The 7 Deadly Virtues

Hypocrisy in the Selfie Age

Article 1: When Sin Became a Virtue – Advertising, Selfies, and the Vain Show of Psalm 39

In past premium article series I’ve written on various topics—including dust and destiny, and what it means to be a living soul, a Nephesh, in a world that’s forgotten both dust and destiny. Today I start something more ambitious: a series on what used to be called the “seven deadly sins,” and how, in our time, they’ve been recast as virtues.

The story of this series begins years ago with a moment from my journey during the period I describe in People of the Sign, Chapter 6, “With a Little Help from My Friends.”

BBDO’s Vice Promotion

In my junior year of college, I was hired as the Administrative Assistant to David Hulme. It was an extraordinary role for a young man still figuring out who he was and what he believed. David was a gifted communicator, and part of my work involved supporting him as he interacted with major agencies on church promotional matters.

That’s how I found myself working with BBDO, one of the world’s premier advertising firms. They were advising us on how the Church might reach the public more effectively. Somewhere in that process I came across a series BBDO had developed built around the seven deadly sins.

The campaign was witty and humorous—clever full‑page ads that played with lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. The whole point was to take something heavy, archaic, and moralistic—“the seven deadly sins”—and make it light, ironic, and entertaining. You could almost feel the chuckle in the conference room.

And they worked as marketing pieces. I can recall several of those ads to this day. That series was more than a creative exercise. It was a cultural thermometer. It revealed how comfortable we had become with turning sin into a joke, a theme, a style.

We didn’t fear it. We found it funny.

Looking back now, I see that campaign as a faint early tremor of a much larger shift: the actual rebranding of the seven deadly sins as deadly virtues.

• Lust as liberation.

• Greed as ambition.

• Gluttony as self‑care.

• Sloth as balance.

• Wrath as moral clarity.

• Envy as inspiration.

• Pride as identity.

What used to be warning labels are now marketing hooks and personal brands.

Scripture has a line for this kind of thing:

“Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain:
he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.”
—Psalm 39:6 (KJV)

Even before there were billboards or Instagram feeds, the psalmist saw it: our tendency to live in performance, in a vain show—a curated image—while our inner life remains restless and unknown.

The Selfie as “Posture Child” for an Age

Fast‑forward a few decades from that BBDO conference room, and we arrive in the age of the selfie.

We now carry in our pockets a device that lets us turn our own faces, bodies, opinions, and moods into an endless stream of images. Some of that is benign; some of it can even be beautiful. But much of it is performance—posture—a carefully constructed image of who we want the world to think we are.

In that sense, the selfie has become the posture child of our time.

We lift our arms, find our light, tilt our heads, add the filter, and broadcast. We don’t just record life; we compose it. And in the process, we can easily start believing the edited version more than the unvarnished truth.

Fairy tales saw this coming.

In the Grimm story of Snow White, the Evil Queen—Snow White’s mother in the earliest version, stepmother in later revisions—stands each morning before her magic mirror to demand: “Who is the fairest of them all?” Her entire identity is outsourced to a reflective surface. When the mirror finally informs her that Snow White has surpassed her in beauty “a thousand times,” her narcissism, pride, and hubris ignite into murderous rage.

The Grimms were explicit: this was didactic. A warning against narcissism, pride, and hubris, and a reminder that when we live by comparison, we will die by it. As psychologist Sheldon Cashdan puts it, the Queen “embodies narcissism,” and her destruction signals “a victory of virtue over vice.”

The apostle Paul warned about this same disease of comparison in another register:

“For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves
with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves,
and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.”
—2 Corinthians 10:12 (KJV)

The Evil Queen is a living parable of that verse. She “commends herself,” then measures herself by herself and against Snow White. It drives her mad.

In our age, we’ve done something remarkable with this story. We’ve sanitized the punishment, rehabilitated the Queen in various retellings, and quietly normalized the very thing she represents. The narcissism, pride, and hubris that once marked her as a villain are now, in many circles, marks of success—“confidence,” “personal brand,” “being that girl.”

Social media—and increasingly, AI—have become a global, networked version of her magic mirror. Every platform whispers our own version of “Mirror, mirror on the wall…” And like the Queen, we keep coming back, needing the answer:

• Am I still the fairest?

• Am I seen, liked, shared, amplified more than the others?

• Where do I rank?

Media scholars have started to notice the parallel. Erin McKenzie, writing in The Journal of Popular Culture, argues that Snow White’s mirror is an early cultural prototype of algorithmic validation—an external authority that tells the Queen who she is and how she ranks, much as digital metrics define us today (McKenzie, 2021).

Psalm 39:6 names it with unnerving accuracy:

“Surely every man walketh in a vain shew…”

If the psalmist could see our feeds, and if the Brothers Grimm could see us living inside the Evil Queen’s question, they might not be shocked at all. This is exactly what they were warning about—and exactly what Paul cautioned against when he said those who “compare themselves among themselves, are not wise.”

We are busy, constantly “disquieted”—but over what? Over our image, our reach, our brand. We heap up not only riches, but attention, affirmation, and moral approval, and rarely stop to ask who we’re actually becoming.

That is why the Evil Queen still matters. She is not just a villain in a children’s story. She is a mirror of the age—and, if we’re honest, of tendencies in our own hearts.

Virtue Signaling: The Crack Cocaine of Hypocrisy

In The Hardness of the Heart, I dug into the language of desire and rule in Genesis—how God warns Eve and later Cain that desire, once unmoored from Him, will try to dominate us. Our calling is to rule it, not be ruled by it.

In the selfie age, that desire expresses itself in a new addictive pattern: virtue signaling.

Virtue signaling is the habit of publicly displaying our “right” opinions, causes, and emotions—not mainly as an honest outflow of conviction, but as a way to be seen as good, compassionate, enlightened, or on the “correct side.”

It is, in many ways, the crack cocaine of hypocrisy:

• It delivers a fast, gratifying high: “I’ve said the right thing; I’m one of the good people.”

• It’s endlessly repeatable: there is always a new controversy, a new hashtag, a new public stand to take.

• It never satisfies: the more we perform, the more we need to perform, to keep the image intact.

And like any addiction, it hollows us out from within.

We can become skilled at broadcasting our compassion for the poor while rarely sacrificing our comfort. We can rail against injustice in eloquent threads while remaining harsh, unkind, or dishonest in our private relationships. We can hashtag humility and inclusion while nursing pride and contempt just beneath the surface.

The Evil Queen’s daily ritual—checking the mirror to confirm her own superiority—was an early form of virtue signaling. The mirror validated her imagined goodness and greatness. When it refused to cooperate, she set out to eliminate the rival rather than confront her own heart.

We replay that script every time we curate our feeds to prove our virtue, then mute or cancel the people whose presence threatens our reflection.

The prophet Jeremiah wrote:

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked:
who can know it?”
—Jeremiah 17:9 (KJV)

Modern psychology has its own language for this, but the conclusion is similar: we are capable of deep self‑deception. We don’t just fool others; we fool ourselves.

In the selfie age, that self‑deception isn’t confined to the hidden corners of the heart. We export it. We edit it. We filter it. We put it out for likes.

We walk in a vain show—and then spend our evenings scrolling through everybody else’s. Our devices have become magic mirrors; our timelines, fairytale walls; our hearts, still as fragile and double‑minded as the Queen’s.

Psalm 1, Psalm 2, and a Prophetic Frame

If you’ve read People of the Sign, Hardness of the Heart, or The Rod of Iron, you know I read Scripture as more than ancient text. It’s a map—poetic, prophetic, painfully honest about who we are and where we’re heading.

Psalms 1 and 2 stand at the gateway of that map.

Psalm 1 paints a simple contrast:

• The one who delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night is like a tree—rooted by rivers of water, fruitful in its season, enduring through heat and storm.

• The ungodly are like chaff—rootless, weightless, driven away by the wind.

Psalm 2 shifts the focus from the individual to the nations:

“Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,
Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.”
—Psalm 2:1–3 (KJV)

Here we see powerful people and systems actively resisting God’s moral order. They experience His “bands” and “cords” not as lifelines, but as chains to be shattered.

If Psalm 1 is a picture of the rooted life, Psalm 2 is a picture of the raging world.

Look around today, and it’s hard to escape the sense that Psalm 2 currently has the upper hand. The idea that there is a Creator with the authority to define good and evil—and to tell us “no” in the deepest places of desire and identity—is widely seen as oppressive, even hateful.

In that context, the seven deadly sins fit right in. They are precisely the “bands” we want removed:

• Lust without “repression.”

• Greed without “guilt.”

• Gluttony without “shame.”

• Sloth without “judgment.”

• Wrath without “tone‑policing.”

• Envy without “negativity.”

• Pride without “constraints.”

We don’t just tolerate them; we market them. We brand them. We declare them essential to liberation and authenticity.

The Evil Queen was an early prototype of Psalm 2 in a dress and crown: determined to cast off any limit to her desire to be the “fairest,” unwilling to accept that another might be blessed, beautiful, or chosen. Our age has multiplied her image by billions of screens.

Jesus and the Flip from Law to Heart

So where does Jesus come in?

He stepped into a world that took sin seriously. The Torah counted 613 commands. It would have been simple for him to say: keep all 613 more strictly, and you’re fine.

Instead, he did something far more unsettling.

He moved the battleground of righteousness inside.

• “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

• “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not murder.’ But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother without a cause will be in danger of the judgment.”

• “Judge not, that you be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

In other words, the final accounting will not be a crude check‑box review of religious performance. It will be an individualized, deeply tailored review of the heart—how we desired, how we judged, how we treated others, and how honest we were about our own condition.

Hypocrisy is no longer a side issue; it becomes the central concern.

If I denounce greed while baptizing my covetousness as “drive”…
If I perform outrage at injustice while leaving the poor and lonely unvisited…
If I present myself as humble and gentle online while being harsh and controlling in my home…

…then the standard I used on others will return to me. That is Jesus’ promise—and his warning.

The selfie age gives us more sophisticated masks than any generation before us. But the One who weighs hearts is not impressed with filters, or reels, or even our most polished “mirror, mirror” moments.

The Evil Queen’s fate in the original tale—forced to dance in red‑hot iron shoes until she dies—was brutal, but symbolically apt. She is destroyed by the very fire of envy and vanity that consumed her. Our judgment will be less theatrical, but no less precise: we will finally see what our own hearts have become, and how much of our life was spent “comparing ourselves among ourselves” rather than looking to God.

Where We’re Going: The 7 Deadly Virtues

In this series, I want to look honestly at how each of the traditional “deadly sins” has been re‑cast as a virtue in our time:

• Lust as liberation and “sex‑positivity”

• Greed as ambition and hustle

• Gluttony as self‑care and lifestyle

• Sloth as balance and boundaries

• Wrath as moral clarity and activism

• Envy as inspiration and aspiration

• Pride as the non‑negotiable core of identity and autonomy

We’ll explore concrete cultural examples from the last 100 years. We’ll hold them up to Psalm 1 and Psalm 2. We’ll let Psalm 39:6, Jeremiah 17:9, and 2 Corinthians 10:12 speak into our curated, comparative, disquieted lives. And we’ll keep in view the way Jesus flips the script from legalism to heart‑level integrity.

Later, we’ll widen the lens to a collective frame:

• Matthew 25 and the sheep and the goats—Christ’s picture of a final sorting based on how we treated “the least of these.”

• The year 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted and the modern State of Israel was established—two global “signs,” one secular, one scriptural, pointing to a shared standard and a “sign to the nations.”

For now, I want to leave you with a few simple questions:

In a world obsessed with images, what image are you actually curating?
In a culture addicted to virtue signaling, where has the crack cocaine of hypocrisy touched your own heart?
In the age of the selfie—and the age of “mirror, mirror on the wall” gone global—who are you when nobody’s watching and nothing is being recorded?

Psalm 39 says we walk in a vain show and heap up what we cannot keep. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful above all things. Paul says that measuring ourselves by ourselves is the height of folly. Jesus says the measure we use on others will be used on us.

This series is not an invitation to despair, but to deeper honesty. Not to smash your camera, but to let the One who sees behind the lens remake the heart that holds it.

We were not created merely to project an image. We were created to bear one—the image of God.

Let’s walk through these 7 deadly virtues together, and rediscover what it might mean, even in the selfie age, to bring forth good fruit.

—Wade Fransson

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