Question

Good afternoon, Rabbi Michi.
Inspired by the previous column you wrote, and by the whole uproar around the Yuval Dayan story,
I was reminded of the concept of desecration of God’s name and sanctification of God’s name, and a difficulty occurred to me that I wanted to hear your opinion about.
As far as I remember, and as I understand it, these terms refer to situations in which the name of Heaven—the perception of religion and of the Holy One, blessed be He—among the broader public, meaning people who are not in the study hall, such as non-Jews, secular people, standard ordinary householders, and just plain ignoramuses, changes or is influenced because of the behavior of believing people.
In many cases—for example, in the case of returning lost property to a non-Jew—it is even permitted to violate an explicit halakhic command: to return the non-Jew’s lost item, solely so that he will say, “The faith of the Jews is admirable.”
That is of course just one example, but many times the claim, today and in the past, is:
There are cases where one must do certain things, behave in a certain way, or refrain from certain things because of the way the honor of Heaven’s name could be harmed.
And I wonder whether this prohibition, despite how much people talk about it nowadays, can really be practical at all in the modern world.
After all, in earlier times, when there was no technology and we were not one big global village, it was possible to hide certain actions or the intentions behind certain actions.
And today?
Any non-Jew in a Western country can, for example, open the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, in theory, and see there that according to some approaches in Judaism it is forbidden to save his life for free without receiving payment. Any secular person can peek into a Haredi or Hardal study hall and discover that the outlook there regarding equality between the sexes is different from that of the modern world, and it cannot be hidden that by his standards some rabbis would be considered chauvinists according to those criteria.
Any righteous convert who converts can tell people around him, or his former friends and acquaintances, that in principle the Torah permitted him to marry his mother or sister, that his biological lineage changes legally, contrary to the logic of the law of nations.
Any newly religious person can tell his former friends that there are factions that do not see importance or value in advanced core studies or familiarity with the world, that there are factions that truly view the Torah as the only thing that matters, and that all the media talk about bringing hearts closer, about shared principles and worlds that can always meet, is not always mere lip service—but in many cases it is—and that in many circles there is no conception of essential tolerance,
certainly not of pluralism.
So if that is the case, regardless of the question of how important and precious or critical this concept is or isn’t,
is this even something that is possible to take into account in the modern period?
In my opinion, nowadays when a person wants to prevent a desecration of God’s name or sanctify God’s name, he is almost coerced,
because everything is open and everything is completely on the table.