Editorial June 1, 2020 Issue

Our right to freedom from self-righteousness

Tony Lobl

The coronavirus pandemic has brought out amazing expressions of community. These range from Italy’s bittersweet balcony singalongs, to free digital access to global cultural activities, to the response to a call from United Kingdom officials for volunteers to assist the nation’s loneliest. Within the first day, over half a million of my fellow UK citizens had stepped up to answer the call.

But not everyone is feeling as charitable. Self-righteousness has reared its head, according to two British opinion pieces on the coronavirus, although the authors didn’t agree on who was being self-righteous. One article criticized those the author said were flouting calls to shelter in place and practice physical distancing. The other piece castigated people for “coronavirus shaming,” which the writer saw as judging others without caring to learn if there were mitigating circumstances. This suggests that self-righteousness isn’t so much about what we judge as the way we judge. History’s most extreme example of misjudging self-righteously was the blindness to the goodness of Jesus that impelled religious leaders of his day to cause the crucifixion of “the best man that ever trod the globe,” which is how Mary Baker Eddy describes Christ Jesus in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 52).

Self-righteous thinking is flawed in many ways, but the underlying problem is that it fixates on our perception of ourselves and others as flawed material personalities. Knowing that this isn’t what we or others are, because we are each truly God’s creation, is a great starting point from which to challenge self-righteousness when we recognize that trait within ourselves. To see a flawed creation is to concede to the notion of a flawed creator. But God isn’t flawed. The true God, divine Spirit, is perfect. And so is everything divinity creates, according to the Bible. It says of God, “He is the Rock, his work is perfect” (Deuteronomy 32:4). That perfect “work” of God includes the true, spiritual identity of every single one of us, which is entirely derived from, and defined by, God’s nature.

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