It is very easy to make a virtue out of stuff I am not particularly tempted by. I, for instance, have never been tempted by the thought of trying out heroin. It has never appealed to me, I don’t like the associations surrounding it, I don’t like needles, I’m not particularly thrilled by the other ways to ingest it. As far as it goes, it has never ever tempted me. I suspect that is true for quite a few other Christian people too.

Only, it would be very easy to make a virtue out of that. After all, drugs are bad, aren’t they? Jesus doesn’t want us getting smashed on smack, that much seems obvious. Surely it is good that I have never touched heroin. Which, in an ultimate sense, is broadly true. It is good that I haven’t touched heroin and it would be bad if I had. Believe it or not, I have been offered horse more than once (I obviously look the type!) but I was no more tempted by it when it was offered me than at any other time. I am not interested. But it seems odd that one would make a virtue out of not doing what I was never tempted to do in the first place.

I can think of all sorts of other vices and sins the Bible says not to do that I have never done nor been tempted to do. That stuff in the Bible about not visiting prostitutes, for example, has never been an issue for me. I have never done that and I have never been tempted to do that. Admittedly, for much of my life, I wouldn’t have had the first clue where to even go to find one if I wanted to so. But these days, I know where they are and I even know some of them and they have been along to church. But I have never once been tempted by the thought of going and visiting them in their professional capacity. But it seems strange to me that we might think to make a virtue out of not doing something that I just wasn’t ever tempted to do in the first place. Obviously, it’s good that I haven’t done that; but it isn’t a great difficulty given it just isn’t a temptation for me.

There is a case you can make for this being virtuous. The virtue is simply not sinning. It is obviously good not to sin. Never mind that I am not tempted by these particular sins, it is ultimately good that I didn’t do them. Of course, I need to be more mindful of those areas where I am tempted to sin so may spend more time concerning myself with battling sin where the frontline manifests in my own life. But if we are going to make a virtue out of not doing what I was never tempted to do, it can only be at the level of ultimately being a good thing that I didn’t sin (but we have to recognise the chances of me doing so in that way was remarkably small).

But I think the tendency to make a virtue out of stuff we aren’t tempted to do speaks into another tendency many have to make a virtue out of not doing stuff they don’t like even though the Bible doesn’t say it is wrong. I, for instance, don’t like clubbing. I have no time for it. I think I’ve been to a club with proper dance music and all that about twice in my life. I don’t think it was sinful to be there, but I also maintain both occasions were dreadful. There was nothing about the experience I enjoyed and I decided I wouldn’t go again.

Given that, it would be very easy to jump on the bandwagon of the many Christians arguing that clubbing is sinful. For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think it is. I don’t see anything in scripture that necessarily makes it so. But it is very easy to find some Christianesque, pseudo-spiritual reasons why everyone should hate it like I do. I can’t say the Bible explicitly says so, but I can – through a series of torturous links to various biblical principles – make a virtue out of my not going rather than it being what it really is; a morally neutral preference.

I can think of many other examples where someone with no interest in a thing makes a virtue out of their lack of interest in it. That virtue is usually couched in Christian terms as though they are ‘redeeming the time’ in a way that someone interested in this thing isn’t. Other Christian principles may get cited, even if there is no straight line from them to the thing in question. What becomes clear is that this is deemed sub-Christian but the ground for it seems to be little more than the person saying so happens not to like it.

What lies behind these things? Sometimes, I think there is a latent gnosticism at work. Certain pastimes are deemed good and virtuous whilst others are deemed bad or sub-Christian. Walking in the woods and enjoying God’s creation; good! Enjoying fair ground rides; bad! Pressing into the logic of why this is good and that is bad is a fools errand, for rarely is there any. Rather, what underlies it is a gnostic tendency that nobody is quite willing to admit. Sometimes it is as blatant as spirit-good, material-bad whilst other times it is simply attempting to split everything into binary good/bad without nuance or grounds. Enjoying things for their own sake is often a source of great introspection and handwringing, sucking the joy out of everything. We can ultimately only enjoy at all what we have first ruined by parsing all the issues and asking at great length whether we can actually enjoy this or not. It is tiresome, miserable and I suspect subtly gnostic.

Other times, however, I think there is a more pernicious judgementalism at play. Why does anybody feel the need to comment on other people’s interests with pseudo-spiritual digs? Why can people be so cocksure in their censure of others despite the shoddy biblical logic on display and sub-Christian ideas driving it? Might it be that we sometimes make a virtue out of what we’re not tempted by, and censure perfectly legitimate things that we aren’t interested in, not because the Bible does, but because it makes us feel more virtuous? We pass judgement on others because it makes us feel superior. We aren’t really interested in their spiritual good; we’re mainly interested in our spiritual superiority. Thank God I am not like this sinner!

So, how do we know whether we are serving the spiritual good of another person or if we are really aiming at making ourselves feel virtuous? I think these questions might help us:

1. Does the Bible directly and outrightly call this thing sinful and harmful or are you having to draw a lot of inferences in order to get there?
2. Are you speaking to this person privately and gently or are you speaking to lots of other people about them?
3. Are you ready and willing to hear pushback about your understanding of the sinfulness of this thing or the reality of the situation?
4. Do we have any empathy with the person doing this thing or can we not imagine how anybody might want to do these things (especially not a Christian)?
5. How do we feel as we think about speaking to this person? Are we genuinely burdened for their good or are we suddenly feeling good about ourselves?
6. Can we understand and articulate how this thing does/doesn’t lead somebody closer to Christ?