The white ecclesia in the United States either opposed or equivocated on the matter of the humanity of African Americans. The 1939 unification of majority white Methodist bodies, for example, structurally segregated black members into a separate Central Jurisdiction. This action mimicked practices in the broader body politic that crystallized in American society both de jure and de facto systems of second-class citizenship for African Americans. This hypocrisy mobilized adherents of Gandhian non-violence and elicited from them tenets and tactics which energized moral methodologies that defeated a church and civic collusion that perpetrated black subordination. Interracial alliances derived from the ecclesia and parachurch organizations articulated non-violence as a moral precept that sacralized a grassroots civil rights movement. This initiative morally discredited the racial hypocrisy aimed at America's formerly enslaved and segregated population.

This article examines the treatment of Anglican clergy in the novels of Iris Murdoch, setting this discussion in the context of Murdoch's own engagement with Christianity: one of sympathy without assent, yet with detailed knowledge of the secularizing theologies of the period. Clerical interventions in pastoral situations, politely tolerated in the earlier novels, are openly and robustly rejected in the later books. That pastoral care is, for Murdoch, vitiated by a desire for control, against which Murdoch set her ideal of self-emptying attention. Murdoch also dramatizes the loss of faith which forced, on some of the clergy, an inconsistency between outward speech and inner conviction. For some, the apparent hypocrisy is resolved by suicide or exile; for others, their vocation must continue as a witness to something absolute, even if they themselves can longer articulate its nature with any conviction. The Church remains necessary even if God himself is not.

The brief but bitter campaign to expose the hidden homosexuality of Anglican bishops in the mid-1990s was framed as a contest about hypocrisy, with bishops – whether suspected of homosexuality or not – condemned as hypocrites, and the Church of England as hypocritical. However, the activists behind this ‘outing’, and the media which covered the story with such enthusiasm, were similarly attacked for hypocrisy. A neglected moment in recent ecclesiastical history, it reveals the ongoing importance of hypocrisy in debates about the nature of faith and the authority of the church. Still more, it sheds light on how contemporary assumptions about authenticity both intensified the perceived importance of hypocrisy and increased the chances of being accused of acting hypocritically.