Hate Hoaxes Are What Happen When Your Religion Is Identity Politics

When Christianity was still a baby religion, it dealt with its first case of hypocrisy. The Bible records the story in Acts 5: Ananias and Sapphira, a married couple in the church at Jerusalem, sold a piece of property. They made it known that they were donating all their proceeds to the poor, but they lied about the price, secretly keeping a portion for themselves.For this self-exalting falsehood, the Holy Spirit struck them dead. “Then great fear came on the whole church,” the author of Acts concludes. I guess so.Times change, and religious affiliations fluctuate, but human nature remains the same. People will always be tempted toward self-exalting lies, seeking to be applauded as virtuous without putting in the effort to actually be virtuous.It’s through this lens that we should view the curious case of Jussie Smollett, who now appears to have faked a hate crime against himself, blaming it on faceless Trump supporters. We could also mention other recent viral “hate hoaxes”––the Covington Catholic debacle, the homophobic Whole Foods cake, and the too-readily-believed “racist restaurant patron” tales that plague the internet. These stories bear too many similarities to be seen simply as isolated attention-seeking.Instead, this phenomenon has everything to do with a philosophy that has taken hold in the modern mind. Like Ananias and Sapphira before them, we should see these particular liars as early hypocrites in a new religion: the church of modern progressivism.

Source: Hate Hoaxes Are What Happen When Your Religion Is Identity Politics