Category | Op Ed

The hypocrisy of moderate religion

Published on February 23, 2010 by Matthew Cole

In the last decade, America has witnessed many troubling events related to religious extremism, including 9/11, the Fort Hood shooting, Westboro Baptist Church protests at military funerals and the murder of abortion doctors. In response to such events, so-called “religious moderates” have rightly denounced acts of violence and discrimination perpetrated in the name of religion. What is it that separates these moderates from those extremists? Here is the answer: Hypocrisy.

Let me be clear on my use of terms. I realize that two people who care equally about the same religious text can each derive different interpretations from it. Differences in interpretation are to be expected if a particular text is written vaguely or metaphorically. I do not base my definition of the terms “moderate” and “extremist” on any particular interpretation of a religion. I have a more precise means of separating the two.

Moderates have a “salad bar” religion, in that they are selective about which parts of a religion they choose to take seriously. Do you like the Golden Rule and the part about loving one’s neighbor? Put it on a bumper sticker and show off your righteousness. Not too fond of genocide, racism and slavery? Just pretend those parts of your preferred religious text don’t exist, or maybe you can invent your own metaphorical “interpretation” for it that you don’t even take seriously. This is the sort of thinking that defines a moderate. Extremists don’t have this problem-they take their religion as it is. They take the whole thing, and not just the parts that make them feel all warm and fuzzy.

In recent years, it has become fashionable for foreign policy scholars to yearn for a debate within the Muslim world between moderates and extremists. I don’t think an actual “debate” is possible, becauase the ideologies of the moderates and the extremists are based on two very different epistomologies. Simply defined, an epistomology is a way of “knowing.” The epistomology of the extremists is faith. What moderates have can’t really be considered faith, but rather, empiricism masquerading as faith. These two epistomologies are like two totally different languages.

Suppose you have a pastor or imam who chooses certain parts of a religious text to follow and other parts to quietly ignore. He had to make a conscious decision to deem certain parts “good” and other parts “bad” or “irrelevant.” He is essentially making a moral judgment based on his own set of moral values. For him to claim to get his moral values from the religious text would be dishonest, because his own moral instincts remain primary while the moral values the religious text advocate are treated as though they were secondary in importance. This is circular reasoning. If he truly believed that the religious text is of primary importance in determining moral values, then he would not have applied his independent judgment to critique it, he would have just taken it on faith, as like the extremist does.

The extremists can’t help it if their religious texts command them to think and act in ways that are inconvenient in the 21st Century. Moderates must bear a greater moral responsibility for what they might do, both good and bad, in the name of religion. For the moderates, religion is just a pretense onto which they can project their own predetermined ideologies and prejudices. For them to preach about the necessity of faith is total hypocrisy, since the selective application of their own independent judgment to the teachings of the religious text they claim to believe in shows that faith is something they don’t really have.

Why then do religious moderates not drop the pretense of faith altogether? I think many moderates simply have predetermined ideologies and prejudices that have no chance of being taken seriously by many other people unless disguised as religious commands. For other moderates, particularly in parts of the world where people are forced into a religion under threat of death, the pretense of faith allows them to escape the scorn of their co-religionists while still maintaining some distance from teachings that run contrary to what their rational faculties would have them conclude otherwise.

It may also be argued that moderates enable extremists, because if there were no moderates, the extremists might be too isolated for their faith-based beliefs to survive. I won’t offer my assessment here of any religion’s teachings, except to say that hypocrisy is, in my independent judgment, “bad.”