Her Lying Eradicates Carrie Prejean's Moral Authority

As both a Christian and a normal human being, I find disquieting (and worse: boring) the idea of Carrie Prejean as anything resembling a moral authority. I don’t mind that she’s made her career as a swimsuit and lingerie model. Except for maybe Hugh Hefner’s family, I don’t see anything “family values” about that, but women getting paid to objectify their bodies is hardly anything new.

What makes absurd Ms. Prejean being positioned as morally admirable is that she's a liar. Saying she didn't know those soft-porn photos of her were being taken is like an armed bank robber saying he didn't know anyone would put money in his sack. She's lying. She was willfully and purposefully trading her body for money, period. And it is certainly Ms. Prejean's right to pose for the cheesecake photos that she did. But if we Christians ever want non-Christians to take us any more seriously than they do, we have got to stop proclaiming as moral heroes people who by their actions conclusively prove that they have no more right claiming a moral high ground than Ryan Seacrest has claiming he's a brain surgeon.

It's good that Ms. Prejean stood up for what she believes. But that belief is part of a moral code, the much larger part of which she egregiously violated by out-and-out lying in public about what, why, and how she did what she did.

Lying as she has (and continues to do) should obliterate the idea of Ms. Prejean being anyone in whom we Christians should take pride. But, alas, it hasn't. We continue to point to her with pride. And so we Christians are once again validating what non-Christians think of us, which is that the trees of condemnation are more important to us than the forest of the truth.


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