Leadingchurch.com

Breaking News!

Mother Jones (via Forbes) uncovered the companies that Hobby Lobby has invested in, and guess what? They made money off companies who make the kinds of abortion products that they fighting to not have to fund via employee health insurance.

The Forbes article begins

In what just may be the most stunning example of hypocrisy in my lifetime,

Maybe I should meet Rick Ungar because I know I’ve been at least as hypocritical. Maybe I can stun him more!

Hobby Lobby’s hypocrisy may be more on display than most of us, given their visibility at the Supreme Court, but evaluating the depths of it is kind of like comparing one sin verses another.

The fun thing about pointing out hypocrisy is how it makes us feel righteous at the expense of our adversary. What sucks about hypocrisy is when it is done to me and I am revealed to be a lover of self and a user of people and I am shown before the world to be a immoral, a liar, a fake and worthy of condemnation and scorn.

What’s amazing is that this is news. It really shouldn’t be amazing because we all love experiencing the bright light of our imagined moral excellence at the revelation of our adversary’s failure.

An Uglier, More Universal Truth

This is no surprise to me. This is how the game is played.

Can any of us with power and wealth in this world actually have clean hands? If the dire warnings of environmental devastation are correct people 100 years from now will curse us all for riding in cars and planes more than we curse our ancestors for killing the whales for nicer oil to fuel their meager lamps.

What do our tax dollars buy? What do our corporate vendors do with the money we cheerful turn over to them for our entertainment, our gadgets, and our food?

The Solutions?

So Hobby Lobby should cave in on their values and let their employees use their employer provided “Plan B” drugs. The morally bankrupt should end their moral pretense.

One side says “hurrah! Let’s stop pretending that you are holier than though”. What then to make of OKCupid’s boycott of Firefox? Maybe if that goes to the supreme court we can discover that OKCupid has helped hook up lots of Prop 8 proponents assisting them to find romantic bliss and on and on we go.

We quickly then, like Scholastic theologians develop our systems by which investing in my managed investment fund is moral but buying these other stocks directly is immoral, or only allowing boys under the age of 13 to be taught by women.

Total Depravity

I cannot live in this world without someone’s blood on my hands. I live on earth that was taken from Native Americans taken from Russians taken from Mexicans taken from who else knows.

I live “my well-being at someone else’s expense” all the time and think nothing of it. I am a bigot in how many different ways, more ways than I know. I use people for the love of things but what I most love is being honored by people for being a “good person” or being “a good Christian” or being a “fine writer” or a “good preacher”. I subscribe to a theological system by which I claim to be a theoretical sinner but I get angry when people point out my actual sins and shortcomings.  I love being seen as loving the poor, the mentally ill, the forgotten by society but I instinctively and implicitly rank people according to their usefulness to me and my agendas.

All of this is why I need a righteousness that is received and not achieved because even my achievements are duplicitous and hypocritical.

My guess is that most of the people who are up in arms about those few employees who won’t have access to the few drugs they protest don’t know or care about any or all of these employees. We care about ourselves and our righteousness and our petty systems that will be forgotten 100 years from now in the devastation we caused just because we wanted to pay less for a nice blouse.

So we can enjoy Hobby Lobby’s hypocrisy. Fox News will find someone else’s hypocrisy to lambaste and Jon Stewart will skewer them all better than anyone one else.

We are all self-important hypocrites and bigots longing for a savior who actually loves by living “your well-being at my expense.” Where can we find such a man?