The Survey Says

The Christian Ethics class I took during my first year at seminary was an eye opener. Going in, I expected help with moral quandaries like, say, R-rated movies (some believers think they’re okay as long as the violence and nudity are essential to the plot and not just stuck in there for titillation). But the course covered a list of social ills like divorce, abortion, AIDS, and hunger that were, perhaps, more pressing.

Along the way, we reviewed a report by a Christian pollster named George Barna who had surveyed ordinary Americans about some of the very issues we were studying. Barna’s findings were quite disturbing, because they showed virtually no difference between the moral behaviors of Christians and nonChristians (a trend that has apparently continued).

Various explanations were offered for these results, and the class was evenly divided between two possibilities (my own suggestion of "Mickey Mouse" polling techniques got little traction): (1) nominal believers who did not have a genuine relationship with Jesus were skewing the results on the Christian side; (2) pastors had “gone soft” and stopped taking firm stands on doctrinal and moral issues.

Option 1 struck me as a bit too convenient. Don’t like the results? Just redefine "Christian" to match the group of people who are conforming to expectations! And Option 2 gave me a queasy feeling. Was I supposed to spend my career haranguing people about their lax morals? No thanks. So I continued to push the Mickey Mouse theory.

These days I prefer the simplest explanation of all: people are people. And faith of any kind does not immunize us from human struggles and failings. Even scripture tells us that the righteous fall seven times and rise again (Proverbs 24:16), so maybe the idea is to dust yourself off and start over instead of keeping your nose clean in the first place.

Of course, seven stumbles do wreck the poll numbers, so if Barna calls, just pretend you don’t speak English or something.