LOSING OUR RELIGION by S. E. CUPP

Author:S. E. CUPP
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THRESHOLD EDITIONS
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

VII

THOU SHALT FALL SPECTACULARLY

FROM GRACE

Hypocrisy, over the past few years, has become the favorite rallying cry of the liberal press, and no group is more often accused of it than Christian America.

When conservative Christians—in particular public figures—fall from grace due to some transgression in their personal lives, their morality is called into question, as is their right to have morals in the first place. “Hypocrisy!” the outraged blowhards cry, as they self-righteously point and then secretly laugh. David Shuster’s short-lived MSNBC program, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, featured a regular segment ominously, and kind of comically, called “Hypocrisy Watch,” and it would do just this—point and laugh at the country’s new creepy, crawly societal ill, the “hypocrites.” And not surprisingly, over less than four months of 2009, thirty-four of the new Hypocrisy Arbiter-in-Chief’s forty-eight offenders were Republicans or conservatives. Only four were Democrats or liberals. Because liberals are just way more sincere. 132

The allure of the conservative Christian hypocrite for the urban liberal media elite is fairly predictable: It’s another opportunity to shame Christians to the far fringes of American civilization—where oddities like tractor pulls, agriculture, and Sunday Mass are still inexplicably clinging to relevance—and simultaneously out them as liars, frauds, and holier-than-thou zealots. After all, Christians, to the secular Left, are far more dangerous when they actually practice what they preach—so taking them down a peg when they don’t reassures the Bill Mahers and Keith Olbermanns of the world that their secular bully pulpits maintain a protected status. “Phew,” they say. “We will live to laugh and point another day.”

So when a Republican politician, who has the audacity (some might call it courage) to say that he believes some actions are moral, while others aren’t, and then that politician himself acts immorally, he is immediately called a hypocrite by the liberal press, and the whole of the Republican Party is thrown to the lions along with him. “So much for family values,” the left-wing pundits shrug and shake their heads, and then excitedly snicker during the commercial break and high-five under the news desk.

Their collective glee isn’t diminished any when Democratic politicians are caught in flagrante delicto, because these aren’t the guys who ever “said” they had morals to begin with, nor did they ever suggest you should. So their transgressions are okay—politically ruinous, maybe, but hardly out of line with the rest of the country, which the liberal media points out is a collection of adulterers and philanderers anyway. For having values Republicans are hypocrites, and for having none Democrats are merely “representative.”

But it seems that, thanks to the continuous circulation of political scandals and controversies in the press, and the affinity for sensationalist hype the media depends on, many in the mainstream press have forgotten what hypocrisy actually means. Or maybe the better explanation is that they never knew what it meant to begin with. (“Tonight on ‘Hypocrisy Watch’: Liberal hypocrites in the press learn that ‘hypocrisy’ doesn’t mean what they think it means, and that calling people ‘hypocrites’ is actually ‘hypocritical’ and inaccurate.

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