Why are many Christians such hypocrites?

[Samwise]

It's difficult to sort this one out between "hypocritical" and "just plain stupid." After all, that purported statistic says the odds are 23 to 2 against these particular Muslims having that attitude.

Anyway, the hypocrisy comes from thinking of "Christian" as a label rather than as a belief system that guides one's actions. The whole point of this attitude is to avoid letting Christianity guide one's actions, on the grounds that having the label is enough.

This tends to be a problem with established religions. It is precisely the reason that Jesus tended to rip the religious leaders of his own day a new one whenever he saw the opportunity.

Some writers I have found who comment on the problem:


The Christians looked to the earth alone. They claimed power from heaven; but they had made that heaven remote and they kept its power to themselves, to build up new separate institutions among upstart heroes on earth. Such institutions had been hastily thrown up by men for men. To these human institutions a new generation of Christians was prepared to transfer that sense of solemn delight which men of the old religion still sought in the clustering stars.
-- Peter Brown, "The Making of Late Antiquity"


“Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.”
-- Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"
[This fantasy novel, by the way, has gotten me through several rounds of dealing with just this sort of Christian hypocrisy.]


Some were all rules and relics and rosaries; others were all drab clothes, long faces, and petty traditional abstinences from wine or cards or the theatre. Both had in common their self-righteousness and the almost infinite distance between their actual outlook and anything the Enemy really is or commands. The wickedness of other religions was the really live doctrine in the religion of each; slander was its gospel and denigration its litany.
-- C.S. Lewis, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast"
[Just to be clear, the Screwtape character is a demon in Hell, so the "Enemy" to whom he refers is the Christian God.]