One thing you learn if you grow up in a good church is about the dangers of Pharisaism. If you don’t know who the Pharisees were, they were the best people. Social leaders, influencers, educated, active in the community, obsessed with being ethical, respected, innovative. They had ethical living down to an absolute science, always said something, and were ready to educate anyone who committed any microtransgressions. They were also the guys who had Jesus executed. You can’t get everything right.

The Pharisees are often held up as example of religion, but more generally, morality and moralism, gone wrong. Their faith had become all about rules and offenses and performance and keeping score and public displays and public denunciations. They make for a relevant example today because this problem, this tendency for ethical and moral concern to drift toward self-righteousness, is a perennial problem that has cropped up again and again in Judaism and Christianity. And if you happen to take a look around, you’ll realize that it has been a recurring problem in every religion, and even in non-religious ideologies and endeavors.

The Bible has a lot of chapters devoted to criticizing this exact kind of behavior, so it’s a particularly dire (although common) offense to use the scriptures to build such a faith. The fact that the Jews and Christians were at such pains to record and decry the problems with letting morality become a social performance is a service in humility they performed for our benefit. Because it didn’t always make them look good. Often some of the highest and most important leaders in both traditions get taken to task for it. But we don’t seem to have taken the lesson to heart. If anything, in today’s media-driven world, we’re more performatove than ever.

Weaponized, performative, political moralism, even compassion, is a very duplicitous beast. Our culture, it should be obvious, has become all about outward-facing, statement-based morality, rather than any kind of private control or internal character. It’s a status game you play with and against other people much more than it is anything to do with your own heart. And unfortunately the global history of such moralism is pretty poor. The sages of almost every society are agreed. Morality isn’t a matter of saying or not saying the right things, or supporting this but not that. Those markers only show off the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of such public moralism. It doesn’t point the way to any real solution to the problems of mankind. It doesn’t generate real kindness or honesty or justice or restraint or generosity or love. We can sense the lack of authenticity in it, because we can feel the fear.

The problem is, if you’re spending all your effort trying to keep from drowning in morality and keeping up appearances, you’re not going to have any capacity left to make any real moral choices or develop any true personal character. You’re going to be too busy worrying about your outward appearance and obsessing over tiny actions and infractions like the Pharisees, who literally counted their steps to make sure they were keeping holy. You can drown in moralism without ever contemplating or acting out any true vision of morality.

A moralism founded in statements of tribal identity and opposition and litmus tests and performative rituals is an act of theater, not virtue. It’s a social and polilical morality. And social and political morality always runs the risk of degenerating into a social and political status game. It’s no wonder this kind of morality generates inconsistent and confusing and hypocritical results; it’s almost inevitable.

No one catalogued the problems of this kind of moralism like the Jews. They have book after book in their scriptures talking about how their morality was constantly degenerating into a performative, hypocritical, political, and social religion of status and accusation and kowtowing and pharisaism. It’s a serious problem, even for those who are genuinely (at least as far as they can tell), trying to be “the good people” and trying to following the right path. Our failure to attend to the humiliations of the Jews, which no culture ever catalogued with such detail and brutal honesty, means we are likely to repeat them.