It’s become a regular occurrence.
Someone from my online circles, whether from YouTube, Substack, X, or elsewhere will approach me with a question. It is usually voiced with concern but often carries a kind of moral suspicion: “Why are you friends with that person?” Or: “Don’t you know what he’s said? What he’s done? Don’t you realize what kind of person they are?”
Sometimes the question comes with receipts: screenshots, quotes, timelines. Other times, the evidence is assumed and the judgment is swift. The implication is always the same: Why are you associating with someone like that? Don’t you know what ‘we’ stand for?
It is that last part, “we”, that gives me pause. Because “we” is rarely defined. It is assumed. The critic believes I share their group identity, their moral instincts, and their social boundaries. By being seen in friendly conversation with the wrong kind of person, I have supposedly betrayed that assumed consensus.
So I decided to write this essay. Not as a personal defense, but as a theological clarification. The world of social media, especially in its current obsession with transparency, accountability, and ideological purity, demands a kind of moral uniformity that is foreign to Scripture. When we begin to define righteousness by who we do or do not associate with, we may find ourselves standing on very shaky ground.
To think clearly about this, we need more than reaction. We need Christ. We need a framework that helps us see how God calls us to live in a world where judgment is cheap and mercy is rare.
What does it mean to associate with someone rightly?
I. The Normative Perspective: What Scripture Commands
The Word of God does not celebrate the uninhibited flow of information. It calls for discretion, modesty, and love. In Proverbs 17:9 we read: “Whoever covers an offense seeks love, but he who repeats a matter separates close friends.” Here, concealment is not deceit, it is covenantal wisdom. Scripture acknowledges that not all things ought to be shared.
Paul commands in 1 Thessalonians 4:11 to “aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs.” In our time, where the boundary between personal and public is constantly eroded, this command is not merely quaint, it is radical. The moral law of God binds us to truthfulness, yes, but also to neighbor-love, which “covers a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). A society obsessed with exposure will eventually become one incapable of grace.
Gossip, slander, and tale-bearing are roundly condemned. The ninth commandment forbids bearing false witness—but truth told in malice or without charity is also forbidden (Ex. 23:1; Eph. 4:29).
Truth must be wielded in love.
From a normative standpoint, Scripture insists that not everything should be known and not everyone should know everything. So, what does Scripture say about guilt by association? What does it say about judgment, slander, and gossip? Proverbs 18:17 reminds us, "The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Scripture is filled with admonitions not to speak ill of one another, not to spread tales and not to assume the worst. Total depravity means that every one of us carries a corrupted nature. If that’s true, then all of us are guilty of saying and doing foolish, harmful, even wicked things. Why, then, should I expect sinlessness from others when I do not meet that standard myself?
This does not mean that we affirm or excuse sin. Rather, it means that no one is ever purely good or purely evil in a way that can be neatly categorized. I don’t draw my associations based on curated moral résumés. I draw them based on the reality that relationships require patience, nuance, and forgiveness.
II. The Situational Perspective: The Transparency Society
In his work The Transparency Society, Byung-Chul Han critiques our cultural obsession with visibility. He notes that modern society equates transparency with virtue, but this leads paradoxically to control, not freedom. When everything must be visible, no one is allowed to fail quietly, to repent privately, or to be forgiven.
Governments, corporations, and various social media platforms are reordering human behavior around metrics of visibility and exposure. The recent pushes for verification ID laws, the removal of video games from Steam, or the refusal to release names from high-profile cases such as Epstein’s all demonstrate a selective transparency. Some are exposed. Others are protected. And we are not always privy to who decides which is which.
Situationally, then, we are living in a kind of inverted panopticon. Everyone sees everything except the powerful. Information moves in one direction: downward.
But the problem goes beyond the political; it is also deeply moral. In this system, truth (as transparency) becomes a spectacle and even sin becomes a form of currency so long as it is interesting enough. Hence, why gossip is commodified.
So, we live in a digital panopticon, a "Transparency Society" where every utterance is archived, every joke is weaponized and every perceived misstep becomes a mark of Cain. The technological conditions around us turn people into dossiers, further devaluing our humanity. Sin, therefore, goes above and beyond whatever the original offense was and gets wrapped into a collective mishandling of whatever comes after.
III. The Existential Perspective: The Conscience and the Self
Finally, we consider the individual. What happens to a person in a world without privacy, without mercy and without hiddenness?
John Calvin reminds us that “the human heart is an idol factory.” In a world of total exposure, the idol is the self, a vessel to be performed, managed, edited. We curate a self for others to consume, and we demand the same from others in turn. However, the more we know about people, the harder it becomes to love them. This is not because love fails, but because curiosity and condemnation take its place.
This produces spiritual exhaustion. Shame becomes ambient. We either collapse under the pressure to be perfect or harden into cynicism. Either way, the soul loses the quiet dignity of being known by God alone.
But the Scripture offers a better vision: “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away... then I acknowledged my sin to you, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.” (Psalm 32). This is the paradox of godly concealment: God sees all and therefore we do not need to be seen by all. What we need is not to be transparent to the world, but to be transparent before the Lord.
Why do we want to know every wrong someone has done? Why do we demand that our neighbors perform their moral cleanliness for us before we allow them social presence? Why do we think we are immune from this scrutiny ourselves? Because it is easier to hide our own shame behind the projection of outrage. Total depravity doesn’t just mean others are wicked; it means I am too. The log in my eye distorts every speck I claim to see.
Conclusion: Restraint is a Form of Righteousness
This essay is not a call to moral relativism. It is a call to moral realism. I know what people are like. But I also I know what I am like. That’s why I don’t trust the spectacle of curated purity and I certainly don’t place much weight on the judgment of those who participate in the circulation of scandal as if it were righteous action. The Bible has little good to say about gossip and plenty to say about forgiveness. There is wisdom in guarding one’s tongue, patience in withholding judgment, and grace in embracing people as they are.
If we took total depravity seriously, we would not be shocked at sin, but at grace. We would not be quick to cancel, but quick to repent. We would treat others not as moral liabilities, but as fellow sinners in need of the same mercy we depend on daily.
In an age of surveillance, gossip, digital confessions, and public takedowns, the Christian calling is not to outpace the world in transparency. It is to be faithful; to love the truth, to speak it in season, and to protect what ought not be shared. There is no holiness without hiddenness. There is no grace without silence.
From the normative, situational, and existential perspectives, we see the same truth: not everything must be known. Not everything must be said. And not everyone must be seen.
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There is an element within the body of the church that denies grace. They claim we must adhere to the Law in Old Testament scripture. These cannot be reasoned with.
Even when I point out they're breaking it every single day.
This element uses the heresy of salvation by works as a bludgeon to force others to "meet a certain standard" and thus validate themselves and their virtue signaling.
They cannot be reasoned with. Don't even try. Don't apologize. And don't give place to heresy.
This is an excellent essay: clear, succinct, and instructive. Thank you.
In my discussions with Christian elders, it seems as though "don't lie" was badgered into them as an absolute command as children, and that it was illustrated through stories that pushed the idea that blabbing everything to everyone and keeping no secrets for any amount of time was the only right thing to do. That a "lie of omission" was a lie, no matter how temporary it was or how respectful of privacy it was. In short, it was a rule written for children, dumbed down so far as to lose its essential truth. We can't easily ask children to be circumspect about truth because it requires discernement.
As adults, however, we can recognize that telling the SS officer that there is no one else in the house is the right thing to do. And that children would be traumatized to learn about child SA and human trafficking instead of learning about the unfathomable depths of human evil later when their minds are more mature.
I try to remember Christ's instruction to "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16) And how Paul did not tell his captors that he was a Roman citizen until after they beat him with no trial, causing fear in the magistrates that had ordered the beating (Acts 16). Hiding the truth until after the Romans delivered and unjustified beating revealed how unjust these magistrates truly were and the great importance of not punishing someone without searching out and considering all the facts in their case. Not blabbing the truth until after his captors had revealed their unjust practices exposed a truth about human nature and our haste to form rash judgements without fully understanding what is going on.
I think many atheists do this (form rash judgements) when they declare that God is immoral according to their own human judgement because He did this or that in situations that they assume they understand everything about. They will be deeply shamed when they come to fully understand this world and the story God is authoring in it.