All year you could hear it in the sarcastic tone of media personalities covering the news, you could see it in the ubiquitous mockery and derision present in social media, you could feel it as you navigated stores for necessities or tried to worship in church. It began to infect individuals, groups, neighborhoods, cities, churches, nations, and eventually the entire globe at a staggeringly drastic rate. This virus didn’t spread through biology, but through technology.
Obviously, I’m not speaking of the Coronavirus that has caused such devastation and havoc around the globe. Instead, I’m talking about the “better-than” virus that we’ve all experienced, been contaminated with, and spread this year as our nation has sought to walk through a pandemic, racial tensions that reached the boiling point, and a political cycle that has created a tsunami of division and anger, heightened most recently by the attack on the Capitol.
These serious social matters did not create the “better-than” virus, but it has exposed and feverishly fed it. It has now become highly virtuous- whether progressive or conservative- not only to declare oneself to have a certain belief, belong to a certain group, or participate in certain social or political causes, but also to declare any and all who are on the “other side” to be unworthy of breathing oxygen and being part of any society. We have become, as a nation, what David Foster Wallace called “the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.”
Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University and author of The Righteous Mind, says that we’re all inherently self-righteous, scouring the littlest relational interactions to bolster our fragile self-esteem. Jonathan Glover, a British philosopher, outlined in his book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century that most of the violent crises and conflicts of that century began with individuals and groups simply diminishing the humanity of others in subtle ways and creating distance from them relationally.
Yet, especially as I write this mostly to folks who share faith in Jesus, we don’t need Haidt or Glover to tell us these things. Jesus himself has already spoken of the need to take the log out of our own eye before we take the speck out of someone else’s. Paul, while willing to critique the fallenness of Cretan culture, powerfully shows that because believers have been incredibly foolish and deeply fallen with the only remedy being the Gospel, there is no room in any heart for self-righteous boasting (Titus 3:2-7).
Early in 2021 it seems like a remedy for COVID is coming. Finding that remedy, however, has taken much time and cost billions of dollars. The only remedy that can cure and humble the self-righteousness in our hearts came 2000 years ago. It is the death- the broken body and shed blood- of the Son of God.
Then what becomes of our boasting? It is excluded (Rom. 3:27).
Let’s listen more. Think better of others. Be slow to speak. In humility, consider others more significant than ourselves (Phil. 2:3).