With regard to the inevitability of implicit self-commendation in the public praise of God, we can blush a bit and say, with increasing sincerity as we walk with the Lord, that all praise properly belongs to him. What a wonder that he would use fallible, imperfect people such as we to accomplish his infallible, perfect purposes.

It is so desperately, frustratingly easy to want to be praised for writing and speaking about praiseworthy things.  (Don’t you like how I wrote that?  Isn’t it so true?)  It’s so tempting to want more than the legitimate enjoyment of true encouragement for a job well done; put bluntly, we often just want to be worshiped.  And more often than we realize, we put that want on full display in public.

When it comes to ethics, it is virtually impossible to commend something without sounding like you’re complementing yourself for your commendation.  For example, to praise a speech you’ve just heard as brilliant is to quietly proclaim your own smarts for so quickly recognizing its quality. We can even sound self-congratulatory in our condemnations.  In fact, it’s especially when we’re decrying something dishonorable that we sound like we’re “virtue-signaling.”

This rather clever phrase (yup, I’m quite perceptive in seeing its merit) connotes the practice of publicly lauding oneself under the guise of lauding something or someone else worthy of praise.  Or more often, virtue-signaling involves chastising something or someone so as to garner praise, among similarly minded people (potential fans!), for one’s courage to speak up.  Proclaiming our ethics via social media makes matters worse. We can gain lots of “likes,” plenty of retweets and maybe a few follows for posting criticisms which require little careful thought to conceive, little time to compose, and which often result in little follow-up activity in “walking the talk.”  In social media, our ostensibly righteous words can easily be all talk, and if we gain enough online accolades, it’s tempting to think that it’s all good.

But still, aren’t there virtuous causes which could benefit from our drawing attention to them? Injustices about which we can create more awareness and against which we can recruit more active opposition?  Absolutely. There are statements worth making in the service of that which is right and therefore against that which is unrighteous.  So how can we, then, especially in our day, publicly promote righteousness without being and sounding self-righteous?

First, we have to face facts. To publicly proclaim your personal identification with a good cause is inevitably self-complimentary. At the very least, it creates that perception in the mind of the reader.  You can’t hail the virtue of a cause without implicitly hailing (signaling) the goodness of believing in it, and therefore your own virtue for believing in it (and even more, for saying something to promote it.)  And if you’ve done an especially effective, even eloquent, job of signaling this good thing’s virtue, the temptation for readers will be to focus their praise on the proclaimer, not the rightful object of praise. In virtue-signaling, that’s the whole point!  But even when that is truly not our intent, the promotion of self in the promotion of good which is bigger than the self is inescapable.  We need to keep a sharp lookout for what makes the inevitable insidious, especially those of us who actually get paid to publicly promote righteousness.

Virtue-signaling is a vicious, ever-present temptation for preachers and teachers of God’s Word. In James’ lightning bolt of a letter, he sounds forth a stunning warning to all Christians, telling us that the vast majority of us should not seek to be teachers in the church, for such people are held by God to a higher degree of accountability for their work and their words (James 3 is all about sins of speech).  It is especially damaging to the cause of Christ when ministers of the gospel, professors of theology, or writers and speakers who focus on theological topics publish or preach material which can be rightly accused of virtue-signaling.  Skeptics can see straight through that stuff, and so can believers who are struggling through doubts in their faith. Both kinds of perceptive people spy the self-worship behind words allegedly written or spoken in praise of God, and both can easily infer the lack of sincerity, or lack of self-awareness, of the proclaimer.  From there, another inference easily follows, one made especially frequently in the modern and postmodern era, as we’ve become increasingly aware of the presence of self-interest in all we do.  If that guy’s alleged worship of God gets expressed through virtue-signaling, then that guy is really just worshiping himself (and getting paid for it).  Virtue-signaling is the very stuff of the sin we preachers/teachers are called to call out, and our ironic actions in spreading it indicates just how insidious, how cancerous to the faith, and how contagious virtue-signaling is in this world.

In a fallen world, ruined by self-worship, we are naturally attracted to and affected by what’s caustic, rather than what’s conducive to peace.  A condemnation is much easier to construct than a compliment. An insult against us is much easier to remember than an encouragement toward us. Thus, for preachers and teachers, invectives can be much more attractive than exhortations, not least because, just like us, congregants and students can crave that allegedly sanctified hostility. We praise as courageous the church leaders who insult people especially well, and who dismiss criticisms for such behavior as exercises in misdirection, revealing the gutlessness of the objector. So, too, those who praise temperateness can do so in the hopes of being praised for their allegedly Jesus-like gentleness – says the guy writing for a blog called “Gentle Reformation” – yikes!

When we’re aware of just how insidious self-worship is, the preaching, teaching, and posting of the truth can feel like a no-win situation. The corresponding frustration has led some, respectively, to abandon verbal discretion and others to shirk their responsibility to proclaim hard, unpopular truths.  Both options capitulate to and double-down on self-worship rather than countering it.  So, what do we do when something needs to be said, and when we’re in a good position to say it?

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