The way to be authentic is to be holy
Of all the people Jesus encountered during his life on earth, the people he always reserved his harshest criticism for was the hypocrites.
Pretty much everyone who’s ever opened a New Testament knows how Jesus felt about hypocrites. Even most people who don’t know the Bible know how Jesus felt about hypocrites. And the biggest hypocrites of all were the religious people who made a big show of piety and religiosity, but didn’t practice what they preached. Their faith wasn’t authentic; it was pretend. They were faking it.
So we try to avoid hypocrisy like the plague, and rightly so. This was, and still is, a big thing with my generation. One of the most important components to relationships for my generation — and seemingly the next as well — is authenticity. We want to know people who are real and authentic. We millennials often frame this as a contrast to the older generation, which cared a lot more about propriety and appearances. We want to be real. We don’t want to fake it, and we don’t want other people around us to, either.
Authenticity is crucially important. I do agree with my generation that we put more emphasis on authenticity than past generations. Many of us feel free to share our struggles and faults with each other, and we admire those who have the courage to confess their sins. It’s letting people see the ugliness and the flaws and scars and struggles and brokenness that we deal with. Of course we should do that (with some appropriate boundaries, of course).
But in the church, I think that there has been a trend over the last 15 or so years of redefining authenticity, particularly among young evangelicals. We have come to associate authenticity primarily with our weaknesses, faults, brokenness, and messiness. Because authenticity has become one of our most prized traits, there’s a sort of association that goes on: brokenness, struggle, and messiness is obviously authentic, authenticity is good, therefore brokenness, struggle, and messiness is good. Things like holiness and piety are often fake, fakeness is bad, therefore holiness and piety are to be looked on with skepticism and caution.
I think we can see the problem with this mindset. This is the mindset that has produced so many books by Christians criticizing “the church.” It’s what’s produced this mentality where we tend to look down our noses at formalized religion, and often denounce “religion” altogether as a bad word — before we redefine “religion” so we can say Christianity doesn’t fall under that category. When the perception is that when we are broken, struggling, and failing, we are showing our most authentic self, then we tend to downplay the praise of holiness and godliness.
With this kind of mindset, is it any wonder that so many young people eschew the organized church? Is it any wonder that people say stuff like, “I love Jesus but not the church,” which, as Brett McCracken so aptly puts it in his excellent book Uncomfortable, is like loving a decapitated head? Is it any wonder that it’s so difficult to convince people that following Jesus means inevitable change?
I could say more about some of the negative effects of prioritizing “authenticity” over holiness. But what we should actually ask is: Is it even true that our brokenness and flaws are the most authentic part of us? Not according to the Bible. The Bible says that God made us very good. He made us in his image, to relate with him and connect with him and commune with him. He made us to be set apart from the rest of creation as his own children. That’s what holy means: “set apart.” That was humanity’s original, natural state. Brokenness, struggle, and sinfulness is an artificially-induced state caused by the then-unnatural sin of our first parents and passed down to us. It became part of our nature, but when we come to Jesus, he transforms our hearts and changes us. He transforms us back into what God made us to be: holy, set apart, in communion with him. That is what we really are.
So could it be, then, that for the Christian, brokenness is not the most authentic expression of our humanity, but holiness is? I think it must be. We are truest to ourselves when we connect with God. We are truest to ourselves when we pray, when we worship, when we connect with God’s people in community. This is true even if we don’t feel like doing it. Sometimes we may feel inauthentic, even fake, when we sing without feeling the emotional impact of the words, when we hear the Bible and it goes in one ear and out the other, when we serve but only out of a sense of duty, or when we engage in community with people we’d rather not be around. It might even feel hypocritical, and thus inauthentic.
But that’s not what hypocrisy is. Hypocrisy is not doing something you don’t want to do or feel like doing. It’s not singing to God when you don’t feel the emotional weight of the words. Hypocrisy in Jesus’ day literally referred to an actor putting on a mask, pretending he was someone else. That’s what hypocrisy is: pretending to be someone you’re not. But if we are truly children of God, holy, set apart, then when we express those things in a godly way, we are not being hypocrites. Quite the opposite. Hypocrisy would be denying the reality of who God made us to be.
We were not made to be broken. The only reason we are broken is because we need to be in order to come to holiness. Now, it’s not that we shouldn’t express our struggles and faults. We should. And church should be a place where we feel comfortable doing it. But those struggles are not what make us human, nor do they define our identity, nor are they expressions of our truest self. We should not look at our struggles and say, “This is who I truly am.” We should look at ourselves worshiping God, serving the poor, or reading God’s word and say, “This is who I truly am.” For if you’re a child of God, then when you’re imitating your Father, that’s when you’re being truest to yourself.
