I just ran across a story on Boing Boing that I'm sure some of my readers will have come across. (They have wonderful things there, ya know . . .) Perhaps not surprisingly, a study has come out showing that among states with people looking at the most online porn, 8 of the top 10 were "red states" that went for McCain this year. Another interesting finding revealed that people with increased church attendance tended to buy less online porn on Sundays.
Since I know there's a strong correlation between people who go to church every week and those who vote Republican, this is not just a political issue but a religious one also.
Again, I have to remember what my former Baptist pastor told us one day - based on one of the Barna Group's studies of perceptions of Christianity. He said the only difference that non-Christians saw between Christians and non-Christians are that the former "go to church more" and "are more judgmental".
This means that nonbelievers see Christians as hypocritical. I'm not sure those perceptions are really wrong, because in the minds of the wider secular culture, "Christian" and "Christianity" mean something very much different from what many millions of people believe in and experience each day.
I've said before that Christianity has a real PR problem, and we still don't have really good ways of ameliorating this, because the fringe ideas are better at getting press when handled well. (Some of my libertarian aquaintences know how to play this game better than anyone I've seen.)
Most of us can agree that this is symptomatic of a larger problem - but identifying the problem is tricky and finding solutions is even harder.
We could put forth (tired) ideas about how Republican politics' power base is in Evangelical Christianity which fuels itself through moralism, us/them thinking, and fearmongering. We could continue by saying that these attitudes lead to repression of natural human sexuality, requiring it to be lived out in the supposed anonimity of the Internet and clandestine and unseemly sexual activities.
If we go with these ideas, and there are many who will, then a lot of secular people I met who feel that the world would be better if we throw the Bible in the trashcan might be right. To keep that from happening, others will say that we need to adopt better marketing and PR strategies to help get different ideas out into the market. (Which is naturally more difficult, many will say, because black & white is much more quickly made into a soundbite than are nuanced ideas.)
I've written before on this blog about my hypothesis that one needs to make a religious product cost more (in all ways) in order to increase the value of that religious product and therefore attract more adherents to the religious product being offered - that is, if you want your religious product to be consumed by more people.
This means that if you want to grow your church you have to at at least give lip service to a lot of moral requirements and emphasize assent to certain doctrinal statements. You have to show how what you offer is distinctive and even unique. If you emphasize high standards of giving/tithing to the local church, membership in the local church would seem more attractive because you belong to a group with more stringent membership standards. You are elite.
I have seen many pastors and other people clamoring for church growth that seem to say these kinds of things - in varying degrees of subtletly. While they may have a point, this seems to me to be a very dangerous path to follow, because you begin to measure your religious success through secular standards, even as you have to compete in a secular world for the same - here it comes - "church shoppers" that everyone else is looking for.
If we do this - become PR shills and adopt "butts in the seats" attitudes - aren't we being fake Christians? Aren't we emphasizing the strategy more than the results? Don't we need to be focused on improving the spiritual health of congregants (drawing people closer to God) and let this drive what we're doing?
I feel like mainline churches are focusing too much on methods and not doing enough evaluation to see whether the methods are producing quality religious results, rather than simply good secular ones.
To me, a church or denomination that has religious goals (and specifc ways to measure them) as its focus is going eventually going to give people a much better moral framework through which to live their lives - so that maybe their sexuality won't seem hypocritical anymore.
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