Lost Words, Found Hypocrisies
A glossary of forgotten biblical terms for the age of performative piety. Or, "Let us prey."
Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.
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“The various modes of religion which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.”
—Edward Gibbon, 1776
The practice of American politicians draping themselves in the vestments of religious authority has become as reliable as the changing of the seasons, and nearly as empty of surprise.
Watch them gather at prayer breakfasts1 and evangelical convocations, these temporal princes clutching their Bibles like talismans against electoral misfortune, invoking the Almighty with the practiced ease of carnival barkers calling the credulous to their tents.
They speak of compassion while slashing programs for the indigent, of biblical justice while stuffing the courts with judges devoted to the privileges of wealth, of loving thy neighbor while building walls both literal and legislative to keep the desperate and dispossessed at comfortable distance.
The hypocrisy is so richly textured, so magnificently shameless, that one almost admires the theatrical audacity of it — the president who quotes the Sermon on the Mount while cutting taxes for plutocrats, the senator who invokes Jesus’s care for the least among us while voting to strip health coverage from millions.
What makes this species of fraud so durable is not its subtlety but its usefulness to both the deceiver and the deceived.
The politician requires the moral legitimacy that religious language confers, that sacred vocabulary transforming greed into stewardship, cruelty into tough love, and indifference into divine providence. The congregation of voters, meanwhile, receives permission to believe that their prejudices are principles and their resentments are righteous.
It is a transaction conducted in the bright currency of faith but denominated in the base metal of power. Both parties to the bargain understand perfectly well that God, should He exist and concern Himself with such matters, would more likely be found among the money-changers being driven from the temple than among those doing the driving for cameras and campaign contributions.
The very language of scripture has receded from common usage — not necessarily because we the people are unfamiliar with it, but rather due to the centuries-old tome finding new language and new audiences in successive generations. What once worked for King James now requires modernization, leaving certain words in the dust bin (or at least in the recesses of our TikTok-fueled scrolling minds).
Old Words, Modern Concepts
While usage of these terms may have slipped, the meanings are far from archaic, indicating a certain sense of timeless human nature that can be translated from the original Hebrew and Aramaic:
Abase
To humble or degrade oneself, to bring low in position or estimation. The biblical injunction to abase oneself before God has been neatly inverted by our political class, who abase themselves before donors and focus groups while adopting postures of swaggering certainty before the divine.
