STORY OF THE WEEK: The Thing That Jesus Hated Most About Religion

Why His Harshest Words Weren't for 'Sinners'

Image by RomoloTavani on iStock

I still remember the first time I felt the sting of religious hypocrisy.

I was a teenager, sitting in church, listening to a fiery sermon about the dangers of sin. The pastor’s voice thundered from the pulpit as he condemned drinking, sexual immorality, and the corrupting influence of secular culture. He warned us that good Christians should separate themselves from the world, should live righteously, should strive for holiness.

And then, just a few weeks later, I overheard something that made my stomach drop.

That same pastor — the one who had stood in front of the congregation preaching purity and righteousness — had been caught in an affair. Not just any affair, but one with a married woman in the church. And what happened? The church leadership quietly asked him to step down. No public confession. No real accountability. Just a quiet exit while everyone else was expected to keep pretending.

I remember sitting there, trying to make sense of it. I had seen people shamed, shunned, even publicly called out for far less — for dressing the wrong way, for questioning church doctrine, for admitting doubts. But here was a man who had stood on that stage, wielding the Bible like a weapon, only to be guilty of the very sin he condemned. And instead of outrage, there was silence. Instead of justice, there was protection. Instead of humility, there was a cover-up.

That was the moment I realized something Jesus had known all along: the greatest threat to faith is not from the so-called ‘sinners’ — it’s from religious people who pretend they aren’t one of them.

The Sin Jesus Condemned Most

If you were to ask the average churchgoer what sin Jesus spoke against the most, you’d probably hear a few predictable answers: sexual immorality, unbelief, maybe idolatry. But if you actually look at Jesus’ words, one sin is condemned far more than any other — hypocrisy.

Not just any hypocrisy, but specifically the religious kind. The kind that masquerades as righteousness while crushing people under its weight. The kind that obsesses over rules but neglects justice, mercy, and love.

The word hypocrite comes from the Greek word hypokritēs, which originally referred to stage actors — people who pretended, wore masks, and played roles in Greek theater. By Jesus’ time, the term had taken on a deeper meaning, describing those who pretended to be something they were not. When Jesus called the religious leaders hypocrites, he was essentially saying they were playing a part — performing holiness while hiding corruption beneath the surface.

Jesus didn’t mince words about this. He called the religious leaders of his day whitewashed tombs — beautiful on the outside but full of death on the inside (Matthew 23:27). He condemned their meticulous law-keeping while they “neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness” (Matthew 23:23). He accused them of placing heavy burdens on people’s shoulders while refusing to lift a finger to help (Matthew 23:4).

In Jesus’s eyes, it was a big, big problem.

Why We Ignore It

So why don’t we talk about this sin as much as Jesus did?

Why do certain Christians seem to prefer to point at so-called moral failures — things like sexual sin, drinking, cursing, or even what movies someone watches — while ignoring the sin Jesus actually preached against most?

Because those sins are easy, they’re measurable, visible, and conveniently external. Evangelicals have turned them into a moral scoreboard — don’t drink, don’t have sex outside marriage, don’t swear, don’t watch R-rated movies (unless they’re about Jesus being tortured for two hours). If you can check off enough of those boxes, you’re in the club.

You’re “holy.”

Meanwhile, the sins that actually corrupt a person from the inside out— greed, arrogance, self-righteousness, the lust for power — are ignored because they’re often the very foundation of the evangelical industrial complex.

Richard Rohr puts it bluntly:

“Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often give a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of ‘Christian’ countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else — and often more so, I’m afraid.”

The uncomfortable truth is this: Jesus reserved his harshest words not for “sinners” but for the religious elite. The people who thought they were the most righteous. The ones who looked holy on the outside but were rotten underneath. And if we’re not careful, that should terrify us.

The Consequences of Religious Hypocrisy

The hypocrisy Jesus condemned wasn’t just a personal failing — it had real, devastating consequences for the people under its influence. The religious leaders of his day used their status to control, exploit, and exclude. They weaponized faith to maintain power, silencing those who questioned them while making a spectacle of their own “holiness.”

Jesus repeatedly exposed their hypocrisy not because he enjoyed stirring up controversy but because their corruption was harming people. They shut the doors of the kingdom in people’s faces (Matthew 23:13). They loaded people down with impossible burdens, all while refusing to bear any themselves (Matthew 23:4). They used religious tradition as a shield for their greed, manipulating laws to justify neglecting their own families while continuing to appear righteous (Mark 7:9–13).

Sound familiar?

This isn’t just an ancient problem. It’s a playbook we’ve seen repeated in every era of church history. Leaders who demand strict purity while living in secret sin. Politicians who wrap themselves in Christian language while enacting policies that trample the poor and marginalized. Churches that preach love but practice exclusion. Institutions that cover up abuse to protect their reputation while shaming survivors into silence.

The hypocrisy Jesus condemned, sadly, is alive and well. But instead of addressing it, many Christians are too busy fixating on the “sins” that don’t threaten the religious power structure.

We find a convenient scapegoat to avoid looking within.

Rather than confronting the greed, corruption, performance-based religion, and abuses that have taken root in religious institutions, many Christians latch onto easier targets — people who challenge traditional norms, individuals who live outside the moral codes enforced by the church, or entire communities that refuse to conform. The sins that Jesus railed against — exploitation, injustice, and hypocrisy — get buried under manufactured culture wars against LGBTQ+ people, feminism, deconstruction, and anything labeled “woke.” It’s far easier to rally against drag queens reading books in libraries than to address the fact that churches have harbored child abusers for decades. It’s more comfortable to fight about whether someone says “Merry Christmas” than to reckon with the way Christian nationalism has turned faith into a political tool for power.

This is why hypocrisy in the church isn’t just frustrating — it’s dangerous. It creates a warped version of Christianity that cares more about image than integrity, more about control than compassion. It tells the world that faith is about protecting the institution at all costs rather than about truth and justice. And in doing so, it drives countless people away — not from God, but from the hollow, stage-play religion that Jesus himself condemned.

Religious hypocrisy doesn’t just make the church look bad. It devastates lives. It covers for abusers, shields the powerful from accountability, and suffocates the very people Jesus came to set free. It takes faith, something meant to bring healing, and turns it into a weapon of exclusion and harm. It’s no wonder that so many people, when faced with the hypocrisy of Christian institutions, walk away entirely. And when they do, those same institutions often blame them for “falling away” rather than admitting that their own corruption pushed them out.

This is the price of hypocrisy: a faith that is rotten at its core, a church that loses its soul while pretending to save others. And the only way forward — the only way back to anything resembling the gospel — is not in doubling down on empty moralism but in tearing down the systems that protect the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable.

Jesus wasn’t crucified for upholding religious tradition. He was crucified for exposing it.

Crucify the hypocrites!

But before you pick up your stones and begin to hurl them at the church, the system, the institution… everyone else, just remember one thing: