Bill Maher thinks I’m a hypocrite but not nearly as much as I think I’m a hypocrite (part II)

If I’m to make a conservative estimate, I’ve attended over 1,300 worship services in my life.

In my Lutheran tradition, this means that more than 1,300 times, in the presence of others, I’ve said something like these words:

“Most merciful God,

We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves..."

I wasn’t really keeping track, but if I’m to make a liberal estimate, no more than 200 times, Bill Maher, in his aptly titled movie Religulous, reiterates his most forceful argument that Christians are hypocrites. Of his other two main arguments, one, clearly stated, is a truism (bad religion is bad) and the other is a non sequitur (bad religion = bad God), but I have to grant the keenness of this one very useful observation, Christians are hypocrites. He is exactly right, if a little too generous.

If we’re right that Maher publicly pronounced about 200 times that I, as a Christian, am a hypocrite, that’s about 1,100 fewer times than I’ve pronounced it.

In fact, so damning is the evidence that we as Christians are hypocrites that no one in my Lutheran tradition has bothered to cover it up. So indisputably right is Maher’s insight, that it’s a bit like telling someone twenty eight years into an AA program that he might have a problem with alcohol. It’s practically our core statement about ourselves. For Lutherans, who are arguably the denomination that is most wary of Pharisaism, not only is it a sin to sin, it’s a sin to stop sinning and so be accused of pride. To get to the point where we’re only hypocritical about our sin would be a joyous benchmark and a cause for celebration. We’re just trying to stop being so hypocritical about our hypocrisy. So deep does the assumption go that we are hypocrites, the statement that we’re “in bondage to sin” isn’t even the meat of our worship service. It’s more like a preface that we try to hammer out in the very beginning so we can move on to something that we all don’t already know.

Maher nails the matter of hypocrisy right on the head. It just takes him two hours to make the case that Sven and Agatha Ostberger of Duluth, Minnesota have already made before they’ve even turned to the right page in their hymnals on Sunday. Sometimes latecomers to a Lutheran service will lean over in the pew and ask, “What’d I miss?” and someone will dismissively reply, “Just the confession” as if to say, “You didn’t miss much, just the most obvious fact in the history of the world. We’re in bondage to sin. Resistance is futile. Yada, yada.”

It’s a level of honesty unknown to the humanist who naïvely proclaims that we’ll finally set the world right if we can just do away with all the religion.

That “we’ll finally get it right if…” is exactly the notion that Martin Luther insisted we need to give up on entirely if we’ll ever be brought to the point of faith. Far from promoting a squeaky clean image of Christianity, Luther believed that doing good things and thinking good things were as often hindrances as helps to our becoming people of faith. In fact, he believed that we had to be brought past the brink of despair in our own capacity to move beyond the hypocritical.

Luther would have agreed with Maher wholeheartedly that we need to disengage from the religion that gives us the overconfidence to say, “my team/tribe/ideology is right and we’re setting things right.” The problem is that this is easier said than done, and this religion goes by many different names, not all of them as forthright about the fact that it is, at the end of the day, the same old religion. Christianity and Islam are open about the fact that they're engaging in this sort of religion. Agnosto/Atheo/Secular-humanism less so. In the same way that alcohol has the most power over an alcoholic when he can’t admit that he has a problem, this religion has that much more power over it’s adherents when it claims not to be a religion. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and the Manhattan Project were set in motion by humanists who didn’t recognize a religion when they saw one.

Luther realized that, for us, the option isn't between hypocrisy and no hypocrisy. The option is between confessed hypocrisy and blind hypocrisy.

When Religulous closes with Maher’s extended diatribe, it comes clear that he is not offering an alternative to religion at all but the same old religion in new clothes. “My team/tribe/ideology is right and we’re setting things right.” I hardly have to add the subtext. One time when defining his neologism, “apatheist,” Maher went meta (ironically self-referential) and offered us this head-scratcher, “there's atheist and there's agnostic, and I'm okay with us not splitting the difference on those; if you are just not a super-religious person, you are on my team."

Perhaps, though, seeing as he’s a comedian, the irony is intentional when he suggests that the answer to the problems caused by all of our self-aware, avowed religions is an un-self-aware, disavowed religion. I can only assume.

I’m aware too that there are gobs of people who haven’t been repeating this most obvious fact since the cradle, that we are in bondage to sin and that our religions have failed to free us. For these, it might be worth Maher taking a couple extra hours to bring us to that despair in our religion which Luther saw was prerequisite to any meaningful faith.

In that case, I thank Bill Maher for the clever evangelism. Well played.