When writers and researchers break out the demographics,
it’s hard not to root for your “team.” We like to think that our generation is
the most generous, our state the smartest, our profession the most honest, or
our ethnic group the best-looking. Even
when we don’t say it out loud (because our people are also humble), we notice.
I detect that tone when people write about their religious
groups as well. I’ve done it myself, especially in reference to charitable
giving, where we find that the religiously affiliated give more and volunteer
more, even to secular causes. There is a normal but unfortunate tendency for
folks to want to prove their “method” works better than other peoples’ way of
living in the world. There is a type of preacher that takes pains to illustrate
this in reverse as well, ruefully noting that Christians, including
evangelicals, have premarital sex, divorce, and substance abuse about as much
as other populations.
If only those latter were true. There are reasons why those numbers don’t
measure what they say they do (which I leave as an exercise for the student).
If you like to root for the evangelical “team” in that way, you still have
moderate reason for rejoicing. Yet that is not a reason to rejoice. Mark 2:17 Jesus said to them, “It is not the
healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous,
but sinners.” The church is supposed to be attracting those who need her, those
who are in crisis, those who are broken. We should hope that the life histories
of our people include more divorces, more arrests, more homelessness. We don’t
hope that, because we remain very human.
We’re not complete washouts in this, because we do feel comfortable with
bad news if it’s far enough in the past, so that it becomes a testimony or
rescue and redemption. Churches work at closing that gap of how far in the past
something has to be before we’re comfortable with you. It’s not easy.
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