For The Someday Book

UnChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity … And Why It Matters, by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, Baker Books, 2007, 255 pp.

This book is the product of the Barna Group, which is like the Gallup of the evangelical Christian world. Barna conducts widespread research on the state of evangelical Christianity and Christianity in general, using mass survey techniques along with in-depth interviews, focus groups and more. UnChristian looks at research about the perceptions young people have about Christianity, particularly young people outside the church. The research contained in the book was fascinating, but I disagreed with many of the perspectives, conclusions, interpretations and proposed solutions given to it.

This book made a big splash when it was first published in 2007, because it revealed such negative perceptions about Christianity from young people. When young people ages 16-29 were asked about what came to mind when you say, “Christian,” they gave these terms: anti-homosexual, judgmental, hypocritical, too involved in politics, out-of-touch with reality, old-fashioned and insensitive to others. The only two favorable images that ranked higher than these were “teaches the same basic ideas as other religions,” and “has good values and principles.” (28)

The evangelical community reacted to this news with shock and horror. When I shared it in a sermon after I first bought the book three years ago, older members of my congregation reacted the same way. However, people my age and younger (I’m in my mid-30s) seemed to respond, “well, DUH!” We know this reality because it is ours. When we meet people and they find out we are Christian, or attend church, or even serve as a pastor, they immediately believe we are all those things. This is especially frustrating for those of us in the progressive Christian community who desperately try to practice and publicize a Christianity that welcomes and supports GLBT people just as they are, invites conversation without conversion from interfaith partners and puts love, social justice and service to the poor and to the earth ahead of judgments about who is going to hell. UnChristian gave numbers, facts and statistics to our generalized anecdotal experience of Christianity’s unfavorable reputation among our peers.

Kinnaman (as the lead author) writes the truth in bold numbers and alarming quotations from interviews. He tells the stories of young people shunned, shamed, embarrassed and neglected by Christians he rightly calls unChristian. I believe that this act of truth-telling makes this book valuable reading for anyone interested in a reality-check about perceptions of the church and of Christians. That kind of accurate perception will be key to righting our behavior and our witness in Jesus’ name.

The reason it took me three years to go back and finish reading the book (even though I have used it for reference on several occasions) is that Kinnaman’s perspective on our appropriate response is all wrong. My fundamental disagreements run right to the heart of their limited definition of Christianity that limits “true” Christians to those evangelicals who agree with them. The authors defined “true” Christianity in a way that excludes me and millions of other Christians because we do not meet their strict criteria. They have three divisions of Christians: born-again non-evangelical, evangelical and “notional” Christians. Because I do not subscribe to the belief in heaven, as they define it, I am a “notional” Christian–someone who thinks I am a Christian, but really isn’t. You can understand that this immediately makes me angry. (To see if the Barna Group thinks you are a Christian or not, look here.)

It’s this compulsion to draw lines about who’s in and who’s out, to define Christianity not by those who are seeking to live it but by some arbitrary theological premises, and the arrogance of telling millions of faithful people that they are not really Christians that leads to all the descriptions of Christians as judgmental, hypocritical, insensitive to the needs of others, and out of touch with reality. For all its attempts to listen to what non-Christians are saying, UnChristian maintains all the judgmentalism and arrogance that non-Christians (and this kind of Christian) are complaining about.

The pinnacle example comes in the chapter about Christians being “anti-homosexual,” which I place in quotes because members of the GLBT community do not use the term “homosexual” about themselves, and the term itself comes with prejudice. The chapter names all the ways that GLBT people, their families and friends have been judged harshly and excluded by the church—then concludes that Christians should continue to pass the same judgments, but be more polite about it. You know, stop yelling and carrying signs, and sit down over dinner and tell someone they are a sinner instead.

You can tell by my tone why it took me so long to make it through the book. The statistics and the insights they provide made it worth slogging through the crappy theology to get there, but I had to keep putting it down and walking away in frustration. No one else is conducting this kind of research beyond anecdotal conversations. However, the book left me angrier and more disappointed than ever, as evangelical Christians took a good hard look at the evidence against them and still could not muster any true compassion or willingness to examine the flaws in their own theology. I am coming to believe that theological certainty and rigidity are the primary culprits that lead one to becoming uncompassionate and unChristian.

Christianity is in crisis, as the statistics in UnChristian document. In order to recover, we need to stop deciding who really counts as a Christian and get on with loving people in Jesus’ name, without caring what they think or belief in the meantime.