unChristian

unChristian. That’s the title of this book about Christianity’s image problem in our culture. It’s also the name given to how Christians come across.

unChristian (2007) reports on research conducted by David Kinnaman of the Barna Group. The research was commissioned, and the book co-written, by Gabe Lyons of the Fermi Project, the purpose of which is laid out here. It also contains a number of short contributions from other authors and church leaders.

I admire the authors. They were aware of the negative way Christians are perceived, and essentially they have taken a long draught from a fire-hose in an effort to understand the reasons for this negative perception. Over three years, they studied a dozen national surveys, listened to the stories of people outside of Christianity, conducted interviews with 16 to 29 year-olds, interviewed hundreds of pastors and church leaders, and probed the views of Christians. The resulting book is therefore more than a series of impressions by a disaffected individual. It represents an extensive body of evidence, analyzed by a professional researcher who loves the church and knows how to communicate these findings without simply mowing you down under graphs and statistics.

Any Christian who’s been paying attention will not be surprised to discover how we come across: judgmental, overly political, defensive, gay-bashing, legalistic, sheltered, and essentially self-absorbed. But the effect of reading this book is to force you to hold the mirror up for a good long time — as long as it takes to work through its 248 pages — and recognize that this view isn’t all the result of unfair misrepresentation by “the liberal media” (we’ve all heard about that, haven’t we?), but of real interactions with Christians and sometimes in-depth church experience.

The book affected me on many levels as I read (I journalled about some of my responses here), but probably I’m most sobered in my role as a parent. “Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” advises the book of Proverbs. But the truth is that they are departing, in vast numbers, from the church. (I have heard it pointed out that this verse specifies “when he is old” and doesn’t speak of all the years in between. But I want the life trajectory of my children to be rooted deeply in the life-giving truth of Christianity all the way.)

Honestly, on one level it’s a profoundly discouraging book, and it leaves me reeling. It’s not that I’m surprised, exactly. It’s just that it gives you a sense of the scope of the dysfunction that cannot leave your perspective unchanged. I was planning to move on to the sequel, The Next Christians: The Good News About the End of Christian America, but I’m not sure I can handle it right away. I may need to read something very different while my mind continues to absorb and process and accommodate the material of unChristian before moving on. In A Year of Biblical Womanhood, Rachel Held Evans comments at one point that she wishes Christians weren’t so quick to start explaining the disturbing parts of the Bible; she wishes they could just sit with them, and feel bad about them, for a little while first. I suppose that’s what I want to do with unChristian. It’s not where I plan to stay. But it needs, I believe, to be a stop along the way.