From Timothy Keller’s book, ‘The Reason for God.’
The devil, if anything, prefers Pharisees—men and women who try to save themselves. They are more unhappy than either mature Christians or irreligious people and they do a lot more spiritual damage..
The Damage of Pharisaism
Why is Pharisaic religion so damaging? Recall the “sickness unto death,” the scriptural deep nausea we experience when we fail to build our identity on God. We struggle for a sense of worth, purpose, and distinctiveness, but it is based on conditions that we can never achieve or maintain, and that are always slipping away from us. As Kierkegaard says, we have not become ourselves. This is experienced internally as anxiety, insecurity, and anger. It leads us externally to marginalize, oppress, and exclude others.
Despite all their legal righteousness, then, Pharisees have lives that are, if anything, more driven by despair of sin. They build their sense of worth on their moral sense of worth or their moral and spiritual performance, as a kind of résumé to present before God and the world. The moral and spiritual standards of all religions are very high, and Pharisees know deep down that they are not fully living up to those standards. They are not praying as often as they should. They are not loving their neighbor as much as they should. They are not keeping their inner thoughts as pure as they should. The resulting internal anxiety, insecurity, and irritation will often be much greater than anything experienced by the irreligious.
Richard Lovelace captures well another way that Pharisaic religion is so damaging: Many . . . draw their assurance of acceptance with God form their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. . . . Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce, defensive assertion of their own righteousness, and defensive criticism of others. They come naturally to hate other cultural styles and other races in order to bolster their own security and discharge their suppressed anger.3
As Lovelace says, Pharisaic religion doesn’t just damage the soul, it also creates social strife. Pharisees need to shore up their sense of righteousness, so they despise and attack all who don’t have their doctrinal beliefs and religious practices. Racism and cultural imperialism result. Churches that are filled with self-righteous, exclusive, insecure, angry, moralistic people are extremely unattractive. Their public pronouncements are often highly judgmental, while internally such churches experience many bitter conflicts, splits and divisions. When one of their leaders has a moral lapse the churches either rationalize it and denounce the leader’s critics, or else they scapegoat him. Millions of people raised in or near these kinds of churches reject Christianity at an early age or in college largely because of their experience. For the rest of their lives, then, they are inoculated against Christianity. If you are a person who has been disillusioned by such churches, anytime anyone recommends Christianity to you, you assume they are calling you to adopt “religion.” Pharisees and their unattractive lives leave many people confused about the real nature of Christianity. ~Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York, N.Y. 10014, 2008,2018) p.184-86
* Posts with a preamble asterisk are for a more general audience and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
