What is “Self-Righteousness”?
The Left loves to call Christians "self-righteous." It makes them feel good.
The Left is very, very adept at calling Christians “self-righteous” and “hypocrites.” It makes them feel good to do that. It makes them feel superior. It also means, to them, if they can find some kind of improper motive in the messenger that they do not have to believe or practice any truth he might teach. While that last point is very problematic, the Left is actually the most self-righteous and hypocritical people on earth. To understand that, we must understand what “self-righteousness” is, something the Left, as with all things religious, has absolutely no clue about.
What is “self-righteousness”? A self-righteous person is someone who sets up his own standard and judges other people by it. Now that's different from hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is to have a standard and demand other people follow it, but not follow it oneself. That's not self-righteousness. The best example of both is the Pharisees in Jesus’s day. They created their own standard of what was “righteous.” And they judged Jesus (and others) by that standard. They didn't judge Jesus by the Law of Moses; they claimed to follow the Law of Moses, but didn’t, thus Jesus rightly condemned them for hypocrisy. They judged Jesus by their own standard which they claimed to live up to. But Jesus said they were hypocrites because they didn't live up to Law of Moses or even their own standard (read Matthew 23). But such is what self-righteousness is, setting up a set of rules and demanding other people live by them.
I haven’t set up my own standard and judge people by that. I judge people by Jesus's standard. That's not self-righteousness when you judge somebody by God’s law. And by the way, I don't even live up to Jesus's standard; far from it. But, part of Jesus’s teaching is to humble oneself, and confess one’s faults, and I try to do that often. Nobody judges me more harshly than I judge myself. I don’t assert my own righteousness, because I know I’m not particular “righteous.” I judge myself by the same law (God’s) that I judge others. And that isn’t what self-righteousness is, especially when one acknowledges one’s own imperfections. Trying to teach people and point people to the perfect Law of God is not self-righteousness.
What the left has done, of course, is to reject Jesus’s standard, establish one of their own, judge people by it, and condemn them when they don’t live by it. All the while claiming they (the Leftist) does. When they denounce Christopher Columbus and America’s Founding Fathers, they condemn them (and us) based upon the standard they have established today. Columbus was supposed to meet the Left’s current standard. THAT is as “self-righteous” as a person can get—“You should live by MY standard.”
Maybe Columbus and the Founding Fathers were self-righteous hypocrites; frankly, I don’t know. I certainly know they weren’t perfect; no human being is. But whether they judged people by their own standard, and didn’t live up to it (self-righteousness and hypocrisy), I don’t know. I don’t know their hearts, and neither does the Leftist.
When I call the Democratic Party evil, I’m not judging them by my own standard, I’m judging them by Jesus’s. When I say the Chinese Communist Party, Hitler, Stalin, Mao were/are evil, I’m not condemning them based upon some canon I have created, but by the law of the Son of God. And according to His standard, the above folks are very evil. And very hypocritical. The Left claims to love children, but say that unborn babies can be murdered, children can be mutilated for sexual purposes, homosexuals are “coming for your children”—those things are evil in Jesus’s eyes, but acceptable to the Left. When they condemn Columbus and the Founders, they do so not by the standards of Columbus’s or the Founding Fathers’ time, of even Jesus’s standard (which they don’t believe in), but by the standard the Left has established today! That is exactly what the Pharisees did—judge people, not by the Law of Moses, but by their own rules. Read Luke 18:9-14. Jesus said some “trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others.” That is exactly what the Left does today. Christians certainly can, and have, done that. But judging people by Jesus’s standard, and living as best one can in accordance with His standard, is not self-righteousness, because His standard demands constant repentance, confession of sin, and humility.
Have you ever seen a humble Leftist? That isn’t part of their standard. Indeed, it’s a contradiction of terms.
So, a self-righteous person is one who sets up his own standard and then judges others by it. And he’s a hypocrite if he doesn’t live according to that standard (he can obviously be a hypocrite, too, if he claims to live by Jesus’s standard and doesn’t do it.) But the Left are the consummate self-righteous people. But they’ll never admit it, of course. They’d rather throw that epithet at others. It makes them feel good and gives them something to hide behind.