A Loud Alarm Clock

From the Barna group’s latest publication — unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters:

Even among young Christians, many of the negative images generated significant traction. Half of young churchgoers said they perceive Christianity to be judgmental, hypocritical, and too political. One-third said it was old-fashioned and out of touch with reality. . . .

When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was “Christianity is changed from what it used to be” and “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.” These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).

Kinnaman explained, “That’s where the term ‘unChristian’ came from. Young people are very candid. In our interviews, we kept encountering young people – both those inside the church and outside of it – who said that something was broken in the present-day expression of Christianity. Their perceptions about Christianity were not always accurate, but what surprised me was not only the severity of their frustration with Christians, but also how frequently young born again Christians expressed some of the very same comments as young non-Christians.”

We can’t just shrug this off as the foolish opinion of those “meddling kids” or don our martyr complex and declare that the world should hate us. We can’t cluck our tongues at all those other, more [insert antonymic adjective here] Christians that are really causing the problem (couldn’t be us, right?). We can’t repeat academicish phrases such as “perception is reality” and skip along happily in the hedged-off conservative evangelical “amusement parks” we call home.

If you’re not a fan of Barna, check out this Canadian news story, “Seven Days with Evangelicals.” Now, first a caveat. The first evangelicals the reporter investigates are . . . deliberately shocking. So consider yourself warned. It quite bluntly points out how much we don’t get it. We think being edgy is being relevant. And he doesn’t just talk to the overly-worldly evangelicals. He talks to straight-arrow fundamentalists too. Makes you wonder if there’s really any difference between a Doug Phillips’ film and well, . . . that other first group I don’t want to name or link to. <shudder> Watch the video to finish out that enthymeme for yourself.

The reporter was tentative about following these evangelicals & fundies because he thought they would be trying so hard to convince him to join them. In the end, instead of being scary, he discovered they were just scared — too busy talking to themselves to really have any influence in the culture at large, too scared of being rejected to really accomplish anything.

All signs point to a grave problem. We’ve got to wake up. Alarms are going off all over the place.