A lot of Christians are accused of being hypocrites. I have an idea as to why that is.
Christianity started as rejection of the world. Then, as it converted the world’s various populations, it became the world. So now we see the same people who once militated against the world running the world; and that will always lead to accusations of hypocrisy. The economic and political structures, that the original Christians condemned, will exist anywhere and under any system. So that whatever ideology is in power will have to implement such things; and if it started as a rejection of the world it will have many problems to solve.
Both America and the former Soviet Union started as revolutions against the state. Then both became the state. Logically, they have no right to forbid their populations to become rebels, as they owe their nationhood to rebellion. Many people have noticed that. So we keep seeing all sorts of rebellions taking place in America, and there is nothing that the government can logically do to forbid that from taking place.
Marx called religion the opium for the masses. He claimed that the ruling classes were using religion to keep people down. It got used that way; but that’s not how it started. Christianity was started by disaffected radicals in a conquered province. It then converted both the ruled and the rulers alike. It was never intended as an attempt by ruling classes to fool the masses. It was not started by ruling classes; it was started among the masses. So then, when it was being used by Victorians to keep the population pacified as the plutocrats were making tons of money on their bruised backs, it was seen as a tool used by the propertied class to control the working class. Once again it got used that way; but it was never the intent of the founders of the religion.
How did a minority religion that was started by disaffected radicals in a conquered province outlast the great Roman Empire? There must be more here than bigotry. Bigotry can happen under any ideology. I’ve known many people considering themselves rational who were complete bigots. I’ve known bigoted Communists, rationalists and sceptics. Ask not how an ideology gets transmitted, but how or why it started.
What do you do if you militate against the world and then come into the leadership of the world? You have to figure out politics and economics. The tasks that were fulfilled by someone against whom you’ve militated now have to be fulfilled by you, and you need to know what you are doing. Unfortunately many people who start out as revolutionaries do not know what they are doing. When there was famine in the Soviet Union, Lenin said that he had no idea how to solve these kinds of problems. That is because he had no knowledge of economics. He had militated against capitalism, but he had no clue how to solve the problems that capitalism had solved.
With Christianity, we have seen an ideology that militated against the world converting the world. It started out as rejection of the world, then it became the world. That, once again, will always be seen as being hypocritical; and I do not see what Christians can do to do away with such accusations.