When Does Faith Become a Performance?

The reason this pretense is so corrosive to trustworthiness is that it signals a fundamental dishonesty. The individual is not presenting their true self to the world; they are presenting a carefully crafted version of it. They are living a lie, and if they are willing to deceive others about something as deeply personal as their faith, it stands to reason that they would be willing to deceive them in other, more mundane aspects of life as well. The very foundation of trust—honesty and consistency—is absent from the start.