Our values are our most cherished ideals, our firmest foundations, an expression of our core convictions. Every decision we make can be traced down to a foundational value that caused us to decide one way or the other. The tricky thing for us is that we are very good at misunderstanding our OWN values. We often have a mental list of what we say & believe our values are, and that list can often, without even noticing, not actually reflect what we truly value. With this dichotomy, we become unwitting hypocrites who may even be undermining the very values we are championing.

To help frame this discussion, let us differentiate between a Stated Value and an Actual Value. Our Stated Values are what we say, and believe, to be our values. We fight for and are convinced these are our values. Our Actual Values may or may not be the same. We may have Actual Values that we don’t know we hold. The discontinuity between our Actual Values and Stated Values is often covered by Rationalization that obscures an Actual Value overriding a Stated Value.

Let’s use a simple and convicting example. I believe both as a conservative and a Christian that the law is to be obeyed, and that to break the law is a sin. That Stated Value becomes something I fight for politically, especially in regard to crime or immigration. Then I get in my car to go somewhere and while the speed limit is the law, I hold allegiance to that law very loosely. My Actual Value is that the law should give way to personal decisions, at least for me. I would never publicly embrace this value, nor usually admit it to myself. I’m a Law and Order man!

This tendency to fight for values, especially in the political arena, while not actually holding those values has become almost a feature of much of modern politics in the American Church, especially what we would call the Republican Right Church. The discontinuity has become so stark, that the rationalizations have had to become explicit as well. Phrases like, “we aren’t electing a pastor-in-cheif” or “I vote for the policy, not the person” can be true statements while also serving to paper over the difference between a Stated Value and an Actual Value so that we don’t have to admit the Actual Value.

The question really becomes, can you separate a Person from the Value? Yes, people of poor character can cast a vote for a good thing, that is clear, but when it comes to championing & spreading a value, can values be saved, transmitted, and made transformative to society by those who do not hold those values?

For the Christian, the Biblical answer is, NO! The Bible makes it clear that how we live is inseparable from what we believe. It goes so far as to make the point that if your life is consistently out of step with your beliefs, your belief is invalid.

(Jas 1:22)  But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.

(1Jn 2:9)  The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now.

(1Jn 4:20)  If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.

A pastor who preaches against adultery, yet commits adultery, should not be tolerated in a church. This isn’t simply because he’s a pastor, but because as a Christian, the deeds matter. Now when we step out of the church into the world, do our values change? We do understand that many of our politicians do not share our values, and yet we vote for them. This is a normal part of living in a pagan society that is a participatory democracy, and there is no hypocrisy in that simple act.

The problem becomes when we try to use our values as weapons to accrue political power while trying to pretend that we are merely defending our values. This leads us to divorce our Stated Values from our Actual Values, and to do so in front of a lost world that is not deceived by our rationalizations.

The greatest value that has been weaponized in our culture is the incendiary area of Abortion. If we hold that abortion is the death of a child, no matter how unformed, then we have to be against it. This simple formulation has been the political framework for most of the Republican Christian Right. This value overrides all others, sometimes creating what is called a “single-issue voter.”

Within the Pro-Life/Anti-Abortion movement, there have been two centers of thinking. Incrementalists seek to take a step-by-step approach to try to remove abortion from the culture. Abolitionists hold that embracing the step-by-step approach is tantamount to pro-abortion, with the only right way to fight the evil being full abolition as step one, no matter how possible that is. Both of these approaches have appeals based on how one understands their Values.

Let’s take for a moment the Abolitionist stance as it seems to take a stronger Moral Value position. Now if I am offered a candidate that will vote to ban all abortions, but who has in their personal life, embraced abortion as a choice, how do I vote? I vote the policy, not the person. In other words, I’m against abortion for society, but not for certain individuals. I’m willing to look the other way on an individual abortion situation to champion the value that EVERY LIFE must be saved.

Thus the hypocrisy is exposed. Every life is valuable except the ones that must be sacrificed for the value. I may be a Stated Value Abolitionist, but I’m willing to ignore some incremental abortions to get there. It is this discontinuity that is undermining the witness of Christians in the public sphere. To champion truth, but willing to support lies to get there. To champion life, but willing to see death to get there. To champion sexual morality, but willing to embrace the immoral to get there. When we say we are voting our principles BY ignoring those principles, we reveal what our Actual Value is: Power.

The point of politics is to establish governing power. For many of us these days, that is the Actual Value that we are trying to hide from our own eyes. No longer in the majority of our nation, we want to try to hold onto control of the public morality and laws, and if it takes immoral people to help us keep that power, then that is ok because our Actual Value is: that power.

Our ends are good. The question we must wrestle with again and again Biblically is: do those ends justify the means and do we Actually Value what we say we do?