John Donne once said that the great spiritual malaise of his time was melancholy. My candidate for that distinction today would be the ease with which we assume the cloak of infallibility. It is our age’s favorite variation on the cardinal sin of pride (disguised deftly as humility) combined with a strong shot of anger and of anger’s distilled form, hatred—a very heady cocktail designed precisely to match our taste for self-righteousness

But let me be more exact about my topic. I am not writing about either papal infallibility or the infallibility (aka inerrancy) of scripture. While I do not profess either doctrine, I know faithful Christian people who do, and neither doctrine seems to pose any insuperable barrier to their genuine Christian faith. There is no occasion in these for anathemas, however much I may be tempted. (Well, I do seem to recall having come close to hurling a few such anathemas in Lovesongs and Reproaches. If so, I recant.)

My subject, rather, is the way in which all sorts of people (including those of us who don’t officially believe in infallibility of any kind) appropriate infallibility for ourselves. Not that we would admit to it. In fact, we would resist the notion mightily: It is not I who am infallible. I am merely the messenger, the reporter, the humble servant of infallibility.

What prompts these reflections at just this moment? For one thing, there is the ongoing drama of Evangelicals worldwide, hiding under the cloak of infallibility in order to attack gay and lesbian people—in some cases targeting their rights, in others their bodies and their lives as well. For another, there is a new bit of comedy playing out in the Roman Catholic Church, in which conservative voices are trying to figure out how to seize control the pope’s infallibility for themselves to ease their anxiety that the new gentleman in the chair is about to promote some things that they know infallibly to be false. It is a conundrum, of course. But it isn’t the first time that some Roman Catholics have come to the conclusion that they are more Catholic than the pope.

But the illness is much more widespread than these two examples. What are the symptoms by which one can recognize it? One is the offloading of responsibility: “I, of course, am a generous and loving person. It is not I myself who tell you that you are evil. I am just the reluctant messenger of God/truth. God/truth makes me do it.” When we adopt this stance, we usually feel that it is self-evidently right. After all, this is what my own group has long believed. Where would we have gotten it if not from God? The prospect that it might have more to do with the social norms of rural America in preceding generations (in the case of Evangelicals) or the politics of two preceding popes (in the case of conservative Roman Catholics) or academic culture (in the case of the new atheists) is not to be admitted into consciousness.

Another symptom is the avoidance of serious human engagement with the people one condemns. One claims not to know any of the sinners in question (e.g., gay folk or remarried divorced persons or women who have had an abortion) or else to know a few and perhaps even feel sorry for them (though the knowledge usually does not go beyond general acquaintance). In addressing those identified as displeasing to God, the infallible person adopts the stance of an adult lecturing a teen-ager, never that of an equal—thereby ensuring that there will be no real communication.

And if pressed on the issue of the scriptural command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, the victim of this spiritual disease will then explain that, of course, that is exactly what he or she is doing for you. Since you are doing something infallibly defined as wrong, the only loving thing to do is to prevent you from proceeding, even if it must be substantial cost to you. Really, all this misery is for your own good. Claiming love as the justification for patently unloving acts is thus a third symptom.

A fourth symptom is pervasive anger. Seldom does anyone claim infallibility in any other emotional state. Such anger lends a certain sense of exaltation to the human psyche, especially when it frees us to behave in ways we would normally consider boorish. It is really quite delicious to find oneself carried away by righteous emotion as one assaults the reprobate. The problem is that anger also clouds our perception of reality, painting everything and everyone with whom one is angry in the most livid and threatening of hues. In this way, it feeds on itself and creates new and worse caricatures of these people whom now, to tell the truth, one well and truly hates.

A fifth symptom is the way the illness communicates itself through the body. The traits of righteous anger, being visible, are particularly helpful in diagnosis: the narrowed eyes, pinched lips, jutting chin, rigidly held limbs, all approximating (as far as humanly possible) the look of an angry chicken (as my late friend M. R. Ritley pointed out to me some years ago.)

This spiritual malaise has proven so contagious that it has worked its way through all areas of modern human discourse. Atheists are as subject to it as the religious. Political theorists and economists easily become its mouthpieces. Our autocrats of taste may in fact have little else to fall back on. And it seems to be taking on increasingly ugly forms—forms that threaten us with loss of the hard-won civilization that our forebears have slowly constructed over the last four or five millennia.

Bearing the cloak of infallibility exacts a cost. Like Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility, it exposes us to deeply inhuman menaces that would like to sap our souls. We are in danger of becoming hollow shells held together by little more than a brittle crust compounded of self-esteem and hostility toward the enemy. The supreme indicator of spiritual health is the opposite—not infallibility but love.