Rated R for Religious Hypocrisy

Growing up in a church obsessed with Hollywood but blind to hunger

Growing up evangelical I watched my church lose its mind over movie ratings while entire neighborhoods went hungry across town.

I was consistently warned about the spiritual danger of Rated R films. The phrase I grew up hearing was “trash in, trash out.” I would hear sermons on Hollywood’s agenda, and about the slippery slope of “worldly entertainment.” Meanwhile, our church parking lot was full of luxury SUVs, and I can’t remember a single sermon about economic injustice. Not one. We had a culture war to fight, and apparently Jesus was really concerned about whether or not I watched Titanic. Good grief.

I didn’t have language for it then, but I felt the dissonance. We could mobilize a prayer chain over a Supreme Court decision in minutes, but if Mrs. Johnson down the street lost her house to medical debt, we sent a casserole.

The Selective Moral Outrage Problem

Looking back, far too many churches have become experts at thundering. They know how to raise their voices about threats to “traditional values.” They can pack a school board meeting to protest a library book. They can organize a boycott before breakfast. The infrastructure is impressive, really. The email lists, the talking points, the righteous indignation on demand.

But ask those same churches to address the reality that wages haven’t kept pace with cost of living for forty years, and suddenly it gets complicated.

Bring up the fact that our criminal justice system disproportionately destroys Black families, and we start hearing a lot about “both sides” and “personal responsibility.”

Mention that our healthcare system lets people die because they can’t afford insulin, and someone will inevitably pivot to abortion.

The pattern is so consistent it’s almost predictable. Cultural sins…the ones that make us feel morally superior, the ones that require nothing from us except judgment…get the spotlight. Systemic sins…the ones embedded in how we’ve structured society, the ones we might actually benefit from…get a theological shrug.

What Jesus Actually Cared About

I keep thinking about how Jesus spent his time. He wasn’t forming a coalition to preserve Sabbath observance in the public square. He was too busy healing people on the Sabbath and getting in trouble for it. He wasn’t organizing protests against Roman sexual ethics. He was sitting down to eat with the people his religious community had written off as moral failures.

When Jesus got loud, when he actually raised his voice and disrupted the peace, it was in the temple. Not because people were sinning wrong, but because the religious establishment had turned worship into something else entirely. That’s what made him dangerous. That’s what got him killed.

The prophets before him had the same priorities. Isaiah didn’t spend his breath condemning personal moral failures. He went after people who “add house to house and join field to field” until there was no room left for anyone else. Amos pronounced judgment on those who “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth.” Micah called out leaders who “abhor justice and pervert all equity.” These weren’t random individuals making bad choices. These were systems. Structures. Ways of organizing society that ground people up and called it normal.

I came across this quote recently that stuck with me:

“There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.” -Robert Reich

That sentence does so much work. It names the exact move we keep making…focusing on individual behaviors we find uncomfortable while protecting economic systems that destroy lives at scale.

The Comfort of Cultural Battles

There’s a reason we default to cultural warfare. It’s cleaner. Simpler. You can draw clear lines. You can know who the good guys are. You can feel like you’re standing for truth without actually having to change anything about your life.

Systemic sin is messier because we’re implicated. I benefit from systems that underpay workers and keep costs low. I participate in an economy built on extraction. My retirement account probably includes investments in companies doing real harm. My comfort is connected to someone else’s exploitation, and that’s a harder sermon to preach than “guard your heart against secular media.”

One of my favorite New Testament scholars, N.T. Wright, talks about this…how Western Christianity became obsessed with individual soul-saving while losing the script on God’s intention to renew all of creation, to set things right systemically. We reduced the gospel to a personal transaction and lost the vision of the kingdom of God as a present reality that confronts every power structure that dehumanizes people.

When the church picks cultural battles over systemic ones, we’re essentially saying that God cares more about maintaining our comfort and cultural dominance than about justice for the oppressed. We’re saying that personal piety matters more than economic fairness, that sexual ethics trump fair wages, and that defending our slice of power is holier than defending the powerless. Jesus would not be impressed.

Recovering Prophetic Imagination

The church’s job isn’t primarily to make individuals more moral according to our preferred cultural standards. Our job is to embody and announce a different way of organizing human life…one where the last are first, where the powerful are brought down from their thrones, where good news comes to the poor.

Now, I want to be clear…this isn’t a call to abandon personal ethics. It’s a call to stop using personal ethics as a shield against structural justice. It’s possible to care about both, but we’ve made a habit of weaponizing one against the other. Every time someone brings up poverty or racism or healthcare, someone else derails the conversation by bringing up a cultural issue they consider more spiritually serious. It’s ridiculous. And it’s effective at keeping us from having to do the harder work.

What This Looks Like in Practice

So what does it mean to actually confront systemic sin instead of just performing moral outrage about cultural ones? It means your church might need to talk about wages and housing and healthcare with the same urgency it brings to other moral issues. It means asking who benefits from the way things are currently structured and whether that aligns with God’s vision of flourishing for all people.

It means recognizing that when immigrants are dehumanized, when healthcare is a commodity, when education funding is tied to property values, when prisons become profitable…these aren’t random individual failures. They’re systems. And systems can be changed. Should be changed. Must be changed if we’re serious about following a Jesus who came to bring good news to the poor and freedom to the oppressed.

It means the church recovering its prophetic voice. Not the performance of prophetic voice that rails against cultural boogeymen while cozying up to political power. The actual prophetic tradition that speaks truth to power, that advocates for the vulnerable, that calls out injustice wherever it shows up…even and especially when it shows up in the structures we benefit from.

The world doesn’t need another church that’s good at being angry about the culture war outrage of the week. The world needs churches that look like Acts 2, where nobody had unmet needs because the community actually restructured their relationship to resources. The world needs churches that sound like Amos, who told comfortable religious people that God hated their worship services because they were ignoring justice.

Woe to the church that thunders about cultural sins while remaining silent on systemic ones. Not because cultural issues don’t matter, but because our selective outrage reveals what we actually worship. And right now, lots of churches are looking more like the religious leaders that Jesus confronted than the kingdom he announced.

Jesus would not be impressed. But he’s still inviting us to something better.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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