Virtue Signaling | Episode: Racism, Injustice, and the Church

helpful. I think one of the reasons why virtue signaling can be so dangerous, and I'm going to speak particularly to the

Christian brethren, is that it can destroy unity within the greater church. Virtue signaling happens inside and outside of the church, and far be it for me to expect

Christian and Christlike behavior from nonbelievers, so I'm not even going to speak to that. We can expect it from that sphere, but within the church, it's kind of the ultimate subtweet.

If you're on Twitter, you're familiar with that language where you tweet something out in response to somebody without directly addressing that person.

So virtue signaling, what it does or what it can do is it can create more disunity because it postures yourself to look better than others.

Let me be the first to say, I am not perfect in this area. I understand that getting on social media and doing a 240 -character rant feels really, really good.

I get that. But at some point, we all have to be mindful that throwing out our best tweet of righteousness, often what it can do is it can create this tiered system where I am better than you, because I have thought of this when perhaps you haven't.

Let me throw out my virtue. Nobody does vice signaling. Nobody does that.

Nobody throws out their dirty laundry, and yet that's actually one of the things that the

Scripture does command us to do, to confess our sins to one another. Maybe for every virtue signal you do on Twitter, you should confess a sin publicly, but we can talk about that another time.

JP, did you want to add to this as well? Justin Perdue Sure. Even the term virtue signaling means that we're drawing attention to at least what we perceive to be our own virtue, and that's a problem biblically.

It's not that how we live doesn't matter. It matters, of course, how we live. God gives us plenty of instruction in his word to the church in the

New Testament how we're to live with one another, and we're going to talk about some of those things on this episode. It's not that it doesn't matter how we live, but I'm mindful of the apostle

Paul, for example, in Philippians 3, where he talks about any righteousness that would be his.

He considers it as less than nothing. He considers it as rubbish because what he is concerned with is the righteousness of God that is found through Christ by faith.

I think it's generally not good when we as believers are going to attempt in some way to showcase or parade around our own righteousness or our own virtue and, by at least an indirect implication, condemn other people.

It's fine for us to try to correct misunderstanding. We want to do that. The three of us do that all the time as preachers of God's word, but what we want to try to do is to point people positively to what

God has prescribed in his word rather than just dropping shame bombs all over the place and thinking that that's going to move the needle in people's minds.

A lot of times, as you brothers have pointed out, that kind of talk and rhetoric only serves to foster more division.

It certainly doesn't bring unity. I think that's one of the things that has grieved me this week, in addition to just being horrified by things that I've seen in videos that have been posted online and being grieved by just the pain that I see others experiencing, is to see the division that is out there even amongst

God's people. Some of the rhetoric has been really hard for me to read, and that's coming from all kinds of people.