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American Christian social media lit up last week with the story of another fraudulent influencer. An account claiming to be run by a patriarchy-supporting “trad wife” with 14 children turned out to be that of a single, childless woman with a fake identity and a falsely narrated life.
This case was an especially literal example of a broader truth that ought to serve as a warning in an age of ideological extremism: You become who you pretend to be—but in one direction only. You can fake your way to vice but never to virtue.
The evolutionary biologist Hanno Sauer has written a book, The Invention of Good and Evil, that seems designed to elicit eyerolls from me from the title on. Sauer’s argument is common enough from the reductionist materialist perspective: that morality and immorality, good and evil, don’t reflect anything transcendent about reality but instead show how humans have evolved to cooperate for the flourishing of the gene pool.
Sauer’s analysis is more interesting when he gets to a sociological examination of the last 50 years or so, however. He wonders how, in this cultural moment, people navigate what’s right and wrong. Among other things, he points to the role of pretense.
After a long discussion of broadening views of human rights, including what some refer to as the “wokeness” wars of the past several years, Sauer looks at the global right-wing backlash, especially as mediated through social media. There, he describes a pattern of irony-leading-to-reality that I’ve seen play itself out in a thousand tragic stories.
He asks, first of all, why so many have embraced what would be seen in almost any other age as cruelty of a cartoonish sort. Some of this, he argues, is the desperate search for something against which to rebel.
“In the case of many adolescents, what’s left to rebel against when your former hippie parents don’t have a problem with drugs and premarital sex?” he writes. “Not infrequently, this next step has consisted of swastikas, crude misogyny and confessions of murder fantasies.”
At first, much of this rebellion is played for laughs. “Which aspects of the right-wing backlash were really meant seriously, and which were simply provocation, whether the ends eventually justified almost every means?” Sauer asks. In the beginning, much of it is the latter, “only ever meant ironically, or more precisely meta-ironically: the irony being to leave it unclear what was really meant ironically and what was not,” he writes.
Human psychology, however, does not allow the heart to keep this kind of “vice-signaling” at the level of trolling. “Unfortunately, some people who had been in on the joke forgot that you have to be careful who you pretend to be, because at some point you become who you pretend to be,” Sauer notes. “Many, once they’d shed their ironic pose, became real Nazis or real misogynists (and often both).”
This is especially true, he argues, in a time of “extremism inflation” driven by an attention economy. If you’ve wondered why much of what you see in online Christianity seems to be a direct inversion of the Christian elder—as “temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Tim. 3:2–3)—you are not the crazy one.
“Almost every social grouping, both right- and left-wing, has to struggle with the problem of extremism inflation, particularly as those few extremists end up dominating discourse,” Sauer writes. “A group’s ideology inevitably ends up being dominated by the people who represent the most extreme version of that ideology, and beyond a certain point, this extreme version eventually becomes the new normal.” He continues,
Anyone who wants to join the group or move up within it must be able to demonstrate a particular loyalty to the cause, and that usually means escalating this radicalization loop even more. From there, it is only a small step to proclaiming that Kim Jong Un can teleport or that the “Führer” is infallible. Vanishingly few actually believe this nonsense, or indeed that anyone else believes it. But ideological extremism becomes a costly signal, as it is designed to build trust within groups by burning bridges with common sense—and with others—and further consolidating the group’s bonds.
In this way, the vapid advice for people to “fake it until you make it” is actually true. Pretending to be extreme will eventually make the typical person into an extremist. Pretending to see compassion as toxic or fidelity as weakness will eventually lead to an inner life of cruelty and coarseness that matches the outer show.
That’s because the hunger for the pretense is itself already a loss of integrity. Those who mimic the ways of an idol, the Bible says, do, in fact, become like that idol over time (Ps. 115:8).
For this reason, the apostle Paul warns about unconfronted immorality under the cover of church membership: “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Cor. 5:6, ESV throughout). What’s normalized is imitated, and immorality that is imitated ultimately becomes real.
It doesn’t work the other way around, though. You can pretend your way to vice but not to virtue. You can wink with irony on your way to hell, but there’s no return ticket.
That’s because integrity and morality and godliness do not come about by outward demonstration. Whitewashing the tomb does nothing to enliven the decomposing corpses underneath (Matt. 23:27–29). Having “the appearance of godliness but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5) is not the first step to real godliness but the contradiction and desecration of it.
The way to immorality starts with building one’s way up, and you can fake your way to a foothold on that climb. But the way of Christ starts with a recognition of lack—of the kind of empty-handedness that puts away falsehood (Eph. 4:25).
Pretend to be a Nazi long enough, and you will soon find yourself goose-stepping along with the best of them. Laugh at sexual abuse and human trafficking long enough, and you will become a predator.
Those who wink and nod with “Aren’t we naughty?” trolls, thinking they can do so without ever becoming what they pretend to be, enact a sad irony. They seem to think they can create a Christian nation only if the state is coercive enough to make people pretend to be Christians until they are. But the exact opposite is true.
You cannot pretend your way to a changed heart or a renewed mind, much less to Christian maturity. The Spirit doesn’t work that way.
Jesus will ask you what he asks of everyone: “What are you seeking?” (John 1:38). But you will not enter the kingdom of God without a congruence between the heart and the mouth. Admittance to the kingdom is through mercy and grace alone, which come only to those who have given up on earning and achieving (Rom. 10:9–11).
Millennia ago, the Bible warned us of all this. “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith,” Paul wrote to Timothy. “Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” (1 Tim. 1:5–7).
Be careful what you pretend to be. Pretending your way to hell will take you there—and pretending your way to heaven will take you to hell too.
A sincere faith, a good conscience: These things are not good for clout in a time of extremism inflation. But ask yourself: Is that what you really want?
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
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