Religion That God Accepts

The chapter ends with James defining a word people are sure they already understand. He takes religion, which everyone assumes is about ceremony and belief, and measures it by things most people would not put on the list at all.

If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not bridle his tongue, he deceives his heart and his religion is worthless.

He starts with the tongue, and the phrase is pointed. A person can consider himself religious, can mean it sincerely, and be wrong about it, because the evidence is not in how he feels but in whether he controls his mouth. James is severe here. An unbridled tongue does not merely weaken such a person's religion; it empties the whole thing out and leaves it worthless, and it does so while the man goes on believing he is fine. That is the deception, and it is aimed at the sincerely religious rather than at the openly hypocritical.

Pure and undefiled religion before our God and Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

He names the real thing next, and it has two halves. One turns outward, to orphans and widows in their distress, whose care James puts at the center of what real religion is. The other half turns inward. It is keeping oneself unstained by the world, the purity people usually think religion is entirely about. James keeps it, but he refuses to let it stand alone. Real religion, in his account, both reaches the helpless and guards the heart, and it is measured before God rather than before a congregation. What it is not is a feeling of devotion attached to a mouth and a life that never changed.