Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites...and Other Lies You've Been Told

by Bradley R. E. Ph. D. Wright

  Figure 7.11: Attitudes toward Blacks and Gays among White Evangelicals, by Age

  Regarding young people’s attitudes toward members of other races and gay people, I return to the General Social Survey and reexamine two of the questions discussed above: Do respondents disapprove of a family member marrying a Black person, and do they oppose a gay man giving a public speech? Here I compare White Evangelical youth to middle-aged and older White Evangelicals, and as shown in Figure 7.11, young Evangelicals are the most tolerant and accepting of African-Americans and gays. Twenty-eight percent of the youngest White Evangelicals opposed interracial marriage, compared to a full 57% of the oldest Evangelicals. Nineteen percent of the young Evangelicals opposed a gay man giving a speech compared to 36% of the oldest respondents. As much as we older Evangelicals worry about our young people, maybe we have overlooked how we can learn from them.

  Conclusion

  Overall, this chapter is much more of a mixed bag than the others. With measures of love and compassion, Christians do very well as compared to the rest of society. They are neighborly, forgiving, and caring for the poor. And what’s more, these measures of general goodwill toward others increase with church attendance, which suggests the possibility that churches effectively teach compassion.

  On the other hand, when it comes to our feelings toward minorities, both racial and sexual, the news is not so good. Christians in general and Evangelicals in particular are the least accepting and favorably disposed toward those who are not like us. That said, our attitudes seem to be improving with time, and the young among us may be a bright spot as we look toward the future.

  CHAPTER 8

  What Do Non-Christians Think of Us?

  Young people are quick to point out that they believe that Christianity is no longer as Jesus intended. It is UnChristian.

  —David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, UnChristian

  I probably wouldn’t like Christians if I weren’t one.

  —Dan Kimball, Christian author

  I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians.

  —Shane Claiborne, Esquire Magazine

  “Christianity has an image problem,” warns the book UnChristian, written by Christian writers David Kinnaman, of The Barna Group, and Gabe Lyons. Examining data collected from several hundred young non-Christians, the authors conclude that, overall, non-Christians don’t like Christians, especially Evangelicals. Kinnaman and Lyons find that about one-third of their sample had negative impressions of all Christians while one-half felt negatively toward Evangelical Christians. Only 3% had a good impression of Evangelicals. Underlying these negative attitudes, the non-Christian respondents viewed Christians as hypocritical, too evangelistic, antigay, sheltered, political, and judgmental.[1] Furthermore, the authors assert that young people’s attitudes toward Christians have become increasingly negative over the past decade.[2] They write: “modern-day Christianity no longer seems Christian” [emphasis added].[3]

  According to Kinnaman and Lyons, these negative perceptions limit the church’s ability to fulfill its mission. If non-Christians do not like Christians, and they associate Christians with various negative beliefs and actions, then they will understandably be less interested in hearing the message of Christianity. As summarized in UnChristian, these negative attitudes “alter their willingness to commit their lives to Jesus.”[4] George Barna elsewhere spells out the implications of UnChristian when he writes: “The public perception of our character and lifestyle is one of the major reasons why our evangelistic efforts in the United States have been so ineffective in the past quarter century.”[5]

  After defining these negative perceptions as a problem, Kinnaman and Lyons offer various guidelines for how Christians can act and present themselves differently to “address the unChristian perception of our faith.” Among the authors’ recommendations (all of which seem like good ideas): Act more like Jesus by connecting with people, being creative, serving people, and acting with compassion.

  In this chapter, I want to examine the empirical claims made by UnChristian about the perceptions of Christians. These claims include (a) non-Christians holding negative views of Christians, (b) young people holding especially negative views, and (c) the growth of these negative views over the past decade.

  But before examining the claims of UnChristian, I would like to point out a nearly identical argument made about atheists.[6] Guy Harrison, in his book 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God, refutes belief in religion (especially Christianity) and advocates atheism. In the midst of this refutation, however, he writes that “atheists have an image problem.” According to Harrison, atheists have the bad reputation of being “arrogant jerks” and “pompous fools,” and he offers a remedy: Atheists should act nicer. “If more atheists would stop trying to win arguments and concentrate instead on offering their fellow humans a hand up from irrational beliefs, we might actually achieve the progress we need to survive in the twenty-first century.” Reading this made me wonder if most religious groups think they have an image problem and that others don’t truly understand them. If nothing else, maybe Harrison can write a book entitled UnAtheist?

  A Few Holes in the Argument

  Before getting into data—and it turns out there are plenty of good data on this issue—let’s step back and think about the UnChristian argument and its implications. In sociological language, UnChristian claims that non-Christians hold negative stereotypes of Christians. Stereotypes can be applied on the basis of all sorts of personal characteristics, including race, gender, sexuality, physical appearance, nationality, social class, and of course, religion. Negative stereotypes attribute all sorts of bad things to different social groups, including laziness, dishonesty, greed, immorality, crime, and a lack of intelligence.

  What’s the appropriate response to a negative stereotype? Suppose that you were a member of a racial and ethnic group that was stereotyped as untrustworthy, and based on this stereotype banks were less willing to offer housing loans to members of your group (which, by the way, has happened and is illegal). Would you turn to your fellow group members and plead with them to act more trustworthy so that they were not discriminated against? Probably not. Instead, you would probably condemn the stereotypes and those who advance them.

  Negative stereotypes are wrong and harmful, and we have words for people who hold them, words such as racist, bigot, sexist, anti-Semite, and so on. As a side note, it’s interesting that there isn’t a wellaccepted term for prejudice against Christians, an absence that may reflect an unwillingness to condemn it. Maybe we need to come up with such a word. Any suggestions? How about “Christophobic”—an irrational fear of the Christian gospel and those who believe in it.

  Just for the sake of argument, however, let’s suppose that Evangelical Christians fully implemented UnChristian’s suggestions. That’s right, all the major Evangelical leaders decided to meet in a hidden location, and after exchanging the secret handshake, they rededicated themselves to living like true Christians in order to reverse negative stereotypes. After that, they went home, and they and their churches lived as close to the Christian ideal as humanly possible. As Kinnaman and Lyons write, “To shift our reputation, Christ followers must learn to respond to people in the way Jesus did.”[7] What would happen? Non-Christians’ attitudes toward us might change little, if at all.

  Negative stereotypes of Christians will probably persist, regardless of Christians’ actions, for several reasons. Stereotypes, and the prejudice and discrimination that accompanies them, are not based in reality. They reflect ignorance, not an accurate description of the world, and so changing reality may have no effect on stereotypes. For example, no matter how many women perform well in college (and female students now constitute 57% of college students),[8] some people will persist in thinking that because they are women, they will not do as well academically as men. No matter how many presidents, Supreme Court justices, senators, or mayors we elect of racial minority
groups, there will always be some people who think that racial minorities are less suitable for governance. No matter how much Christians act like Jesus, there will always be people who think that we don’t. As shown in previous chapters, there are already many Christians acting in accord with their beliefs.

  Negative stereotypes of Christians are also rooted in the media presentation of Christians. The media have strong financial incentive to highlight the ironic and unexpected about any subject, including religion. As long as we expect religious people to act morally, it will be front-page news when they do not. As a result, even if by some miracle, hundreds of millions of American Christians acted perfectly in accord with our belief systems, but just a few didn’t, guess who would be on the front page? This, in turn, shapes people’s (both Christians and non-Christians) perceptions of us as a group. Ironically, as Christians act morally, our immoral behavior becomes more “interesting” and “newsworthy,” leading to greater emphasis of it in the media. This, in turn, results in more people viewing us as immoral. (Who knows, maybe we should act immorally to get people to stop saying that we are immoral?)

  Finally, some people are not going to like Christians no matter what—regardless of how well we behave. How do we know this? Because some people don’t like anyone who is different from them. In fact, this is even true if those people don’t exist. In a classic sociological study, Eugene Hartley surveyed people about their attitudes toward various ethnic groups, including the fictitious groups “Danireans,” “Pirraneans,” and “Wallonians.”[9] He found that those people who didn’t like Blacks and Jews also did not like these three fictional groups. This suggests that the causes of prejudice and negative stereotypes are often located in the person holding the prejudice rather than the group receiving it.

  Frankly, if some non-Christians hold negative stereotypes about Christians, perhaps we should view it as their problem and not ours. Trying to change their stereotypes by acting better seems, well, dysfunctional. In my opinion, we Christians should worry much more about our views of others than their views of us. We have control over our views—not theirs—and we are called to have a specific attitude toward others, i.e., love.

  I wonder if we should take the thesis of UnChristian and turn it upside down. It claims that non-Christians’ perceptions of Christians limits our ability to fulfill the mission of Christianity. Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe what’s really limiting us is our perception—and concern—that non-Christians don’t like us. If I think that someone doesn’t like me, I’ll probably want to pull away from that person and move toward those who do like me. Might this be happening with Christians’ perceptions of non-Christians? If we expect disapproval from them, perhaps we will retreat to our churches where we can experience more positive relationships. If so, the real problem may be our concern about the stereotype rather than the stereotype itself.

  So What Do They Really Think of Us?

  Okay, enough argumentation, let’s go to the data. Using the best data that I could find, I will examine three questions: What do people think of Christians? Have attitudes toward Christians become more negative in the past decade? Are young people especially negative toward Christians?

  The first data come from a 2008 Gallup Poll that asked respondents from the general population—both Christians and non-Christians—how they felt about different religious or spiritual groups in the United States.[10] Respondents could answer that they had attitudes that were very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative. I begin with this survey because it asks about a wide variety of religious groups, including Evangelical Christians, so we’re able to make a range of comparisons. As shown in Figure 8.1, attitudes in the general populace toward religious groups vary considerably. Less than 12% of the respondents had negative feelings toward Methodists, Jews, Baptists, or Catholics. In contrast, more than one-third had such feelings toward Muslims, atheists, and, especially, Scientologists. Evangelicals and Fundamentalist Christians were in the middle of the range. About 1 in 4 Americans have negative feelings toward these two Christian groups, with the rest having positive or neutral feelings.

  Figure 8.1: How Do You Feel about People of Different Religious Groups?

  Now let’s focus on the attitudes of non-Christians, either those who are affiliated with a different religion or those who have no religious affiliation. Figure 8.2 describes their attitudes toward religious groups, and once again, Scientologists receive the most negative feelings. After them, however, the most negative feelings are held toward Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. One-half of non-Christians have negative attitudes toward each of these two groups, with fewer than 20% having positive feelings. Attitudes toward other Christian groups were markedly more positive, with about one-quarter of the non-Christian respondents holding negative views of Catholics and Baptists, and about 10% toward Methodists. (Who could hate a Methodist?)

  Who Counts as an Evangelical?

  At first glance, Figure 8.2 looks like supportive evidence for the thesis of UnChristian. After all, about half of non-Christians have negative feelings toward Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. However, in contrast, relatively few non-Christians had negative feelings toward Methodists, Catholics, or Baptists. This last finding is especially puzzling because Baptists are the largest Evangelical denomination, and most Baptists are Evangelicals. Yet somehow 74% of the non-Christian respondents had either neutral or positive feelings toward them.[11] This suggests that attitudes toward Evangelical Christians vary widely depending on how they are labeled. Perhaps the term evangelical prompts a more negative reaction than the people it describes. Researchers use evangelical to refer to a particular Christian affiliation, but its day-to-day use may have other connotations as well.

  I’ve asked students in my sociology class to define “Evangelical Christian,” and some think it refers to people who go door-to-door evangelizing. Others link it to a type of behavior—judgmental, angry, and often rather loony—rather than a denominational affiliation. If you want to read a more in-depth study of the meaning of being an Evangelical, check out theologians Thorsen and Wilkens’ book Everything You Know about Evangelicals Is Wrong (Well, Almost Everything).

  Figure 8.2: How Do You Feel about People of Different Religious Groups?

  (Non-Christian Respondents)

  Another interesting feature of the term evangelical is that many Evangelical Christians don’t apply it to themselves. Catholics think of themselves as Catholic, Jews know that they are Jewish, but Evangelicals often use other labels, such as non-denominational Christian, or a denominational label such as Baptist. Whereas Evangelicals, as defined by researchers, make up 26% of the American population, only about 10% of Protestants apply the label to themselves.[12] It’s unclear, then, how much of the negative associations that are tied to the term evangelical refer to actual Evangelical Christians.

  What Do We Think of Them?

  The Gallup data set examined so far asks about many different religions, but its sample size is too small for more fine-tuned analyses, so now I turn to the Pew Religion and Public Life Study of 2007. This study asked about only six religious groups—Jews, Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and Atheists, but it has about three thousand respondents.[13] The religious-group attitudes of the Pew respondents were very similar to those of the Gallup Poll. They held the most favorable opinions toward Jews and Catholics, the least favorable toward atheists and Muslims, and in the middle were Evangelical Christians and Mormons.

  The advantage of the Pew Study’s larger size is that it allows us to consider the attitudes of different subgroups of the population, which I do in Figure 8.3. In other words, this allows us to explore what Christians, members of other religions, and people unaffiliated with religion think about each other. As shown, roughly one-third of the members of other religions have an unfavorable opinion of Muslims, Evangelical Christians, and Atheists. Forty percent of the religiously unaffiliated have an unfavorabl
e opinion of Evangelicals, with roughly a quarter having an unfavorable opinion of Mormons, Muslims, Catholics, and atheists.[14]

  Figure 8.3: Do You Have an Overall Unfavorable Opinion of

  This Religious Group?

  Of all the groups, who has the most negative attitude? Unfortunately, it seems to be Evangelicals. Fifty-seven percent of the Christian respondents have negative attitudes toward atheists, and almost 40% of Christians think negatively of Muslims. This is ironic because Christians are called to love all people, and yet we have very negative views toward some other religious groups. Oops. On a positive note, Christians are less likely to have negative views toward Jews.

  This raises an interesting question—are Christians who attend church more often also more loving to other groups? Sadly, the most frequent attendees are also those with the most negative attitudes toward Mormons, Muslims, and especially atheists. As shown in Figure 8.4, 30% of the weekly attendees have negative opinions toward Mormons and 46% toward Muslims. The most negative opinions, however, are toward atheists. Whereas 41% of the Christians who rarely attend church have negative opinions of atheists—which isn’t exactly a lovefest in itself—a full 67% of weekly attendees have negative attitudes.

  These findings highlight a conundrum for Evangelical Christians. Many Evangelical Christians understand Christian doctrine to include an element of exclusivity—that Christianity is true in ways that other religions are not. Yet we’re called to love all people, even those who believe differently than we do. Bringing these two ideas together, Christians face the balancing act of loving non-Christians while at the same time rejecting their religious worldview. The data presented here suggest that perhaps Christians do not always make that distinction, for our attitudes toward other groups of people—not only their doctrine but the people themselves—are often negative. An interesting exception seems to be Christians’ attitudes toward Jews. For whatever reason, Christians are slightly less anti-Semitic than most other groups.[15]