Tom Wright on 'hypocrisy'

" If the church is hypocritical about sex, the media are hypocritical about hypocrisy"

For obvious reasons I don't normally recommend articles in The Guardian, but this, Bishop Tom Wright's take on hypocrisy, is worth reading in full. His theme is taken up by Ed West in The Telegraph today [here] who reinforces Dr Wright's telling point that it is now journalists who are setting themselves up on a rather precarious perch as the increasingly (it seems) sanctimonious high priests of the new secular morality.
This is the full article [link here] 

"I listened in disbelief as John Humphrys interviewed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor on Radio 4's Today programme this week. Surely, he said, like a headmaster addressing an errant teenager, if highly placed people knew about the behaviour of Cardinal Keith O'Brien, somebody in authority should have done something rather than covering it up? I waited for the former archbishop of Westminster, who sounded weary of the whole thing, to come up with any of the phrases that might have stopped the interview in its tracks: "Jimmy Savile"; "BBC"; "people in glass houses". Perhaps he was too polite. So Humphrys pressed on: the church claims it can tell people how to behave, so surely it has to live up to those standards itself?

The joke here is that it is usually the media that tell people how to behave. Yes, the church sometimes "speaks out". But if it's moralising you want, turn on the radio. Or pick up a newspaper. And the institution the media especially love to attack is of course the church. There is a logic to this. The media want to be the guardians of public morality, but some people still see the church that way. Very well, it must be pulled down from its perch to make way for its secular successor.

Don't be fooled when "religious affairs correspondents" look prim and solemn and shake their heads at the latest clerical scandal. They are enjoying every minute of it. It keeps them in a job (did anyone imagine that the real "religious affairs" of this country, the prayerful and self-sacrificial work that goes on under the radar every day of every year, would ever make headlines?). More: it makes it easier to sustain the fiction that the journalists have taken over as the nation's moral police.

Until there's another scandal – in the media themselves. Savile at the BBC. Phone hacking at the News of the World. Try suggesting that these were isolated, maverick one-off lapses, and listen to the hollow laughter echoing round the country. The church has rightly been attacked for hypocrisy. But is nobody else guilty? If the church is hypocritical about sex, the media are hypocritical about hypocrisy.

There are two alternatives to hypocrisy. Either you set high moral standards and keep them absolutely. According to Christian teaching, only one person has ever done that. Or you set standards so low that they aren't really standards at all: you simply "do what comes naturally". Angels aren't hypocrites. Nor (I think) are animals. Granted we are none of us in the first category – the only way to avoid hypocrisy is always to follow instinct: do whatever you feel like at the time.

Some ethicists advocate this. "Spontaneity" or "authenticity" appear attractive alternatives to hypocrisy. Go with your heart, we're told. But if you always do what you most feel like doing, you may avoid hypocrisy but you will be inconsistent, unreliable, and probably downright amoral. The heart, Jesus said, was where most of the problems began. The great ethical theorists, from Aristotle and the stoics to the leading religious teachers, saw the point. Virtue, in the strict sense of a character formed by habit and practice, doesn't just happen. You don't become courageous, or just, or prudent, or temperate, by a sudden overnight decision. You might as well wake up and decide to play a Brahms concerto. You have to practise. Of course, if you're a piano teacher it helps if you can play most of the right notes yourself, most of the time. But you're not there to clone yourself. You're there to help others to play Brahms.

The Christian has a particular angle on virtue. Some Protestant traditions have frowned on it: doesn't it mean we are trying to earn salvation by "good works"? Answer: no – it is all based on God's grace. But God's grace doesn't work "automatically". Part of the "fruit of the spirit", along with faith, hope and love, is self-control. That doesn't come overnight, either; and while you're practising the moral scales and arpeggios, and playing wrong notes, you are being, technically speaking … a hypocrite. Christians don't (or at least shouldn't) claim to have "made it" yet. We claim to follow Jesus. The church is composed of prodigal children who have discovered, to their astonishment, that their father still loves them. It was the older brother who thought the whole thing was a sham."