The distinction between ideological hypocrisy and other forms of hypocrisy is vital when it comes to the extent of a person's failure to be consistent in belief and deed. Someone is not an ideological hypocrite just for failing to live out what they rightly recognize as true or probably true, if they are a rationalist/Christian rationalist, but they have lapsed into the hypocrisy not of believing contradictory ideas, but of failing to live in light of them. Indeed, there is also the fact that a hypocrite's inconsistency or potential insincerity does not disprove any worldview, though worldviews that are contradictory and thus impossible will be impossible to consistently live out every tenet of.
If a Christian was to falter, and the only intelligent Christian with the right philosophical motives and epistemology is a Christian rationalist, it is not as if it is logically impossible for Christianity to be true, as if the evidence for Christianity vanishes, or as if every aspect of the Christian's life is insincere. In fact, yielding to a momentary weakness is not even automatically a marker of insincerity in a rationalistic Christian, as people are complex enough to where even people who are purely rational in an epistemological and ideological sense might struggle with behaviorally commiting to the truth in full. I have addressed before why the philosophical and behavioral hypocrisy of a non-rationalist, Christian or not, is by default far worse than that of a rationalist [1], so this is not the same for irrationalists or the philosophically apathetic.
If a Christian was to falter, it is not even because he or she could not have avoided a particular sin or not allowed a desire to be acted upon in a Biblically problematic way. There is not a single sin of any specific or general kind that everyone is fated to partake in; there is not a single sin that any individual will or must yield to. In actuality, even the Bible demands perfection (Matthew 5:48) and says it is literally within everyone's grasp (Deuteronomy 30:11), not that any of the things the Bible condemns are unavoidable with or without these specific verses to point to this. The issue of hypocrisy within the lives of whatever Christians actually struggle with this error--and not hypocrisy in living out church traditions or social norms, but the dictates of the Bible itself--is not some inescapable personal pitfall.
However, for even otherwise perfectly rationalistic Christians who hold to no fallacies with regard to Christianity or other things, only commit to Christianity because of evidences for it without confusing probabilistic evidences for self-verification or logical proof, do not so much as believe in that which they cannot logically prove, and make no assumptions about the teachings of the Bible, it is always possible that a given person will lapse into sin, whether or not that sin is a familiar one for them. If someone is rationalistic and lives for reason and morality but stumbled and does not mistake their error for something justified, it is probably a very small sin compared to most other kinds, and they are not the same as people who live their lives without regard for reason, truth, and morality anything beyond perceptions and preferences. It is still the case that to sin to any extent is no minor thing no matter how trivial it is by comparison to another sin.
This is where a sincere, repentant Christian will recognize the disparity between their worldview and deeds even if they never believed anything contradictory and thus logically impossible. It is for people and situations such as this that mercy is for, never deserved by the recipient (that would be impossible) or obligatory for anyone else, but there is never a person who is closer to deserving mercy than someone of this kind. It would be irrational to treat this kind of fellow Christian and rationalist as no better than the worst kinds of irrationalists and hypocrites who choose worldviews and behaviors based on persistent emotionalistic selfishness. In addition, this is a rare opportunity to express that mercy is not something that even God himself universally withholds while interacting with someone who already understands their predicament in contrast to plenty of other people.
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