Other than Jesus Christ, none of us are perfect. While some sins are bigger than others, we all sin daily. Unfortunately, it can be easy to be judgmental of others despite our own imperfections. Yet, there are also times when we have to use our righteous judgment abilities. We are taught that we are all given a sense of right and wrong. Based on that knowledge, we must make decisions. How can we come to understand the difference between being judgmental and judging the situation or using righteous judgment?
What Does It Mean to Judge the Situation?
Judging the situation or righteous judgment is about using your knowledge of right and wrong to decide if something is a righteous or unrighteous choice. At times, it might be easy. For example, it’s pretty clear that robbing stealing, and murdering are wrong (although Nephi shows that even that’s not always true). It’s just as easy to know that reading your scriptures, saying your prayers, and being of service to others are good things. Yet, sometimes we have to make a judgment call based on a specific situation.
For example, while we are taught to be honest, sometimes we may find ourselves deciding between honesty and kindness. Perhaps, telling someone the whole truth would hurt the other person without providing any positive results. Do you lie to the person, tell only part of the truth, or tell the whole truth?
You may also have to make this righteous judgment call when it comes to media. Does one swear word in a movie or book automatically put the book on your “do not read” list even if it has a good plot and a good message? What constitutes appropriate versus inappropriate? Making these decisions requires righteous judgment on your part.
What Does It Mean to Be Judgmental?
While I feel like judging the situation is about trying to make a righteous decision, being judgmental is about pride. It is easy to judge someone right away. I’m guilty of this far more often than I’d like to admit. When it comes to being judgmental, we most often judge based on a person’s appearance, life circumstances, or actions.
Judging Appearances
When it comes to appearances, we may assume that someone who wears thick glasses is smart or that the tall person must be great at basketball. Maybe, based on the person’s appearance, we decide if that person is someone we feel could be our friend. We might judge someone based on their clothing or their hairstyle. Perhaps, we’re a bit judgmental of the lady coming into Relief Society who has a lot of tattoos. Maybe we judge someone based on what we perceive as a disability or a physical difference.
In some cases, these judgments might be harmless and even later funny, especially if your initial judgment was way off. In other cases, our judgment based on someone’s appearance could be hurtful.
Being Judgmental Based on Life Circumstances
When things aren’t going well in someone’s life, it’s easy to assume that the person is to blame. That person must have sinned, or that person must deserve those circumstances. While hopefully not in that harsh of terms, I think we’ve all had those moments where we judged someone based on their life circumstances. If you haven’t, you’re a far better person than me.
I’ll be honest. There have been several times when I’ve judged someone. Then later, often years later, I find myself in a similar situation, and I realize just how harshly I initially judged that person. Some of those for me include judging people who moved back in with their parents as adults, judging an unmarried youth leader, and judging people who self-published a book because a traditional publisher did not accept the book.
While this could apply to any sort of judgment, one of the worst parts of being judgmental of someone’s life situation is that often because of that life situation, that person is really struggling. Because of that struggle, that person may already feel inferior to others, embarrassed, unimportant, or unloved by God. Instead of being judged, that person really needs understanding and compassion from others.
Judging Based on Actions
Then there are times when we are judgmental based on someone’s actions. I’ll admit it. I fall into this trap often. Maybe, we see someone walking into a store on a Sunday, and we assume that person doesn’t keep the Sabbath day holy. Whether that’s true or not, we are judging that person. Perhaps, we judge someone based on their language, thinking we are superior to that person because we never swear. Maybe, the person’s moral standards don’t align with our own.
Being Judgmental When We All Sin
There are a variety of ways that we may be judgmental of others. It’s important to remember that we all sin. My sins might not be the same as your sins, but they are both sins. One person’s sins might be more apparent than another person’s. I know that it’s sometimes easy to justify my own sins, thinking that mine are not as bad as someone else’s. Yet, it’s really not up to me to create a “sin scale of severity.”
Even if I feel like my sins are minor compared to another person’s sins, that doesn’t mean that I should be judgmental of someone else. Maybe, that person is working on doing better and is making improvements. Maybe, that person doesn’t have the same knowledge of right and wrong as me. At times, I may even be downplaying my own sins while making another person’s sins seem more extreme, at least in my head.
How Might the Two Connect?
Unfortunately, in our quest to not be judgmental of others, we can also go to the opposite extreme. We may begin to feel like because we shouldn’t be judgmental, we can’t make righteous judgment calls either. In the world today, there’s sometimes this attitude that we need to accept people as they are. While that is true to a point, there is a fine line between accepting people as they are and accepting the sin.
There are times when we must decide if we want to allow someone to continue to be in our lives and how much influence we want to allow that person to have over us. It is not judgemental to decide that because someone gets argumentative when it comes to politics, we are going to leave when that person brings up politics, or even that we are going to limit our contact with that person. We may have to decide to cut off contact with someone who constantly puts us down.
In some cases, we may just need to avoid particular activities with that person. Maybe, you can no longer watch movies with a particular friend, who enjoys movies that you feel are too violent or sexually explicit. Perhaps, we need to no longer go out to eat with a friend who we know is going to get drunk. When this is the case, finding the right balance between making a righteous judgment call and being judgmental of your friend might be difficult. Yet, learning to make righteous judgment calls without being judgmental is important for our eternal progression.
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