I recently spent a week or so immersed in constitutional law, looking at — among other things — the place of the Declaration of Independence in constitutional interpretation. It has gotten me thinking about the virtues of hypocrisy. The Declaration is a particularly good example of this. Thomas Jefferson was nothing if not a hypocrite when he declared that all men were created equal and had inalienable rights. Sugar coat it as you might, there is no denying that Jefferson was a slave owner and that whatever abolitionist principles he had in his extreme youth were jettisoned in later life. The English, quite rightly, resented being lectured on liberty by American slave owners, and to its credit the United Kingdom outlawed slavery long before the United States did and the British Navy did more than anyone else in suppressing the trans-Atlantic slave trade.<\/p>\n
And yet, I can’t help but see Jefferson’s hypocrisy as an ultimately good and productive thing. One of the unfortunate effects of modern hyper-liberalism is that it tries to locate all morality in the choices of the autonomous self. This pushes one toward the silly excesses of Satre and Camus and the exaltation of the integrity of the individual as the ultimate sign of virtue. This is not a moral universe in which Thomas Jefferson fares well. If one gives up on locating morality wholly within the self, however, Jefferson can still claim some scraps of virtue. His hypocrisy points beyond himself, locating morality in a sphere outside of the choosing self, making it something that has claim on our choices beyond the ultimately formal demands of integrity. This is important because ultimately this gives the demands of principle a transformative power over not only the self but also the ends and means that the self employs. The working pure of Jefferson’s hypocrisy through the development of American constitutional law ultimately worked a great and good transformation that integrity standing alone could not have done.<\/p>\n
Put in Christian terms, hypocrisy is an instantiation of the Augustinian insight that man falls short of the glory of God and this makes him, in some sense, evil, sinful, and less than he should be. Left to itself, hypocrisy can degenerate into the moral passivity of an extreme and perhaps bastardized Calvinism. Yet there is also an optimistic, Anabaptist and perhaps even Pelagian aspect of hypocrisy. It calls forth repentance, transformation, and points toward perfectibility and even — according to the Mormon heresy — exaltation.<\/p>\n
Mormons, of course, are hypocrites. We sin and white our sepulchres, falling short of the exortations of the prophets and the gospels. To be sure there is shame in this, but it ought not to be the shame of a vacuous integrity. Rather, it seems to me, that our theology creates the possibility of a productive, Jeffersonian hypocrisy that leads on to better things. Much of American constitutional law can be seen as a kind of repentance, a working pure of the primal Jeffersonian hypocrisy not in terms of pure integrity but rather in terms of progression toward the ideal that makes Monticello at once so appealing and so appalling. Christianity in general and Mormonism in particular place us in a similar position. Fortunately,the eventual redemption of Jeffersonian ideals provides some reason for placing hope in the transformative seed of our hypocrisy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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