I think this is the reason so many of us are abandoning faith in government and religion

But for some of us, we have lost hope in ourselves. We know our profession doesn’t match our practice - and if we have honed it - only we know they don’t align. That can lead to lacking respect for yourself and taking it out on others.

I don’t know about you - but for me - when I see hypocrisy in others, it makes me sick to my stomach. Too often we see it in religious and political leaders. They beg us for money or a vote only to squander their influence on vanity, pride and selfishness.

My favorite quote about profession matching practice is from the book The Desire of Ages:

Last week we talked about bread — whether it deserves its reputation as a cultural villain. Gluten gets a lot of blame these days, and we unpacked whether that blame is fair. But there’s an older conversation about bread worth having. One that has less to do with what we eat and everything to do with how we live.

Bear with me for a moment.

In the ancient world, leaven wasn’t the clean, convenient yeast packet sitting in your refrigerator door. It was old, fermented dough — carried over from a previous batch, used to make the next one rise. It worked by introducing a kind of controlled decay into the mixture. Left unchecked, it would spread through everything it touched. That’s why, during Passover, Jewish tradition required unleavened bread — a clean break, a fresh start, nothing carried over from what came before.

The imagery stuck around. And for good reason.

A Warning That Still Lands

There’s a moment in the historical record where Jesus of Nazareth pulls his followers aside and issues a warning. He calls it “the leaven of the Pharisees.” His definition is immediate and unambiguous: hypocrisy.

You don’t have to hold any particular religious belief for that warning to land. Because what he was describing wasn’t a theological problem — it was a human one. The Pharisees were the religious and cultural leaders of their day. Educated, respected, influential - they were the greatest religionists the world had ever known. They had the right language, the right rituals, the right public posture. And according to Jesus, they were rotten at the core.

He wasn’t condemning religion. He was condemning performance masquerading as conviction.

(Side note: I saw some headlines this week about why America is so supportive of the nation of Israel - I wrote about that history a few months ago.)

It Looks Like the Real Thing

Here’s what makes leaven such a precise metaphor: leavened and unleavened bread look almost identical on the outside. You can’t easily tell them apart until you cut in. The corruption isn’t visible. That’s the point.

The same principle is brought out in the story of the wheat and the weeds - Wheat and the Weed Bearded Darnell can look the same while growing -only in the harvest can you tell a difference.

Hypocrisy is dangerous for exactly this reason. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t wear a sign. It shows up dressed in the language of integrity, service, and principle. It sits at the podium, behind the pulpit, on the debate stage — and it sounds convincing because it has had a lot of practice.

We recognize this instinctively when we watch institutions. A megachurch pastor who preaches humility from a private jet. A politician who campaigns on the values of working families from a $20 million estate. A corporate executive whose company releases a vulnerability report while quietly burying the breach that prompted it.

We see the leaven clearly in others. That’s the easy part.

Where It Gets Uncomfortable

The harder question — the one the Pharisees never seemed to get around to asking — is where the leaven shows up in us.

Not in the dramatic, headline-grabbing ways. In the small ones. The version of yourself you perform on social media versus the one your family sees at 7pm on a Tuesday. Hello!!!!

The values you articulate in conversation versus the choices you quietly make when no one is watching. The gap between what you say you believe and what your calendar and your bank account actually reflect.

Leaven starts small. That’s the whole point of the metaphor. It isn’t introduced all at once. It creeps in, batch by batch, until the entire thing has risen around it and you can no longer remember what the original texture felt like.

A Question Worth Sitting With

Institutions don’t become hypocritical overnight. They get there the same way individuals do — through small accommodations, quiet compromises, and the slow drift between stated values and actual behavior.

The antidote isn’t cynicism. Cynicism is just hypocrisy in a different costume — it performs disillusionment the same way optimists perform hope. The antidote is the harder, less glamorous work of honest self-examination.

Where am I performing? Where am I really not being genuine and why?! I’m learning of the studies that seem to paint hypocrisy in our own life as detrimental to our health.

It’s worth asking. Not once, not loudly, but regularly — and in private, where the answer actually matters.

I started a practice last year of journaling at the end of each day - answering the question - What were my motives today? Was I kind to get a promotion? To get an upgrade? Was I insincere with anyone today? Was I candid and honest? Was I fake at anytime?

It has been enlightening - try it.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. 👋

I write this newsletter each week because I feel my best when my body, mind and soul are all healthy. I want the same for you. If you feel like you’ve seen something valuable here, please do me a favor and forward this newsletter to a friend or let me know what you think by replying to this email or texting me - (310) 879-8441

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Here are a few topics I think you’ll love if you haven’t checked them out before:

How to Breathe for Better Health

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