What Is a Christian Hypocrite?

Any honest Christian will admit, however, that there are hypocrites among people who claim to be Christians. Every focus group brought up pedophile priests. As a Protestant pastor who was raised Catholic and served as an altar boy during my three years at Catholic school, as the father of five children, and as the pastor of children in our church, this devastates me. I tear up every time I read about yet another case in the news. Though He was single, Jesus loved children and they loved him. The Bible records occasions where kids wanted nothing more than to have fun with Jesus (Matthew 19:13-14; Mark 10:13-16). This kind of abusive behavior toward children is inexcusable, evil, and damnable.

While most non-Christians would likely disagree with me, in my mind abortion is also egregious example. The majority view among all Christians—Catholic and Protestant—is that abortion takes an innocent human life. Yet, plenty of Christians have abortions. The Christian pro-life group Focus on the Family relays hard data:

“The Alan Guttmacher Institute is a nonprofit corporation for reproductive health research and policy analysis. The Institute is also a public education arm of Planned Parenthood. It reports that one in six women who have had abortions are evangelical Christians. Based on these statistics, 5.6 million women in our churches have chosen abortion as a way out of an unwanted pregnancy. Each year, 1.5 million American women have an abortion. This means 250,000 evangelical Christian women could choose to abort a child this year.”(2)

I do not doubt that many of these women are sincere Christians. I am aware of the pressures that make abortion seem like a woman’s best option. I also assume that a substantial number of these women and their partners were sexually active outside of marriage. Any honest Christian would have to agree however that having premarital sex on Friday and an abortion on Saturday before going to church on Sunday pretending all is well is not best. It is one thing to sin. It is another to act like we have no stuff to deal with and to willfully reject a resolution consistent with what we profess. Whenever we get caught up in sin of whatever kind, God calls us to repent which simply means to agree with Him and invite Him to help us change. The difference between a sinner and a hypocrite is that a sinner sees they are wrong and seeks to stop that wrong whereas a hypocrite keeps on going. We will explore this distinction in the next blog.

(1)Richards, L. O. (1999). In New international encyclopedia of Bible words: based on the NIV and the NASB. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House.

(2)Sanctity of Human Life Department, “Who Has Abortions?” Heartlink.org, 2005, http://www.heartlink.org/directors/abortion/a000000073.cfm.]