I am occasionally confronted by people who feel Christians are simply draped in a make-believe cloak of goodness while they do evil things like everyone else. Many people view Christians as hypocrites, liars, and to prove the point, they often point out that there are many better, more decent people in the world than any Christian they have ever met. Of course, the icing on the cake is the always-popular example of Christian leaders caught up in immoral acts.
The secularized media delights in exposing just about any Christian caught “dirty handed” in one scandal or another—particularly a Christian leader. Studies show that the media gives juicy stories like this far more attention than an equally corrupt wrongdoing by a secular citizen who they are likely to decide isn’t even worth reporting. This extra attention, a celebration of embarrassment, may account for inflated perceptions of Christians as hypocritical, but it certainly cannot account for all the perceptions people have about Christians. The media may delight in Christian bashing, but they rarely make up the stories they report. The facts are generally true, much to the vexation of the Christians that work hard to be a light for others to follow.
People often point to the sheer number of Christian leaders, several every year, that are publicly caught doing something morally wrong. By contrast, in many cases, the same offense are rarely considered front page news when a secularist is caught doing the same thing. It is because the offender is a Christian leader that it has any shocking media value, and thus leads the evening news. If we are to compare secular and religious leaders in this light, we must first ask who are the secular leaders? Take a city like New York as an example. The leaders include the mayor of the town, maybe the senators and representatives for the district, a few others like the police chief etc. When you consider this accounts for a handful of people in a big city, it’s easy to see the false comparison when we consider there are some 8,000 churches in New York City alone. Surely, out of thousands of church leaders, there will be some bad apples. The sheer numbers make it seem nearly impossible to imagine that a handful of people in such a large group wouldn’t get caught up in some “scandal” each year. We’re all human after all.
Now consider the whole country, or the whole world, and the hundreds of thousands of church leaders there are. The media reports all over the world, and when they discover a bad apple, they delight in reporting it over and over for as long as it generates ratings.
With that in mind, why do we imagine that Christian church leaders are more likely to be corrupt than the average secular leader? Some people think it’s true, and it can only be because they don’t realize how much the media bias influences one’s own perceptions. That’s not to say there have not been a few particularly bad apples among Christian leaders. There have been, of course, but compared to the general population, church leaders are far less likely to engage in criminal activities among all categories of crime, despite what the media would have us believe.
To some extent, both secularists and Christians will naturally compare their experiences with the people they have personally interacted with. Christians naturally interact with more Christians, and will likely know many good examples of people who exemplify Christian values. These interactions may cause the average Christian to believe that Christians, on the whole, live more morally praiseworthy lives. Contrarily, secularists who encounter more people who are nonbelievers may look through their secular lens and see a number of morally decent nonbelievers among the people they most respect for moral praiseworthiness.
To a large degree, public gatherings are secular. Excluding churches, where else do people gather as Christians? Many people would be hard-pressed to name one without thinking carefully. By contrast, when one tries to imagine anywhere people may go that is not religious in nature, everything else comes to mind: bars, movies, restaurants, clubs, libraries, concerts, sporting events, city hall, the mall, grocery shopping, public schools and colleges, the gas station, and on and on and on. The reality is quickly understandable. Nonbelievers have opportunities to compare selective moral examples in their day to day lives, counting nearly everyone they interact with, right down to the doorman who helps them with their luggage. This enormous disparity of comparison can account for a vastly disproportionate sample size when comparing perceptions of Christians to secularists.
This means that someone who looks for the most praiseworthy people they know, while comparing secularists against Christians, will likely be comparing the best examples from just about everyone they have ever interacted with against the few people they have met that identified themselves as Christians. With this in mind, it’s hard to imagine that any secularist would think very highly of Christians, based solely on personal ideas derived from personal interactions, given that it is simply far more likely that they have met some truly good and decent people they admire who did not identify themselves as Christians.
In my experience, secularists tend to overlook the good Christians do worldwide. Each year Christian hospitals provide many charitable services. Missions provide millions of doses of vaccines. Christians tithe to the poor, feeding more needy families worldwide than any government or secular institution. The amount of charity and aid given by Christians eclipses all other giving year after year. Surely, doing good doesn’t mean individual Christians aren’t hypocrites. But doing good seems to be the way secularists measure praiseworthiness. In this arena, secularists have very little standing. Even if they object to some constraints, like Christians withholding funds from abortion clinics etc., there can be no standard, no lens, no matter how skewed, that can find that Christians do less to alleviate suffering than secularists on the whole. For this reason, comparing Christians and secularists by praiseworthiness must, for the average secularist, depend on overlooking the big picture and focusing on examples of individuals they have met, or those Christians that are illuminated by the media for wrongdoing.
While there remain many natural reasons a secularist may believe Christians fall short of morally decent behavior, none is more powerful than the non-practicing Christian that wears the label without any effort to be Christ like. In this way, one could argue that many people who compare secularists to Christians aren’t really doing so. They are comparing secularists to people who claim to be Christians, but really aren’t practicing the tenets of the faith that comes with the title. Maybe, but this excuse would seem to be too easy.
One cannot simply claim that any Christian that falls short of secular individuals is not a real Christian, thereby skewing the sample size to the best examples of Christianity. Doing so would be an improper shift to put Christians in a good light, and it would overlook the obvious question, “Why are there any nonreligious people who live morally praiseworthy (even exemplary) lives?”
The answer comes down to grace. The Bible teaches that every good and gift comes down from God (James 1:17). It doesn’t separate Christians from secularists. God’s grace is spread like a blanket, without regard for how much someone deserves it. God’s grace lands like drops of rain on the corrupt and pious alike. Gifts, talents, and all attributes that make life better are not withheld from nonbelievers. Grace is, by definition, undeserved. It falls equally on us all. For this reason, it’s not at all unlikely that a nonbeliever is graced with many good and wonderful attributes that secularists can view as praiseworthy. All good comes from God, even the good that nonbelievers do. They may not recognize it, but God uses believers and nonbelievers alike to do good in the world.
As noted earlier, a secularist might view Christians as morally corrupt simply because they have a limited experience with Christians, perhaps limited to Christians who did something morally wrong. The fallacy of logic is clear, but more can be said on this issue. Christians often come to God when they are broken. They hit rock bottom, turn to the Lord, and find salvation. Many will recount that God broke them before He saved them, a good and decent reason for how far they fell before turning to God. Someone who has lived a broken life fraught with drugs, crime, foul language, mistrust and abuses can turn to God, but they don’t become a pillar of moral perfection overnight. They wear the title “Christian” but may still harbor addictions, dark tendencies, temptations, and many moral shortcomings they struggle with. When someone sees a Christian like this, it’s easy to imagine all Christians are morally corrupt. This is because the struggling Christian is being compared to the perfect ideal, without regard for how far he/she has come. This is why it is said that a church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.
There are many reasons why people might imagine Christians are morally misguided, but the reasons are generally flawed, as flawed as the Christians they compare against. When we look at the good Christians do in the world, it’s plain to see without trickery or mistake. Christians feed the poor, heal the sick, clothe the needy and pray for nonbelievers. Instead of looking for contempt, making comparisons about who is more morally praiseworthy, Christians concede that we are all sinners, all equally falling short of praiseworthiness, all deserving of hell and damnation. The difference is that Christians accept the gift of salvation, accept Jesus’s sacrifice of purification, and embrace the gift that is Jesus Christ.
If there are comparisons to make, this is perhaps the most telling of all. When we ask what belief system embraces instead of vilifies, seeks to include rather than separate, and gives willingly to help others, teaching us all to love our enemies (those we disagree with) as we love ourselves, then Christianity is clearly the moral choice for all of us. And if you haven’t accepted Jesus Christ, you can do so right now, just say it out loud right where you are. The door is always open. There are no morally superior Christians. We are all struggling. It doesn’t matter where you came from, what you have done in the past, or what shame you carry. You can let it go and stand with other Christians as equals. You can do it today.