in our vices even though they cause ourselves and others problems. Whatever divine punishment may exist for our sins, I believe the primary punishment is simply the organic consequences of clinging to sin when we don’t have to. Hell is less about being punished for sin than it is about confining ourselves to an inferior mode of being, which itself is the primary punishment. Here I agree with C.S Lewis who wrote that ‘the doors of hell are locked on the inside.’⁶⁷ We punish ourselves by clinging to sin.

It’s not that hell isn’t horrible. It is described in the New Testament using imagery of fire especially⁶⁸, as well as outer darkness⁶⁹ and weeping and gnashing of teeth⁷⁰. This strong imagery is aimed at getting us to take hell seriously, to understand that existence apart from God is horrible compared to how good it could be with God. We see pockets of hell here on Earth and it gets really, really bad (and imagine how much worse it could get in an ostensible afterlife where all the people with no faith and no love are put together into one place). But we can talk about the badness of hell without inventing eternal conscious torment and untrue doctrines like ‘the smallest of sins against an infinitely holy God merits infinite punishment,’ doctrines which remove God’s justice and any sense of proportionality from the equation just to sound as harsh as possible and keep people in line.

A side effect of the ‘harshest possible interpretation of hell’ is that it makes Christianity an exercise in escaping this incomprehensibly bad outcome, instead of an exercise in escaping our vices and bearing fruit in faith. Because the punishment is too horrible to imagine, Christians craft rhetoric which gives them assurance of salvation from this punishment. Sayings like ‘once saved always saved’ or ‘if you could lose your salvation, you would.’  These are designed to reduce anxiety about our salvation status. They are designed to answer the question ‘am I saved?’ with a resounding YES.

The problem is that such a faith, which is so obsessed with answering that singular question, shies away from other questions which might re-introduce doubt. Questions like: ‘Am I loving God and my neighbor?’ ‘Am I bearing fruit?’ ‘Am I changing and growing as a person?’ Am I being saved from my vices?’ Questions that a true faith is fundamentally concerned with, because its goal is growth. If one’s goal is merely to escape punishment, that is not really faith, at least not a mature one. It is a faith which is unthreatening to our status quo and therefore compatible with hypocrisy, because hypocrisy does not care about change and growth. There is a false humility to this faith which waxes on about how deplorable one is and how deserving of punishment for all eternity, and how wonderful it is that we are saved from that as opposed to our vices themselves, which would actually require change to our status quo and evidence of growth.

Accordingly, the role of works is downplayed by such a faith, because good works result from growth – meaning a lack of works is evidence of stagnation and threatens the credibility of our faith, sparking insecurity about our salvation status. Works are treated almost as an optional afterthought rather than an integral part of the process of salvation and sanctification. Common sayings include ‘works are a result of salvation, not a requirement.’ Or ‘you should want to do good works if you are saved, but they are not necessary for salvation.’ The first part of both statements is correct. Works arise out of a changed heart and a sense of gratitude from being forgiven for our sins. However, as the book of James states, ‘faith without works is dead,’⁷¹ so it follows that works are necessary. On a side note, this may be why Martin Luther called the book of James ‘an epistle of straw’ in his 1522 preface to the New Testament. Luther stressed that ‘faith alone makes one righteous’⁷² in contrast to James who wrote that ‘a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone’⁷³. Now, one could argue that Luther was referring only to ‘imputed’ righteousness here, which is fine as long as one recognizes that the whole picture of righteousness is not ‘faith alone’ but involves works as per James. Recall the discussion earlier about tangible righteousness resulting from imputed righteousness. Tangible righteousness in the form of good works is necessary…it’s just that you can’t quantify these good works. They are an organic result of a true faith, which will look different from person to person according to the faith which is given to them and their circumstances.

The apostle Paul is often quoted in discussions on faith and works because he emphasized that salvation is through faith, not by works:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.⁷⁴

Notice, though, that Paul does not downplay the importance or necessity of good works. He merely flips the script on a common belief in his time, which is that salvation can be achieved through rote adherence to Jewish law. Rather, Paul insisted that truly righteous acts come after salvation, not before. But they are still there. In fact, Paul implies that good works are the whole point of salvation. These ‘works of faith’ do not cause or earn salvation, but they are certainly necessary, because what kind of ‘new creation that is designed to do good works’ does not do good works? It’s kind of like asking what kind of car, which is designed to drive down the road, just sits in the driveway? How do you know it’s a functioning car in that case? Driving is necessary, even though you may not drive as far or as fast as someone else, depending on the make of the car and the state of the roads. Good works are necessary too, proportional to your faith and your circumstances (remember the thief on the cross, whose circumstances did not allow for future good works though his faith was genuine. The only ‘work’ he was able to do was to confess Jesus as his Lord as he died⁷⁵, and that was all God required of him).

But to a mind that is obsessed with answering the question ‘am I saved?’, the statement ‘works are necessary’ instills insecurity, because there will be the constant nagging fear that ‘I’m not doing enough’ to be saved. Which is certainly the wrong mindset. Again, works do not ‘earn’ God’s favour nor do they impress him. But God is pleased by a growth-oriented, humble mindset which naturally produces fruit. One analogy I’ve heard is that it’s like your 3-year-old helping you cook. They are not going to contribute much – if anything – to the meal, but you are pleased that they’re cheerfully learning. Another analogy is that salvation is a bit like winning the lottery. You would never ‘earn’ that amount of money in several lifetimes at an average job, but you still have to go through the process of certifying/cashing in your ticket, not just say ‘yay I won’ and do nothing (similar to how James says that faith is ‘made complete’ through good works⁷⁶).

Ironically, if you are not thinking in terms of ‘am I saved?’, but in terms of those other questions mentioned above (‘Am I loving God and my neighbor,’ etc.), you will not worry so much about whether you’re saved or not. but will stay focused on doing what is right according to the faith you have been given. And that’s what salvation looks like. Once again, faith is about looking upward at God and outward at our neighbour, not inward at our flaws, fears and insecurities, which keeps us from focusing on what we should be focused on, preventing us from making any progress.

It’s like the story of Peter walking on the water in the gospels⁷⁷. As long as his eyes were fixed on the object of his faith (Jesus), he remained above water. It’s only when he looked down at the turbulent waves that he started to sink and fear that he would drown. Once again we see the paramount importance of love for the object of our faith. That is what keeps our faith on course and above water, looking upward and outward. As it says in 1 John 4:18, ‘perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.’⁷⁸

This is why love is greater than faith according to both the gospels and the epistles. It both inspires and sustains our faith, and without it faith fizzles out into irrelevance. Faith attempts the radical moral demands of Jesus’ teachings because it has been energized by his radical love and grace. No, we can’t earn salvation. Yes, faith is a gift from God. But true faith represents a certain attitude. It has a certain character to it which is notably lacking in some Christian circles. A saving faith hungers for righteousness, not content with its current level of righteousness. It aims high, not low. It is whole-hearted, not half-hearted. An earnest offering, not a token offering. It always desires to be more like its object, which captivated it in the first place, sparking a transformation.

But the conservative tendency to adopt ‘the harshest possible interpretation’, in this case ‘eternal conscious torment’ justified by God’s infinite holiness in conjunction with our deplorability, is so jarring and illogical that it forces people to look down at the waves in fear, focusing on ‘not drowning’ rather than walking forward on the waves – coming up with reasons why we are definitely saved irrespective of our attitude, character and behavior. In fact, bad behavior is expected since we are ‘totally depraved!’ This is how you start drowning in hypocrisy without realizing it. The challenging elements of faith are removed out of insecurity over our salvation status.  The emphasis on human deplorability becomes a form of crippling self-pity, an excuse for bad behavior within ourselves and the church.

For instance, when outsiders are critical of the behavior of Christians, I’ve sometimes encountered the response of ‘well, we never claimed to be good people, just sinners saved by grace!’ But this response represents a Cain-faith, not an Abel-faith – a token-offering, hypocritical faith which is unconcerned with accountability and improvement, which is to say no faith at all. Christians become so comfortable with the idea that they are saved through faith, with works being treated like an optional afterthought, that they lose the hunger for righteousness which characterizes a true faith, and forget the point of salvation in the first place – to ‘do the works that God prepared in advance for us to do,’ to love God and others according to the faith which has been given to us.

When faith is so poorly understood, and complacent hypocrisy becomes the norm in the church, with poor behaviour and character being par for the course because ‘we never claimed to be good people’, it’s no wonder how wolves like Trump can pass as Christians in these circles.

It’s quite common for Trump to be compared to King David in the Old Testament, because David royally screwed up with his Bathsheba affair but was still described as ‘a man after God’s own heart’⁷⁹ whom God used to give us the Psalms. The idea that God uses sinners to accomplish his goals is nothing new in scripture. But the difference is that David was repentant and generally exhibited faithfulness to God throughout his life, with the Bathsheba affair representing a major lapse. Whoever thinks Donald Trump is a ‘man after God’s own heart’ has lost any sense of what it means to be a Christian, if they ever had one.

Another reason men of unabashed bad character like Trump can pull the wool over the eyes of Christians is that they appeal to Christian self-interest. When the church is full of hypocrisy, tribal self-interest is the norm rather than tribal responsibility. Whatever seems best for the Christian tribe is supported at the expense of everyone else. Politicians capitalize on this self-interest, paying lip service to Christianity to get elected, promising to ‘defend and restore Christianity’.

There is nothing wrong with one’s faith informing one’s politics, but the emphasis that the religious right puts on slapping the ‘Christian’ label on their politics is misguided, as is the obsession with calling America a ‘Christian nation.’ It’s putting the cart before the horse. An authentic Christian faith is rooted in love, and love of others is not coercive. If God gives us the choice to associate with him or not, that choice must be extended to others. Talk of theocracies or ‘officially’ Christian nations reflects an empty faith and a fruitless politics. Paul wrote that without love, faith is nothing. We might as well give it up, as it will do neither us nor anyone else any good. As a Christian, I think it would be great to see America and Canada become more Christian, but in an organic rather than a contrived, authoritarian manner. But ‘fighting for your faith’ in the political arena against godless enemies is easier than living out an authentic faith which respects people. And that can be another side effect of over-emphasizing the deplorability of humanity – you may come to see humans as worthless in general, except for those whom God has chosen. So it’s easier to have contempt for those whom you think are not chosen, who just so happen to be your political enemies.

***

Another distortion of faith on the Christian Right is turning faith into a laundry list of beliefs. Most Christians I know would reasonably define faith as something like ‘trusting God to save us through Jesus’, but still, there is sometimes too much of an emphasis on believing exactly the right list of doctrines, which we can’t prove so we just have to ‘take them on faith.’ Outsiders have picked up on this to the extent that faith is widely defined in secular circles as ‘belief without proof or even evidence.’

It’s not that having the right beliefs isn’t important, since right beliefs may lead to right behavior.  But the emphasis placed on believing the right things can become a form of hypocrisy, a token substitute for having the right attitude, which is far more defining of what biblical faith is all about.

Cue the parable of the Good Samaritan.⁸⁰ Most people think of this parable as a lesson about doing good to strangers. Sometimes you’ll hear about a ‘Good Samaritan’ on the news who helped their fellow citizens during a flood or something. The importance of helping strangers is certainly a lesson that can be derived from the parable. But the more important lesson is not who was helped (the stranger), but who was doing the helping (the Samaritan). Jesus told this parable to religious Jews who absolutely despised the Samaritans. Judeans thought of Samaritans as essentially half-breed heretics who had rejected their Jewish heritage by intermarrying with the surrounding pagans and adopting their customs. It’s not that Jesus agreed with the distorted religious beliefs of the Samaritans. He was actually fairly aligned with the teachings of the Pharisees, as mentioned earlier. But the Samaritan in the parable helped a man who had been beaten by robbers while the Judean religious leaders walked on by. The Samaritan, despite probably having many erroneous beliefs, humbly demonstrated a commitment to pursuing virtue, while the people with the right beliefs did not. He was therefore in better standing with God than those who had the ‘right beliefs,’ and who were part of the ‘right tribe.’ These days the parable might as well be called ‘the Parable of the Good Atheist,’ or ‘the Parable of the Good Muslim.’

A faith which is too obsessed with believing the right things inevitably spends too little energy on loving God and one’s neighbor, and too much energy defending relatively unimportant doctrines. Plus, the more beliefs that you make your faith contingent on, the more fragile it becomes. It becomes impossible to satisfactorily defend them all, so in order to preserve it you need to resort to intellectual shortcuts. This is where pride and intellectual hypocrisy creep in. You care more about the pretense of honesty and credibility than about the truth, because you fear that without that pretense your faith will collapse. Critical thinking goes out the window, to be replaced by weak arguments (such as arguments from authority) and deflection tactics, accusing any opponents of bias and dishonesty. You can be sure that the loudest voices decrying the ‘liberal agenda’ or ‘mainstream bias’ have shaky beliefs they want to distract you from.  

Distortions of love and faith on the Secular Left

If conservatives err on the side of ‘tough love,’ liberals err on the side of ‘soft love,’ a love which is too coddling, which conflates challenge with unkindness or even with hatred. If ‘tough love’ berates a person with the (purported) truth, ‘soft love’ avoids telling the truth out of fear of offending someone or creating conflict.

This ‘soft love’ is often defined in terms of ‘accepting’ a person as they are. This is all very well in one sense, in that we do not want to shun or reject people for being ‘weak or different’, and we should be kind to them. But there is often some sleight of hand at play, where if you do not accept / affirm a person’s beliefs or mindset, you are not being accepting of them as a person and are therefore a bigot.

One example of this tendency is the ‘body positivity’ movement, where there is a push to represent overweight people in various media because they are under-represented and ‘all body types should be celebrated.’ If you disagree you are a ‘fat-shamer.’ And of course we should not be cruel to overweight people. I’m certainly not going to judge, since I’m not exactly in great shape these days. And it must be stressed that one’s value is unrelated to one’s physical condition. But it’s also true that being in shape is objectively better than not, and it is something to strive for, to the best of one’s abilities and circumstances. So while I really do not care if someone wants to be a plus-size model, I also don’t think the over-representation of healthy, fit people in the media is a problem that needs solving. Maybe it’s better that fit people are over-represented in media, to be an example for the rest of us. It’s not about shaming, demonizing, or devaluing people, nor should it be. It is just about challenging ourselves to strive for greater health. Most will not attain the level of fitness of a model or actor, but that is no reason to feel bad about oneself. The important thing is to make progress at one’s own pace, according to the circumstances one is dealt.

And again, liberals are not wrong to value kindness and link it to love. Indeed Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 that kindness is an attribute of love.⁸¹ If a Christian is not kind by default, then there is something seriously wrong with their faith, as faith without love is ‘nothing.’⁸²

But love, while being kind, also ‘rejoices with the truth.’⁸³ Truth can be difficult to hear but it is liberating, and if we care about people we want them to be liberated from their vices so they can grow as a person. By default the truth (as we understand it, because we could be wrong) should be told with patience, humility, kindness, gentleness, and so on, and if you are still hassled for telling it, for being too ‘unkind’, then at least your conscience will be clear.

In contrast, in left-wing circles there is a tendency to focus on ‘my truth’ rather than pursuing ‘the truth’ which is objective and outside of ourselves. The result is a whole lot of inward-looking navel-gazing which is obsessed with coming to terms with ‘who I am’, embracing self-love, becoming comfortable with all my flaws and weaknesses, instead of thinking about ‘who I could (or should) be’. This mindset precludes faith, because faith is all about looking outside ourselves for truth and inspiration to unlock our potential and combat our flaws.

The word ‘faith’ generally has negative connotations in secular liberal circles anyway, because of its association with religious dogmas, but the closest concept to faith in secular circles is ‘positivity.’ Which usually means something like trying to see the best in oneself, in one’s situation, and in the world. A ‘glass half full’ approach to life. The theory is that by focusing on the good you attract more good, acquiring positive buoyancy to ride over the negative aspects of life which would otherwise weigh you down.

Faith and positivity have some things in common. If you can’t see the good in life then you will have no hope, and without hope you can’t have faith, since you will not reach out to a better reality if you have no hope that it is possible. Moreover, people with a positive outlook respond to obstacles better because they focus on the path forward, the solution more than the problem. But faith and positivity are not equivalent, and there is a danger to the latter. There is a tendency for people who champion positivity to sweep sin under the rug. It’s not seen as ‘positive’ to examine one’s vices (or even acknowledge them as vices) because that just weighs you down.

There is some truth to this in that you do not want to become so burdened by shame and low self-esteem that you start drowning in self-pity and fail to progress. That is the pitfall of the highly negative view of human nature discussed in the previous section, which the positivity / self-esteem movement was in part a reaction to. But the pendulum can swing the other way, to the extent that the very concept of sin is seen as ‘negative’.

Sin, as mentioned earlier, just means ‘to err’ or ‘to miss the mark.’ It means failing to live up to a higher standard, and if we’re honest, this is a daily reality for every human being. We all have vices which hold us back from doing what we should be doing, and it is counterproductive to ignore that fact. If we ignore our vices they do not go away; they just fester.

Whereas faith humbly acknowledges vices and pursues a higher standard, positivity convinces itself that one’s current state is fine, when it is not, leading to an accumulation of problems down the road which causes you (and others) more grief than if the problems had been addressed as a matter of course. As C.S. Lewis put it:

We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back down the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.⁸⁴

Popular sayings like ‘I am Enough’, ‘you’re perfect as you are’, etc., are not helpful because, while they may be intended to elevate people above their insecurities and depression, they are vague enough that they can easily, by sleight of hand, give people the sense that they don’t need to change and grow as a person, that they do not need to look upward at something greater than themselves. This is classic ‘compassion at the expense of challenge.’

And challenge is important. We need to be drawn out of our comfort zones, testing our limits in order to grow. To use a Lord of the Rings analogy, we need a Gandalf to knock on our door and invite us on an adventure, even though that is very bothersome during teatime in a comfortable hobbit hole. This is the Wise Old man Archetype, the old teacher / wizard / prophet who can be rather gruff but who sees your potential and pushes you to reach it. We can almost always do more than we think we can, and the Wise Old Man archetype helps us realize that. Progressivism at its worst ‘cancels’ the Wise Old Man because he is too ‘mean’ or ‘negative’ and makes us uncomfortable. There is perceived to be a very fine line, sometimes no line between challenge and ‘hatred,’ which is an exceedingly unhealthy way of viewing the world. It is a rare but useful skill to be able to accept a valid rebuke or challenge, and even rarer when the valid rebuke is delivered without compassion (as aggravating and demoralizing as that is).

***

Positivity is also related to the notion of ‘the steady march of progress,’ the idea that things are getting better over time as we move past ignorant historical beliefs and traditions (negative aspects of the past). This sentiment was echoed by Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign slogan ‘we’re not going back.’ The assumption is that the party which is nominally progressive will ultimately win because progress is positive and positivity trumps negativity, represented by the other party. This attitude is a major hindrance to tribal responsibility in left-wing circles, because it fails to acknowledge any potential downside of the progressive movement, or of modernity in general. It’s a form of arrogance which is dismissive of tradition rather than respecting its longevity and learning something from it. The fallacy is that forward motion is equivalent to progress. Rather, if you leave behind the valuable parts of tradition, you are regressing, not progressing. Then, as the Lewis quote says, the most progressive person is the one who turns back the soonest.

The failure to acknowledge the concept of ‘sin’ contributes to this arrogance. If you don’t believe you are a sinner, then evil must be externalized – whether into some traditional system like patriarchy or systemic racism, or into your political enemies. Progressive and underprivileged groups are fundamentally good and conservatives, who reinforce these traditional oppressive systems, are fundamentally bad and should be looked down on.

In the intellectual sphere, there is likewise sometimes a myth about new ideas being better. The assumption is that they must be better because we are drawing from an ever-increasing pool of knowledge which our ignorant ancestors did not have access to. When it comes to advanced technology or scientific theories, this is often true. But when it comes to ideas about human nature, our ancestors often have much more to say than we think they do, because human nature hasn’t changed since the greats started pondering it. We can learn a thing or two even from ‘bronze-age goat herders.’

Of course, even when it comes to science, it is important to maintain the intellectual humility from which the scientific method arose. Progressives tend to think of science as their natural ally because the visible advancements of modernity arise from science. Science is treated less as a careful, self-correcting process and more as a certified answer-generating machine which naturally sides with progressives. Scientists or ‘the experts’ are treated almost as priests of the progressive movement, whose conclusions cannot be questioned, especially inasmuch as they inform progressive policies. As we’ve already discussed, this attitude was especially evident during Covid.

Against modernist hubris, those on the secular Left should consider studying ancient faith traditions and philosophies, gleaning what they can from them in terms of personal ethics (I think you know my preference of ancient faith traditions). Faith needs an object to captivate it, and a good place to start looking for that object is what has captivated people in the past, rather than re-inventing the wheel. We need good philosophy to avoid being sucked into the zeitgeist, which can devolve rapidly with certain triggers. And my impression is that there’s not much of substance keeping the mainstream grounded. Allegiance to a political tribe and the adoption of vague, shallow mantras like ‘I am Enough’ doesn’t cut it. Just as shallow religiosity mixed with politics on the Right doesn’t cut it.

In summary, positivity bears some resemblance to faith in that it looks forward to a better reality and acts to bring it about, but because of its tendency to sweep sin under the rug (because it’s not ‘positive’ to focus on sin), it prevents people from looking upward at something greater than themselves and makes it easier to look downward at people who are ostensibly holding back the progressive cause.

Money and Repentance

In the gospel of Luke, the prophet John the Baptist criticizes his listeners for failing to ‘produce fruit in keeping with repentance.’ So they asked him what they must do, and this is the answer he gave:

John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?”

“Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them.

Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”

He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay.”⁸⁵

Notice that all of these answers have to do with money or material goods (the biblical word is ‘mammon’, which includes both). Essentially being fair and generous when it comes to money and material goods (which will just be referred to as ‘money’ going forward).  

Repentance in the New Testament essentially means a change of mind involving a turning away from sin and a turning to God.⁸⁶ We were going the wrong way, but now we’ve done an about turn to get back on the right path (like in the Lewis quote from earlier). Essentially repentance marks the moment when faith in God and greater virtue is instilled in us and we take the first concrete step towards a better reality.

What does this have to do with money?  

Money is where the rubber hits the road. It is something concrete or tangible which in large part determines our physical wellbeing, and that of our neighbour. If repentance is a concrete step in the right direction, there is nothing more concrete than doing something with money.

The book of James, chapter 2, neatly ties in all the concepts we have been discussing⁸⁷:

If you really keep the royal law found in Scripture, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” you are doing right. […]

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

Love, faith, good works, and money are all connected. Love compels us to hope and believe that we and our society can be more righteous, resulting in tangible good deeds towards our neighbour. As an analogy: love is the power source, faith is the switch, and the electrical current is the tangible result: good works (often) involving money.

It seems that society in general is ‘going the wrong way’ when it comes to money. Much injustice in society (and in the world at large) has to do with money, which is to say that many of the most legitimate grievances have to do with unfair practices when it comes to money. These unfair practices are supported by certain attitudes towards money which are ingrained in society and which we participate in with varying degrees of awareness. This makes money an uncomfortable topic for most people, including myself. But repentance from the current unjust state of affairs requires first a change of attitude on an individual and collective level, then a change of practices on an individual and collective level. To that end, let’s take a look at where attitudes and practices need adjusting when it comes to money, on the Right and Left of the political spectrum.

Right-wing attitudes towards money

Conservatives tend to be the more ardent defenders of Capitalism, and this should not come as a surprise. The entrepreneurs who rise to the top of the Capitalist system are not challenge-averse; they are go-getters who sacrifice their time, energy and sometimes health to succeed. As such they are admired by conservatives, who value challenge and are impressed by people who respond to its call.  

The problem is that challenge can be oriented towards the wrong duty. Capitalism too often corrupts our sense of duty, which should be towards God / virtue and the wellbeing of humanity but which is replaced in the Capitalist system by ‘productivity’. Being productive is not a bad thing in itself, but loyalty to productivity essentially means the generation of capital for its own sake. It interferes with our proper loyalties. As Jesus says in the gospels: ‘no man can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.’⁸⁸

Devotion to the continual production of ‘stuff’ for its own sake is essentially devotion to money. You can see an almost fanatical emphasis on ‘the economy’ and ‘creating jobs’ on the Right, where as long as we can keep churning out more ‘stuff’ to keep the stock market growing, we are doing the right thing. The rationale given is that the wealth generated by the process keeps people employed and raises their standard of living.

And it frequently does, which is the major benefit of Capitalism.  But the fact that these benefits so often come at the expense of human flourishing indicates that the underlying loyalty is still to the system, to productivity. The fact that people can be working full time (or more) while struggling to pay rent and put food on the table, while the stock market is at all time highs, reveals our priorities, whether we realize them or not. That wealth remains locked up in the markets, not readily accessible to the average person who is struggling.

I am no economist, but it seems rather obvious that inequalities often arise because of Capitalism’s natural tendency towards monopoly, which reduces competition and therefore quality of products and services, work environment and benefits, protections for workers and the environment, etc. Small businesses are choked by big brand names that show up in town with no regard for the locals.  It’s a bit like a major league sports team playing an exhibition game against a minor league team. The major league team is expected to win, but if they rack up a huge score against the opposition, it is rightly seen as bad sportsmanship. Yet in the context of Capitalism, nobody bats an eye when large companies rack up huge ‘scores’ against small businesses (not to mention their own workers), because devotion to productivity is ingrained in our society, and big businesses are seen as champions of productivity.

The rich and working class alike can be devoted to productivity, and in that case let’s say they are members of the ‘productive tribe.’ Members of the productive tribe derive a certain sense of identity from being productive…working hard, making money, and contributing to the economy. There’s a certain type of person whose entire identity is about work. They look down on others who don’t work as hard and frequently treat people around them like a means to an end, because getting their work done is more important to them than maintaining relationships. For instance they may treat service workers like crap over minor mistakes and delays because they are impatient and ‘don’t have time’ to be a decent person – they are important people with lots of things to do.

The productive tribe is essentially a subset of right-wing grievance culture. Their enemies are those who shirk the responsibility to work hard or who don’t create value for the economy, whether they are working class people who appear too entitled and demanding (e.g. unions), people with low-wage jobs, people with seemingly ‘useless’ jobs (e.g. bureaucrats, liberal arts professors), people on welfare, the homeless, etc. These are the people the productive tribe has contempt for.

As for self-pity, the productive tribe has its own feelings of entitlement, excuses for why they should not be fair and generous with their money as required by God / virtue. Because they perceive that they work harder than anyone else (or provide more value even if they don’t work harder), they feel very entitled to whatever money they do make and are unwilling to part with much. ‘I earned it with my blood, sweat and tears so I can do whatever I want with it. I certainly don’t want it to go to the lazy layabouts who are draining the system.’ This attitude may result in cheating on taxes, being ungenerous, stiffing contractors, paying employees the bare minimum, etc.

Furthermore, if working class members of the productive tribe are struggling to get by, the blame is not placed on Capitalism and the natural inequalities it creates, but on some other factor (corrupt liberal politicians, bureaucrats) which interferes with the proper functioning of Capitalism. They are not always wrong, but we’ll get to that later. The point is that blame is placed on something else rather than reflecting on the downsides of Capitalism and a devotion to productivity.

***

Against the misplaced sense of duty to productivity, and the resultant inequality, two things must be widely affirmed:

1. Capitalism exists for man, not man for Capitalism.

Capitalism is a means, not an end. The end goal is human flourishing, not productivity for its own sake. Producing capital for its own sake leads to contempt for those who suffer the most to produce it. We must not look down on the poor or low-wage workers but treat them with dignity. We need a ‘body of Christ’ mentality towards the workforce, just as Paul had for the church:

The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it.⁸⁹

We need to find ways for the lower-end members of the economy to flourish. If you don’t take care of one part of your body, the whole body suffers. Working at McDonald’s, or as a janitor, for example, should not be looked down on (especially since we all benefit from their work), and one way or another we need to make sure that lower-wage workers (as well as those who can’t work) are protected from slipping through the cracks.

If social programs must be implemented to accomplish this, then so be it. Those who are against a welfare state must provide an effective alternative. It may be that the welfare state could be substantially reduced in a future where private charity takes the reins from it, but we are certainly not in that position and that would first require a mass change of attitude in society, especially among the wealthy. And right-wingers who come into power just to slash funding with no alternative need to think about the damage they are causing by pulling the rug out from the vulnerable in such a manner (see DOGE in the US recently).

2. With wealth comes responsibility.

We have the right to amass wealth, but it is not right to keep it all to ourselves. Because our duty is to God / virtue, not to money, we have a moral responsibility to dispense money fairly and generously. The attitude ‘I don’t have to be generous because I earned my money and I can do whatever I want with it’ is a self-pitying excuse that we use to avoid this responsibility. We should have the attitude that we are less ‘owners’ of our money, and more ‘stewards.’ Jesus’ statement from earlier I think is applicable here:

‘From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.’⁹⁰

(This was in the context of knowledge, but it applies very well to money too.)

Everything we have is from God, or from the Universe if you prefer, or simply a result of blind chance – our upbringing, our disposition, our natural abilities, our health, our circumstances, etc., which all contribute to our ability to amass wealth. Because we have been so blessed, we should pay forward that blessing to others who have been less fortunate. The idea is to voluntarily balance out some of the extreme distributions of chance, such that everything is a little fairer. As Paul put it:

“At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality, as it is written: “The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.”⁹¹

In contrast our society idolizes extreme imbalances, e.g. through Hollywood and celebrity worship. These imbalances lead to the rich thinking highly of themselves while looking down on the poor, and lead to the poor being envious of the rich, creating strife. The responsibility of those who have wealth is to reduce the extreme highs and the extreme lows so that this strife is reduced.

***

I can think of several concrete things that individuals and businesses can do (or not do) to be more fair and generous.

• Instead of expanding a company on the back of cheap labour, give bonuses and raises to employees. Implement profit-sharing systems.
• Don’t price gouge. That’s greedy, and greed is idolatry.⁹² Try to offer consumers the fairest price you can, regardless of the demand.
• Engage in philanthropy (make philanthropy great again). The rich should be competing with each other in their philanthropic endeavours.
• Donate to charitable organizations (C.S. Lewis’ advice was to give a little bit more than you feel comfortable with: “I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”⁹³).
• Tithe at a local church which does good work in the community.
• Don’t cheat on your taxes.
• If you are a big brand name, give shoutouts to local small businesses in the same industry. Or maybe we could make it so that big brand names are required to fund ad space for small businesses in their area, to offset the unfair advantage that the brand name affords them.
• Educate young people on personal finance and investing, so they can tap into the incredible wealth-growing ability of the stock market. I am mystified as to why this is not emphasized in the education system. Maybe it’s because neither the Right nor the Left wants to do it…the Right because that would mean more competition for current wealthy investors, and the Left because they are suspicious of Capitalism.  

Left-wing attitudes towards money

If Capitalism fosters a right-wing ‘productive tribe’, the backlash creates a left-wing ‘protective tribe’ which seeks to protect workers from the lopsided excesses of productivity, where private entities take up too many slices of the collective pie. Just as productivity is not a bad thing in itself, protectiveness is not a bad thing in itself. But blind loyalty to protectiveness goes awry, just as blind loyalty to productivity goes awry.

Protectiveness requires a ‘protector’, which is the State. The State can regulate industry so that predatory business practices do not flourish, and it can collect taxes to create a basic framework for people to live and prosper in. But the State can overstep the bounds of these basic functions in the name of protectiveness or of ‘progress’, which is equated with becoming more protective of its vulnerable citizens. This over-protectiveness manifests as over-taxing, over-spending, and over-regulating.

The overreach is spurred in part by contempt for the productive tribe, especially for those whom Marx referred to as the ‘bourgeoisie’, the wealthier business owners who control the means of production (land and capital). They are viewed as greedy and exploitative people who cannot be trusted. They must be taxed and subjected to stringent regulations to limit their business activities and resultant accumulation of wealth at the expense of everyone else.

The threat posed by the ‘bourgeoisie’ justifies greater control by the government to act as protector. The impulse is to make the government the solution to all social inequality by implementing and administering various social programs, which are paid for by raising taxes (or in socialist regimes, confiscating and centralizing capital). There is a sentiment that the government knows best how to spend taxpayers’ money because wealthy taxpayers cannot be trusted to do the right thing with their money.

One problem with contempt for the wealthy and successful is that it blurs the line between the desire for justice on the one hand, and resentment on the other – wishing to bring the successful down to the same level as everyone else instead of merely raising others up who are below an acceptable level. Admirable human traits which contributed to their success – diligence, ambition, perseverance, courage, ingenuity, creativity, cooperation – are downplayed, and the assumption is that they got to where they were simply by abusing the working class. The protective tribe thus feels entitled to the fruits of the productive tribe’s initiative without aspiring to possess the qualities which contributed to those fruits. This self-pity within the protective tribe leads to an exclusive focus on workers’ rights (as opposed to responsibilities), negotiating with employers in bad faith to squeeze the most benefits out of them, without necessarily seeking to improve the company or become a better worker. It also leads to things like abusing social programs (fraud), shoplifting and looting, etc. Even among the middle class there is an incentive to play the victim of the rich, because then we are off-loading the responsibility to be generous solely onto the rich, even though we could be more generous with what we have (in the spirit of ‘whoever has two shirts should give one to someone who has none’). This may be especially true for left-leaning white men. The protective tribe affords them the opportunity to play the victim of the bourgeoisie, since few other victim classes are available to them.

Another problem with contempt for the wealthy and successful is that by trying to limit their ability to amass wealth, through red tape etc., you may end up killing productivity, not just greed. And killing productivity is fundamentally at odds with paying for increasingly bloated social programs. Liberal governments end up emptying the coffers like drunken sailors while kneecapping the productivity which fills the coffers (see Canada’s government for the last 10 years under Liberal rule). You can increase taxes to refill the coffers, but that only goes so far when there’s little productivity.

The endless red tape which stifles productivity is said to protect workers and the environment, but restrictions are slapped down from on high by bureaucrats who aren’t in touch with the situation on the ground, with the result that the restrictions are often unnecessarily onerous, bogging down the whole process. The extra work creates jobs for bureaucrats and sounds good to liberal voters, but stifles actual productivity without actually protecting anything or anyone in any meaningful way.

Contributing to this smothering approach is a quasi-religious ideological absolutism when it comes to the environment, where any environmental impact, however localized, is a sin against Gaia and must be hindered in some way, or better yet scrapped. There is a lack of a sense of scale as well as consideration of other goals, e.g. economic and geopolitical goals. An example of the effects of this ideology is the 15-20-odd year average timeframe to permit new mineral deposits in Canada⁹⁴ despite the huge importance of ‘critical minerals’ even when it comes to environmental goals (e.g. increasing electrification), let alone geopolitical goals like self-reliance in the face of bad actors.

People who grew up in left-leaning, urban bubbles (which is much of the voting population in Canada, including myself) I think tend to have a blinkered view of what happens outside of that bubble, and what went into creating that bubble in the first place. There is a suspicion of big industry, especially the resource sector, because we are told that Capitalism is rapacious and will destroy the environment to make a quick buck. Of course, there are numerous historical examples (and some modern examples) of that very tendency. But the pendulum can swing the other way, to the point of stifling reasonable productivity, not just destructive greed. It is arrogant for liberals to assume they are always in the right simply because of their commitment to protectiveness. This blind commitment contributes to legitimate problems, and liberals would do well to recognize that if they want to keep demagogues like Trump from being elected.

But liberals seem to have a hard time understanding why people get so angry at bureaucracy that they turn to these demagogues. Maybe it’s because the corruption is not as blatant and in-your-face as the pure cronyism we are seeing in the Trump Administration for example, where institutions are being exploited for the personal gain of those in power. But it is certainly a form of corruption, where organizations and institutions start to exist for their own sake rather than the purpose they were created for. Red tape increases because it is someone’s job to create it: more forms to fill out, boxes to tick, guidelines to follow. Mountains of paperwork to be processed through the system, taking months and years longer than necessary.

Bureaucracy is a bit like a car driving the speed limit (or slower) in the passing lane. The driver doesn’t think it’s a big deal, because they don’t think anyone should be going faster than them anyway, since speeding is dangerous. But it slows down traffic and causes mounting frustration in people who know how to drive and have places to get to, leading to dangerous situations where people try to pass on the right (analogous to electing dangerous right-wing demagogues).

But at least with a certain demagogue’s tariffs, threats of annexation, etc., Canadians are coming around to the importance of productivity as a path to self-reliance, which has been stifled through a decade of Liberal rule. Mark Carney, the new prime minister, has proposed ways to boost the economy which sound downright conservative; for instance, removing barriers to interprovincial trade⁹⁵ and streamlining the approvals process for major economic projects⁹⁶. This is another example of how contempt for political enemies results in polarized, unbalanced positions, which liberals are only now abandoning because their own team is proposing something different.

***

Against the misplaced sense of duty towards an overprotective nanny State and protectiveness in general, two things must be affirmed:

1. The State exists for man, not man for the State.

The State exists to provide a baseline of order and justice to its citizens, so that they can live their lives in peace and prosperity. What is not its role is to enforce a utopian vision for society, such that if one does not conform to the State’s vision, they are punished in some way. It is fine for the State to police unfair and harmful practices, but it is not fine for the State to punish a lack of positive contribution to its utopian goals. If it does so, it becomes totalitarian, taking the place of God / virtue, demanding our complete loyalty. There may be overlap between civic and moral duty, but they are not equivalent. There must be room for moral duty outside of civic duty, otherwise we lose the freedom to exercise moral duties and morality becomes inauthentic, enslaved to the State.

One of the great virtues is generosity (stemming from love): giving more of ourselves than is required, whether of our money, possessions, time, effort, etc. Generosity in society is contagious, breeding mutual gratitude and goodwill, where people are willing to do more for each other than they otherwise would have. An ideal society would abound with this positive feedback loop of goodwill, because it is organic and self-sustaining.

But compulsion kills goodwill. Goodwill evaporates when it is demanded. As a trivial example, imagine it’s your turn to do the dishes, and you are about to do them cheerfully when your roommate walks into the kitchen and asks ‘well? Aren’t you going to do the dishes?’ All goodwill instantly evaporates and now you don’t want to do the dishes.

Same thing when the State makes demands on people. Taxation is one example. Under left-wing governments, there is a tendency to take taxpayers for granted, demanding that everyone ‘pay their fair share,’ increasing the percentage of income that is taxed or even proposing wealth taxes. Even if taxpayers are in general agreement with the tax laws, the hostile environment may make them more grudging about paying the taxes, and less likely to engage in philanthropic endeavours (maybe it shouldn’t, but that is just human nature). This is especially true when tax dollars are mismanaged and the government therefore provides a poor rationale for giving it more money.

This is why it is desirable to minimize a sense of compulsion in society, something that totalitarian ideologies do not understand. Totalitarianism seeks to create the ideal society but ironically cannot because it kills the goodwill that an ideal society would require. It’s always best to have an environment where people do their duty cheerfully, and others express gratitude for that rather than taking people for granted. Of course one should not seek special credit for doing one’s duty, but when other people do their duty, you express gratitude to them. This creates a good-faith environment where everyone is willing to be a little more generous, going above and beyond the call of duty. To that end, liberals should learn to be more appreciative of taxpayers (not just the wealthiest), rather than taking them for granted, throwing money around while always demanding more and more in service to the State’s grand progressive designs. They should also try to leave room for generosity rather than trying to solve everything through bloated social programs. What exactly this looks like, I don’t know. It could start with promoting organizations which are already doing good work to help people (including many religious organizations) and petitioning the wealthy to support those. Perhaps it could mean forming more voluntary collectives. Churches could lead the way in forming grassroots support systems, and many do, but many churches also push people away because of bad behavior, rhetoric and beliefs which we have already discussed, and are thus under-funded to do good work in their communities.

I think the bottom line is that top-down big government solutions should be viewed not as the ultimate, ideal solution but at best as a temporary solution until societal attitudes change for the better and these solutions aren’t needed as much (though even if we get to the point where they are not needed as much, the basic structure can be kept in the background as a safeguard). A welfare state is a necessary evil when other support structures do not exist, for whatever reason (greed, apathy, lack of social groups, low church attendance, etc.).

Because many liberals do not have a religious upbringing, they tend to look elsewhere for their values, which are often tied to the political zeitgeist. This may make them susceptible to totalitarian outlooks which reduce morality to a political vision, the mirror image of theocratic conservatives who try to make the State the vehicle of their religion. If you do not support their  program, you may be punished or ostracized. C.S. Lewis wrote about such a state of affairs:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.”⁹⁷

2. Lesser wealth doesn’t mean no moral responsibility.

We can hold these two ideas simultaneously: those with more resources have a greater responsibility to do good with them, but those with fewer resources should not, in self-pity, use that as an excuse to fail to do what they can with what they have (another possible interpretation of the parable of the talents⁹⁸). Nor should they allow self-pity to degrade their character and lead to bad attitudes and behaviors. Envy and theft are still sins, for instance. It is best to try to be content with what one has, rather than resenting that we can’t live like the rich do. It’s tough in a society where Hollywood exists, and we’re constantly seeing wealth on display at the movies and in the media. The feeling is even more enhanced in an increasingly isolated society, since we have fewer fulfilling family ties and friendships to combat the materialistic mirages of happiness presented to us. The icing on the cake is an increased cost of living for pretty much everyone. This is why I believe that the onus is still on the rich and powerful to prevent a situation where vast inequalities create social unrest. But that doesn’t mean personal character goes out the window in the lower classes, as Jesus’ example teaches us.

Here are a few concrete things which I think individuals and the State can do (or not do) to be fairer when it comes to money:

• If you’re middle class, don’t offload the responsibility to be generous onto the rich; do what you can with what you have. Donate to local charities, tithe at local churches, etc.
• Don’t shoplift or participate in looting. Price gouging is worse than shoplifting in my opinion, because it is rooted in greed, but shoplifting is still bad and often driven by resentment rather than true need.
• Don’t take advantage of programs that you don’t need.
• Try to add value to your job and take pride in it – don’t negotiate raises and benefits in bad faith.
• Leave room for generosity rather than seeking to solve every last problem through the bureaucratic State in the name of progress. Form more voluntary collectives and support organizations that are doing good work.
• Don’t take taxpayers for granted, try to be as fiscally responsible as possible as a policy maker, rather than throwing money around at pet projects that will help you get re-elected.
• Frequently re-evaluate regulations to cut red tape which is unreasonably affecting productivity.

***

We must get away from tribal warfare between the productive tribe and the protective tribe. Both tribes must realize that their ‘struggle’ is not against flesh and blood – neither liberal bureaucrats and politicians, nor the ‘bourgeoisie.’ Their struggle is against any unfairness, greed, or corruption when it comes to money, whatever form that may take.  Either side needs to reflect on how their tribal preferences and misplaced loyalties may result in injustice. Either side must offer the other the opportunity to change their minds while saving some face. And we must choose politicians who understand the problematic excesses of either side and don’t cave in to the loud proponents of these excesses. This is how progress will be made and justice will be done, reducing many of the legitimate grievances that add fuel to the fire of grievance culture.

A Word to Moderates

I am a self-described political moderate, meaning that I do not cheer for any political ‘team’ in particular (even if I have a voting preference at a given time) and have a distaste for extreme political views, preferring center-left or center-right depending on the issue.

So it is only fitting, while discussing tribal responsibility, that I address the pitfalls of such a position.

Moderates are often accused of ‘enlightened centrism,’ or of peddling ‘both-sides-ism’, where a wishy-washy, self-righteous stance is taken at the moment when a choice must be made between two parties. The meat of these accusations is that the moderate is virtue-signaling being above the fray without attempting to discern the better path forward. In essence, exemplifying the moral and intellectual laziness of hypocrisy.

This is certainly one of the dangers of being a moderate. Like partisans, we also have hypocrisy and contempt for others in our hearts. “Thank God that I’m not like those partisan hypocrites! I stay above the fray, appreciate the arguments of both sides, and I’m not easily offended or manipulated like partisans.”

As we’ve discussed, there is a great benefit to resisting angry partisanship, as this allows cooler heads to prevail and make progress. However, moderates need to ensure that this resistance comes from a place of principle rather than from our own disposition. For instance, I personally hate conflict. It makes me extremely anxious. In most situations I would rather not rock the boat and try to keep everybody happy (this is why being a writer is convenient…it delays the response time between expressing thoughts and receiving backlash).

But sometimes you need to rock the boat and display a bit of passion. Remember that anger is not evil in itself, and the passion it demonstrates may convince others to support your cause or to cease their bad behaviour. Moderates may fail to get angry when they should be angry, and the moment for action may pass them by as they overanalyze the situation or cowardly shy away from confrontation. So, while there may not be as much danger of grievance culture among moderates, the passion that partisans frequently display may be lost, and that is not always a good thing.

It is still important to take sides on important ‘issues’, even when not necessarily siding with a certain ‘team.’ To that end, what I’ve tried to do in this essay is highlight specific areas where right-wing and left-wing grievance cultures get things wrong, rather than simply saying that ‘both sides are equally bad and do exactly the same things.’ In times of hyper-partisanship, moderates shine by identifying areas where the truth has been stretched in one direction or another, because, having no particular allegiance, they can do this better than partisans. But it should be remembered that for some issues, one side may be much closer to the truth. It requires discernment to figure out whether the truth is closer to the middle or closer to one side, rather than just assuming that it must be closer to the middle on every issue because of our polarized environment. And one side may be the lesser of two evils at any given time.

A Note on Media Consumption

In this essay I have focused on adopting better philosophy to resist the effects of biased media on our anger. But dialing back our media / social media consumption is not a bad thing either. Pick your battles; cut back on internet arguments, which have a habit of getting more heated than they should. When your opponent isn’t in the room with you, it is easier to ‘write them off’. Plus, without tone and facial expressions, misunderstandings abound. Also cut back on reading rage bait articles. It’s fine to stay informed, but it’s not fruitful to get yourself habitually worked up about things you can’t control. Avoid pundits who have a habit of bashing the people you don’t like. Try to find calmer, more rational people and discussions. Maybe longer form podcasts or radio shows.

Summary

• Grievance culture is a culture which fosters a collective addiction to righteous indignation (anger) for the purposes of avoiding moral responsibility within a tribe.
• The primary grievance of a grievance culture is that the enemy is ruining society because of their deficient character, values or intelligence, and must therefore be defeated at all costs. All other grievances fall under this umbrella.
• Hypocrisy is the central vice of grievance culture, the pretense that we are more righteous than we are, that we do not have to change and grow as a person while others do. It makes token offerings to moral responsibility, signaling virtue without pursuing and implementing virtue. One such token offering is righteous indignation (anger), where we virtue signal being in the right compared to those people who are in the wrong. Hypocrisy allows our anger to take the path of least resistance, turning us into righteous warriors or righteous victims who employ double standards, heaping special punishment on an enemy or affording ourselves and our tribe special lenience.
• The righteous warrior wields the sword of hypocrisy (contempt for others) to disproportionately cut down their enemies, scapegoating them, reducing them to their transgressions for the purposes of comparing themselves favorably to said enemy. This is essentially a deflection tactic to focus the glare of moral responsibility on the inherent ‘wrongness’ of the enemy, so that we don’t need to think about ways in which we have to grow as a person.
• The righteous victim wields the shield of hypocrisy (self-pity) to defend themselves against accusations by others or their own conscience, demanding special lenience compared to others, emphasizing and broadcasting their grievances to set their ‘rightness’ in stone, making excuses to moral responsibility for why they should be exempt from its demands – why they are too hard-done-by to grow as a person. The ball is in the enemy’s court, not theirs.
• In the intellectual sphere, contempt writes people off as irredeemably stupid, focusing on the dumbest thing they said so we can ignore anything else they say, while self-pity makes excuses for our own intellectual shortcomings or dishonesty by complaining about the bias or agenda of our opponents.
• Hypocrisy is about looking inward and backward at our weaknesses and past grievances to exempt ourselves and our tribe from moral responsibility, or downward at our enemies to ignore our need to change and grow as a person.
• The virtue of faith is the antidote to the vice of hypocrisy. Faith looks upward at something greater than ourselves and forward towards positive change and growth in ourselves and our communities. It looks outward at our moral responsibilities towards others instead of making excuses. Faith pursues righteousness, believing that virtue is more important to pursue than our own selfish interests, while hypocrisy is merely interested in the perception of righteousness. Faith hopes and believes that personal (and collective) moral improvement / spiritual growth is possible by placing its trust in some conception or vision of greater virtue that they have witnessed or heard about, perhaps through some religion, philosophy, spiritual teacher, role model or story. Christians place their faith in the person of Christ whom we believe is the ultimate embodiment of virtue and thus the ultimate object of faith, who moreover can actually forgive us and save us from our sins, transforming us into people who become more and more righteous over time, to that end gifting us a penitent, humble, hopeful, positive, persistent, growth-oriented attitude which is essentially what faith consists of. Faith leads to moral-spiritual life, while hypocrisy kills moral potential and keeps us spiritually dead.
• We must be captivated by virtue in order to persist in faith. We must possess a sense of awe, reverence and gratitude, in other words a deep love of that which is supremely admirable, which for Christians is God himself. Love for our neighbour follows, since if we love what is right we will treat our neighbour rightly, forbidding ourselves from treating them with the double standards that come so naturally to us. We may not like our neighbour very much, but we wish for them to grow to the potential that God has in store for them and work to facilitate that, because we gratefully recognize that God has granted us that same opportunity. Loving God and our neighbour involves looking upward at God as our superior and outward at our neighbour as an equal who has needs to be met and grievances to be resolved.
• In the intellectual sphere, curiosity and love of learning sustain our pursuit of truth and spur us to higher standards that reject rhetorical dishonesty. The pursuit of truth parallels the pursuit of righteousness and also requires a kind of faith – in some source of knowledge or method of investigation, hoping and believing that the truth is knowable or discoverable.
• Faith (rooted in love) does the hard thing, in contrast to hypocrisy which represents the path of least resistance. It refuses to degrade the humanity of our enemies through contempt, and it refuses to afford ourselves or our tribe special lenience through self-pity. Faith visualizes the potential for the redemption of our enemies and the potential for growth in our tribe, even though it is difficult to acknowledge that our enemies are valuable and redeemable, and difficult to acknowledge that our tribe needs to repent and grow. Jesus’ crucifixion informs both these points, dealing a fatal blow to tribal hypocrisy and hypocrisy in general. It demonstrates that all sinners are valuable, even our enemies, and that all people are sinners, including us and our tribe. It shows that tribal responsibility is the path to individual and collective salvation, not tribal warfare. Faith trusts that it is better to ‘pick up our cross’ and aim for a higher standard than our knee-jerk contempt and self-pity, even though that may cause strife within the tribe and loss of leverage in the culture war, not to mention possible harm to ourselves.
• Compassion and challenge are two values which, in the right proportions, promote growth. Hypocrisy selectively applies these values, challenging others in a contempt-filled manner without challenging ourselves or our tribe, and showing compassion for ourselves and our tribe in a self-pitying manner, without showing compassion to others. Grievance cultures do not promote growth, instead sparring over polarized conceptions of these two fundamental values. The Left champions compassion at the expense of challenge while the Right champions challenge at the expense of compassion. These two values should rather complement each other.
• Challenge is more susceptible to contempt, which withers its target instead of merely directing someone to their duty. Compassion is more susceptible to excessive pity which allows self-pity to thrive, smothering someone who needs to grow. So contempt is the more ‘natural’ vice of conservatives, while self-pity is the more ‘natural’ vice of liberals. Yet because of hypocrisy, political grievance culture warriors end up wielding both the sword and the shield of hypocrisy, regardless of which is more natural to them. They have no integrity to keep them from embracing their opponents’ vices (so conservatives can become whiny snowflakes and liberals can become toxic bigots).
• The conservative righteous warrior targets the ‘weak and the different’, blasting the ‘snowflakes’ or ‘weak links’ who have apparently failed to answer the call of challenge and duty, rather than simply directing them to their duty. It also targets those of other faiths, cultures and ideologies which differ from ‘traditional’ Western values. These people are perceived as broken or defective cogs in the social machine.
• The liberal righteous victim enshrines weakness and difference for the sake of maintaining permanent leverage over the privileged classes, in whom they attempt to sequester evil. They seek to organize people into permanent victim classes, oppressed by fixed privileged systems (patriarchy, systemic racism, oligarchy) then remove moral responsibility from people in those classes, which promotes stagnation rather than growth.
• Like liberal righteous victims, conservative righteous victims make themselves into permanent victims of fixed systems (globalism, communism, secularism, socialism, the Deep State), which seek to undermine the average person’s way of life in favour of the ‘weak and the different’. They are highly sensitive to any evidence of tradition being undermined, and loudly decry such practices, which can be as trivial as saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas.’
• Like conservative righteous warriors, liberal righteous warriors have their own version of the ‘weak and the different’, conservative rubes and traditionalist-religious weirdos who are holding society back from progressing. They are over-protective, excoriating anyone who challenges the underprivileged or who disagrees with proposed protections for them, which become increasingly coddling. They seek to shun or punish anyone who does not bow the knee to the progressive program, which is equated with protecting the vulnerable.
• There are distorted views of love and faith in society which act as barriers to a proper application of faith, in opposition to the hypocrisy of grievance culture. On the religious right, there is an emphasis on ‘tough love’ which is purportedly about telling the truth for someone’s own good, but which is not actually loving because it is compassionless and stunts growth, serving as an excuse to look down on others instead of upward at how far God is above us. Furthermore, the ‘toughest’ or harshest possible interpretation of biblical texts results in an excessive emphasis on ‘punishment’ and how much we deserve to suffer for all eternity (eternal conscious torment). This waters down faith into something that is less threatening to our status quo, because it makes salvation chiefly about avoiding punishment rather than being saved from our vices themselves and changing and growing as a person. An excessively negative view of human nature also leads to paralyzing self-pity, where bad behavior and character become normalized and expected because our nature is ‘totally depraved’ (i.e. thoroughly corrupt) or because ‘we never claimed to be good people, just sinners saved by grace!’. This leads to an environment where bad character is acceptable as long as one pays lip service to Christianity, and wolves roam freely and openly among the sheep.
• Meanwhile, there is a distorted conception of love on the secular Left, where love is about ‘acceptance’, which includes not only acceptance of people but affirmation of their beliefs and mindset. This leads to an environment where navel-gazing (looking inward) is the norm rather than looking outside oneself for truth and inspiration, which precludes faith and stunts growth. It turns faith into ‘positivity’ which dispenses with the concept of sin, acting like there is nothing within us that needs changing, that we don’t need to look upward. Thus evil must be externalized, whether in one’s enemies who are inherently evil or in ‘systems’ like patriarchy, systemic racism, etc. Progress means defeating these systems and political opponents, but has little to do with individual character growth. There is a high degree of arrogance in liberal politics which assumes it is morally and intellectually superior simply by virtue of the ‘progressive’ label, and which looks down on those who do not subscribe to that label.
• Repentance marks the moment when faith in something greater and better than ourselves is instilled in us, and we take a concrete step in the right direction. There is nothing more concrete than money; therefore, what we do with our money reflects our repentance and leads to justice.
• The ‘productive tribe’ and the ‘protective tribe’ are subsets of Right and Left-wing grievance cultures, respectively. The former has a misplaced loyalty to productivity / the economy, which results in unjust wealth gaps and exploitation, while the latter has a misplaced loyalty to protectiveness / the State, which results in over-regulating, over-taxation and over-spending. Electing politicians who understand the problematic excesses of either side will be important going forward. That way many of the legitimate grievances that add fuel to the fire of grievance culture can be reduced.
• Political moderates are not off the hook, since we also have hypocrisy in our hearts, even if we are less susceptible to grievance culture in general. We should not lazily assume that ‘both sides are the same’ as an excuse to avoid making a choice between parties, nor should we always assume that the truth is in the middle. Nor should we disregard the passion that partisans display, since it may be appropriate at times.  
• Reducing the consumption of partisan media doesn’t hurt.

***

I hope that this discussion of vices and virtues has been helpful to some. I know I’ve written some harsh things in this essay, which was born of alarm (and frankly disgust) at the degree of political tribalism in our society, especially within the church. But we’re all human. We all succumb to the same universal vices. The important thing is to be aware of that and use that knowledge to deal with the wrong in our midst. I don’t have all (or even most) of the practical answers for how to make society better. I want to see people laying down their sword and shield and coming back to the table across from their fellow humans, so that I can hear their ideas on how to make things better.

And I believe that is possible. This essay ends with hope. I believe that, however furious the culture wars appear, people can change and grow when exposed to the right influences. If we can dispense with grievance culture in our midst, we can get back to the negotiating table and solve our more tangible problems, rather than wasting our time playing righteous warrior or righteous victim on the stage of political tribal warfare. We can begin to see each other as humans again, humans who are susceptible to the same universal vices but who can, by grace, overcome them and move forward together.

---

1. Gen 4: 1-16 ↩︎
2. Matthew 23: 1-4 NIV ↩︎
3. Matthew 23: 23-24 NIV ↩︎
4. Luke 6: 41-42 NIV ↩︎
5. Luke 18: 9-14 NIV ↩︎
6. Aldous Huxley, Introduction to Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon” (Easton Press edition, The Limited Editions Club, New York, 1934). ↩︎
7. Luke 9:23 NIV ↩︎
8. Matthew 5:29 NIV ↩︎
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10. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952). Book III, Chapter 8: “The Great Sin.” ↩︎
11. John 15:5 NIV ↩︎
12. Matthew 13:31-32 ↩︎
13. Mark 2: 1-12; Matthew 9: 1-8; Luke 5: 17-26 NIV ↩︎
14. Hebrews 11:1 NIV ↩︎
15. Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11 NIV ↩︎
16. Matthew 5:6 NIV ↩︎
17. Hebrews 11:4 NIV ↩︎
18. Matthew 5:8 NIV ↩︎
19. Luke 6:45 NIV ↩︎
20. Matthew 25: 14-30 ↩︎
21. Matthew 22: 37-38 NIV ↩︎
22. Proverbs 21:21 NIV ↩︎
23. Matthew 22:39 NIV ↩︎
24. John 8:12 NIV ↩︎
25. John 6:35 NIV ↩︎
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76. James 2:22 NIV ↩︎
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78. 1 John 4:18 NIV ↩︎
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