The longer I live the more I’ve come to realize that being right is not the same as being righteous. Being right is about believing what is true, having opinions that correspond to reality. Being righteous, however, is about integrity, being the kind of person who can be counted on to act according conscience rather than self-interest.

There is nothing wrong with being right, of course. In fact, it’s very important to believe what is true. Believing what is not true leads to all sorts of avoidable harms, whether it’s believing that your body is immune to disease (and refusing preventative measures like vaccination or even hand-washing) or believing that God will make you rich if you follow him (and sending money to televangelists to make it happen). However, insisting that you are right about something—anything, really—can damage your relationships and lead to arrogance and conceit. There’s nothing wrong with explaining that you are convinced that something is true. The problem arises when you insist that others believe the same and be convinced to the same degree by the same arguments that persuaded you.

Everyone is different. Arguments and experiences that you have found persuasive may not persuade someone else no matter how factual you regard them. Many people think that an appeal to facts ought to be conclusive, but it rarely is. Facts are subject to interpretation. Indeed, what people even regard as facts is often culturally or socially determined. This does not mean that facts are useless, merely that they will often not bear the weight of an argument when crucial, often tacit, assumptions are also at issue.

One of the consequences is that you cannot be absolutely certain that you are right. Oh, you may feel certain. You may be convinced. But there is nothing to which you can appeal that will guarantee that your interlocutor must agree with you, nothing that can legitimately remove all doubt. If nothing else, there are always the doubts arising from dreams and altered states of consciousness that make it possible, however unlikely, that you are deluded. Important as being right is, no one person can rely too much on their own rightness. We need each other to set boundaries for our beliefs. We need some humility.

Unlike being right, being righteous is a quality of one’s character. It is intrinsically relational. Righteousness is much more about doing right than being right. It involves, at the very least, living up to your own standards of right behavior. It may also involve living up to communal standards. Indeed, someone who ignores communal standards and does only what is right in their own eyes could well be a sociopath. You cannot be righteous if you do what you condemn in others.

Righteousness requires some kind of standard of right behavior, a standard that by its very nature must be universally applicable. What I mean by “universal” is that the judgement about a deed’s righteousness does not depend on the identity of the doer. This is why Justice is so often depicted as blindfolded. Ideal justice takes no notice of a defendant’s identity, social position, wealth, or influence. Justice is impartial, so righteousness means adhering to a common standard.

It should be obvious that if one must choose between being right and doing right, doing right is better. The impact of doing wrong is clearly much worse than being wrong about some belief, even though wrong beliefs lead to wrong actions. It is the actions that count. This is why both Jesus and Paul insist that the final judgment of both sinners and saints will be about what they have done, not about what they have believed. It is also why James insists that faith unaccompanied by deeds is useless.