Justin Rice

In this dissertation, I explore how Christian doctrine and practice respond to the pressures placed upon them by the troubling reality of religious hypocrisy (RH). Assuming a teleological notion of social institutions, I argue that RH is best understood in relation to the Church as an institution, and that RH occurs when religious agents undermine or subvert their appointed role within the Church. RH consists in the conscious or unconscious charade of spiritual or moral virtue undertaken in one’s capacity as a member of a religious institution, grounded in a fundamental disparity between one’s thoughts, words, desires, motivations, or deeds, and facilitated through the mechanisms of self-deception, interpersonal deception, or the vice of complacency. I further offer an account of several archetypes of religious hypocrisy: conmen, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and the complacent. After establishing a distinction between fraternal arguments and adversarial arguments from hypocrisy, I introduce the Ecclesiological Problem of RH, which consists in the erosion of trust in the Church and its teachings. To address this crisis, I formalize three adversarial challenges: the Arguments from Institutional Corruption, Prudence, and Doctrinal Implausibility. These arguments ultimately point to what I call the Disadvantage of History – a state of severe spiritual and epistemic bewilderment. Finally, I formulate the Corrupt Dissemination Argument which is a fraternal argument meant to counter Christian exclusivist soteriologies. I conclude the dissertation with a brief polemic against Christian Nationalism, contrasting the coercive geopolitical control of nationalist ideology against an account of piety as an interior gift of the Spirit, which animates the Church’s true telos of radical love, service, and justice.