It might be added that when the cruelties of economic and political life are thus obscured, and when the inertia, which every effort towards social justice must meet in any society, however religious or enlightened, remains unrecognized, there is always a note of hypocrisy, as well as sentimentality, in the total view. Those who benefit from social injustice are naturally less capable of understanding its real character than those who suffer from it. They will attribute ethical qualities to social life, if only the slightest gesture of philanthropy hides social injustice. If the disinherited treat these gestures with cynicism and interpret unconscious sentimentality as conscious hypocrisy, the privilege will be properly outraged and offended by the moral perversity of the recipients of their beneficences. Since liberal Protestantism is, on the whole, the religion of the privileged classes of Western civilization, it is not surprising that its espousal of the ideal of love, in a civilization wreaking with social injustice, should be cynically judged and convicted of hypocrisy by those in whom bitter social experiences destroy the sentimentalities and illusions of the comfortable. - Reinhold Niebuhr
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 00:17:45 +0000
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