In the March 31 episode of CBS’s Face the Nation, Roman Catholic Cardinal Gregory Walton of Washington DC spoke of President Joe Biden as a “cafeteria Catholic.” The Cardinal explained to the audience that cafeteria Catholics pick and choose which church teachings to believe and practice based on expediency and preference. Walton hastened to add that Mr. Biden is “sincere,” which to my mind strains credulity. For I can’t square flagrant disobedience and direct contradiction of the Church’s clear teaching with sincerity. What stands out in the cafeteria Catholic mentality is the lack of a spirit of obedience. They want the advantages of being known as good Catholics without actually having to live like one. And so, they add the sin of hypocrisy to the sin of disobedience. A “sincere” cafeteria Catholic is an oxymoron, like a square circle or married bachelor.

Cafeteria Protestants join their Catholic counterparts in the same spirit of selectivity and hypocrisy. Cafeteria Protestants treat the Bible the way cafeteria Catholics treat the teaching authority of the Roman Catholic Church. For them, Jesus’s teaching can be summed up in two commandments: (1) don’t judge the choices of others, and (2) do what makes you happy. They quietly pass over Jesus’s teaching forbidding divorce, lust, and greed. They soften Jesus’s warnings about the narrow and the broad ways. They practice injustice, abortion, fornication, and adultery. The only cross they bear is the one the wear around their necks. Of the spirit of obedience, they know nothing. Sincerity means purity of heart. You can’t be a sincere hypocrite!

In the Bible, especially in the New Testament, the test of sincerity is your willingness to suffer for the faith. Faithfulness unto death is the mark of a true disciple of Jesus. Willingness to confess Christ as Lord before hostile audiences is the proof of faith. The words of Peter expose and condemn in the clearest terms the hypocrisy of “cafeteria” faith in both its Catholic and Protestant forms:

Therefore, with minds that are alert and fully sober, set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming. As obedient children, do not conform to the evil desires you had when you lived in ignorance. But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: “Be holy, because I am holy.”

Since you call on a Father who judges each person’s work impartially, live out your time as foreigners here in reverent fear. For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God (1 Peter 1:13-21).

“Alert and fully sober,” “obedient children,” “holy,” “reverent fear”? These are not terms that come to mind when I think of cafeteria Christians. Like all hypocrites, cafeteria Catholics and cafeteria Protestants possess no real consciousness of God, that is, of the “Father who judges each person’s work impartially.” They seek only “to be seen by others” as virtuous. Jesus says of them, “Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full” (Matthew 6:5-6).