UnChristian: A New Understanding Of Contemporary Christendom In America

by Nicole

"Modern day Christianity no longer seems Christian,” writes the author of a revealing new book. UnChristian is a data-driven study written by David Kinnaman, the son of an Arizona pastor, who serves as the president of The Barna Group, a Christian Gallup-like research organization based in Ventura, CA. Analyzing information culled from extensive surveys and numerous interviews, Kinnaman, with the help of co-author Gabe Lyons, reports on the state of contemporary Christian culture and how it's perceived. “What began as a three month project has turned into a three-year study to grasp the picture God was revealing through the data,” writes Kinnaman in the book’s preface. “It was not a pretty picture.”

38% of outsiders surveyed had a bad impression of Christianity, 45% had a neutral one, and just 16% had a good impression. Furthermore 91% of outsiders felt that Christianity was anti-homosexual, 87% said it was judgmental and 85% thought it was hypocritical. 84% of outsiders claimed to know a Christian, yet only 15% could see a lifestyle difference that indicated that their friends practiced what they preached. In light of these findings, The Daily Mantra caught up with Kinnaman to find out if, and how, Christianity can get back on track.

DM: In the first chapter of your book you start by saying “Christianity has an image problem.” Is it really the image that’s the problem or the underlying substance?

DK: I’m glad that I wrote that sentence, because it’s provocative. It’s tough for Christians to understand what a substance problem really is. All the people that work at the Barna Group come back around to that question of the substance/image problem. If you look at the stuff that we’ve done, we make more enemies with Christians than we do with outsiders because much of the information that we put out is not very flattering to the Christian church.

Around the time 400 A.D. Constantine made an official Christian nation out of The Roman Empire and for sixteen hundred years since then we’ve lived in Christendom in the west, which is this idea that society is essentially Christianized. America is a quote-un-quote Christian nation, in the sense that 83% of Americans say they’re Christian and seven out of ten say they’ve made a commitment to Christ that’s still important in their life. I am as concerned about superficial Christianity as I am about anything else in our culture. What does it really mean to be a Christ follower in a country where almost everyone says that they are? How do we really be the kind of people that Jesus asked us to be? So few people really live like that. If the first sentence of the book is that ‘Christianity has an image problem,’ the last sentence of the book ought to be ‘Christianity has a substance problem.’

DM: You also say ‘they react negatively to our swagger,’ but I think that more than the swagger it would be the stance.

DK: Yes, I can understand that. I think we’ve been so busy defending a fort that we forgot why we built the fort in the first place. The Church is supposed to be a beacon of hope for people, and that is really why we’re known as unchristian because after sixteen hundred years of Christendom, after creating higher education and many of the hospitals, and creating many of the non-profits that have benefited society, we’ve been more concerned about reacting against things that we are fearful of, rather than trying to recreate and reclaim those ways of making life better for people. We have become more known for talking about sin than doing anything for those people affected by sin.

DM: One of the largest groups of people affected by the Christian definition of sin, as reflected by your own research, is the homosexual community. According to your book, 91% of outsiders view the Church as anti-homosexual.

DK: It is the most difficult topic of all. It's the place where I think a lot of Christians are having a hard time understanding what to do. Even though the book has been well received with a lot of Christians, it's the area that's creating the most tension. The idea of sin scripturely is not a black and white thing, it's more of a gradation issue. Maybe the best way of describing it is that Christians are saying that homosexuality is not the best way, it's not the way our sexuality was meant to be to be best lived.

What's really fascinating and frustrating to me is that while we try to talk about this stuff Christians are known as being feisty, polarizing, inexpert and arrogant, and, instead, I think we ought to be known as relational. We ought to be compassionate. We ought to be willing to learn. We ought to be informed. We ought to be solution-orientated. We ought to have a genuine respect for differences.

We haven't really talked about the holistic nature of a Christian perspective on some of these things, instead we've got really focused on 'Christian views mean everyone is sinful and everyone needs to accept Jesus to go to heaven,' and it's become a very simple message.

What Gabe and I talk about a lot is this idea that we forget the first part of the story that everything was created to be perfect, excellent in every way. So we actually don't realize people's imitatio dei, the image of God that's created in every person, whether we agree with them, whether we disagree with them, regardless of their sexuality, regardless of any of that, we don't esteem and love that in people. And then we don't realize the last part of the story, which is that Jesus came to restore. See the most famous verse in the Bible is John 3:16. 'For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him would have eternal life.' But we missed the next verse (*see note at bottom). He didn't come to condemn the world but to save it.

We think as messengers of Christianity, this whole idea of reclaiming Christianity, it's not about 'you're a sinner get saved' but it's that 'you were created perfect, we all have something fundamentally broken in us.' We need Jesus, but that doesn't mean that we're just a bunch of megaphones trying to talk at people. We're about trying to restore and rescue, and work with the poor, with the most diseased people, with the most arrogant people, with whomever it is that God puts in our path, to bring them a deeper sense of spirituality and purpose.

DM: Talking of sin, you make an interesting point in your book about viewing all sins as equal, and say that God will forgive them all equally, but the human Church does seem to have managed to prioritize them. Homosexuality doesn't even hit the Ten Commandments. It doesn't seem like it's in God's top ten list, but you'd never know that from how the Church is perceived in America, because that seems to be number one issue on its agenda.

DK: I couldn't agree with you more. I think that the way Christians have been related to racism, to gender, to sexuality, to income, it's fascinating; People vote and think more often as a member of a social strata than as a Christ follower, as a member of Christ's kingdom. We don't understand how much our level of affluence affects our views, and it's embarrassing. It's something that I personally am trying to find ways of separating myself from, not just from people like that, but the capacity in my own heart to do that.

You're absolutely right, that's one of the things we try to argue for in that chapter. We don't realize how devastating divorce is, that simple lack of commitment to the person you agreed to marry, and how much more common that is within the church than homosexuality, just from a numbers standpoint. Or the capacity for pornography, to objectify women, to objectify the body rather than the relationship in terms of sexuality, these are huge problems.

We have not been transparent, or authentic or willing to work with people. If you take the issue of abortion, and Christians have been defined based on their approach to life, we could have a debate about 'when does life start,' and that's an appropriate debate to have, but really at the very core of that, we think, the more important debate to have is 'what do you to restore peoples lives.' All of those things should be dealt with in a very loving, and relational way. A one-on-one way, not a pulpit-to-pew-person way.

We should talk about why we believe in life, but it's not something you just talk about. Christians ought to be the most likely to adopt, the most likely to give to women, the most likely to help singe parents. Those are the things we ought to be defined by rather than just simply being against a women who might go through that very difficult process of an unplanned pregnancy.

DM: It's true, no women is pro-abortion in the sense that they wake up and say I can't wait to abort a baby today. If you want a mother to keep a baby, then you have to be prepared to help that possibly single mother support that baby until that baby can support itself. If you're not prepared to do the follow through for the next 18 years to make sure that mother and baby are OK, with basic things like healthcare, a decent standard of living, and decent working hours, so she can both keep a roof over the baby's head and be there to nurture the baby, then...

DK: What the hell are we talking about?

DM: Exactly

DK: My heart was really broken in a lot of cases because in addition to the scientific interviews that we did through the polling, I did a lot of one-on-one interviews, and had my eyes and ears opened during the process of writing this book. Victoria, one of the people that I quote in the books, she was like, 'I was in church for over a year and everyone just kept talking about how my son and I were basically not as good because we were a single parent family.' A lot of times when you look at the reasons for considering abortion, it isn't simply because of the financial reality, or even the unfaithfulness of the father, although those are real, but they don't want to admit that they got pregnant. The church ought to be the one place where you could say 'listen, I screwed up, I'm not the perfect person.'

I mean Jesus' life is filled with people that are the worst of the worst, and yet we forget that. Think about it, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, these are people that, with the exception of Luke, were eye-witnesses to Jesus' life. They spent so much time talking about Jesus' life changing the social strata, and how much he was judged by religious insiders for his willingness to be with people that everyone else was disgusted by. There's no mistaking that was an intentional part, that was part of what he did. In the very beginning of his ministry he makes this amazing statement that he's here to set captors free, to give sight to the blind, to heal the sick and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. That's his mission statement in life. And if we Christians, if I could just get that into my stinking head, it would be a completely different expression of what it means to be a Christian.

DM: There were a couple of passages in your book that relate to this. First of all you talk about how "they hijack the image of Jesus." Then later on you talk about "softening or reshaping the gospel" being an "utterly wrong response to the objections people raise," the whole create-your-own-savior mindset being a troublesome one to you. But one of the things Jesus was was a massive revisionist. He replaced the eye-for-an-eye sensibility of the Old Testament with turn-the-other-cheek of the New Testament. To me that represents a huge leap in the sophistication and moral compass of a society. But in saying that it's not up to us to reshape Christianity, you're in a sense saying that kind of progression had to end when Jesus' life ended.

DK: I'm not a person that goes through a lot of 'my faith is superior to yours.' I don't have those thoughts at all, and I think sometimes as Christians we've misinterpreted, we've applied these statements in a way to a logical modern context that Jesus didn't intend them to mean. When he says, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.' it's not there as an I'm better than you are, kind of statement.

There's a lot of debate even within the Christian community about how exclusive Christianity is. Like what does it mean to be saved, or to have eternal salvation, and different people have different views of that, but what concerns me more is the hyper individualism of the American experiment. This is what's really fascinating when you look at people picking and choosing from pretty much any perspective, rather than looking at is as some kind of holistic understanding of the way the world ought to work.

They essentially think they can create their own personal spirituality, they can have a little bit of this, a little bit of that, add a little bit of this, and the problem with that is that some of these are really very different ways of seeing the world. So for me, I believe that Jesus, all these things that he said about himself, and the way the apostle Paul describes him, and the message of grace are fundamentally true about him. And I don't say that to be exclusive to any other faith, it's just for me it's just changed my life.

I'm afraid that because of superficial Christianity in particular we've cultivated so few deep thinking Christians that we're less concerned about trying to figure out how does this all fit together, and we're just picking and choosing from all these different kinds of perspectives, and they don't actually make any cohesive meal. We've been so busy consuming what political parties have given us, what media has given us, the baggage our parents have given us.

The idea of the gospel is that it's a different way of seeing your mission in life and it doesn't just affect you on one day a month, it affects the way you spend your money, the way you use technology, the way you live your life. It's the way you interact with your neighbors. It's the way you deal with your wife, with your children, the way you deal with your sexuality, the way you deal with your sexual fantasies.

A lot of Christians bifurcate and say I can be a Christian and still do all this other stuff. They excuse and say 'well we're just all hypocrites.' I just think that's wrong. I'm trying to be the very best Christian I can be because it's a whole way of seeing and living our life. When you just pick and choose, and so many Christians who don't think do that, then there's never any impulse, there's never any responsibility to be a better person like Christ calls us to be.

DM: One of the things that I would say in response to that, because I am a very pick n' mix spiritualist, is that in many respects the church is too. One of the most shocking things to me was visiting The Vatican and going to the roof of St. Peter's where there's a bunch of nuns in a hut selling tacky trinkets. My mind was blown. I'm thinking do they not know the passage in the bible where Jesus said, "Pick up this stuff, and get it out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace" (John 2:16). It's like the Pope hasn't read the bible. So it seems to me the church can have their pick n' mix spirituality, but their sheep can't.

DK: I couldn't agree with you more about the fact that that expression which you experienced there was not in keeping with what Jesus said, just like I think in a lot of cases in today's mega-churches and in today's American spirituality we have bought into the notion as a consumer that you can buy your way into faith. The way the Christian sub-culture works, if you own fifty CDs of Christian music, and if you own five hundred Christian books, and if you go to church, that means you're a good Christian. It's this constant battle of doing away with the fluff and finding a different kind of expression that's more true to the heart of what Jesus said. To me, this is what mine and Gabe's book is really about.

I think we've lost this notion of being like missionaries, of working to restore and rescue peoples lives like Jesus did, and consequently we're known as unchristian because we've just become spiritual consumers, tossed too and fro by the latest political message, by the latest media message. We don't have any kind of centering on what it really means to be a person of deep faith.

DM: This is, in a way, why I actually find much of your research encouraging, because there's a lot of faith out there, but there is a lot of faith, with caveats and cynicism, and in a way that's a healthy thing. After 9/11 you have a whole generation that's seen the results of what happens when you don't question authority. Questioning authority is an important check and balance. And when you don't question authority, that's when authority tends to run riot. So in the long-term you'll have a healthier church if you have a new generation of people coming through that are fearless and will question.

DK: I think so. There's a lot of really amazing people who are asking some much bigger and more profound questions than I am. I'm actually super hopeful because in a lot of ways with the globalization of faith, and of the world, there's a lot more information available. There's something fundamental about young people today that's pretty interesting: their technology use, their focus on being solution-orientated, trying to find common ground, trying to be friends, the idea of a lot of ethnic barriers in many ways coming down. I think there's a real hope for seeing a different kind of generational expression of spirituality that I'm really, really optimistic about.

(*John 3: 17. 'For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.')

| 11/26/07 | Religion