The Message Is Good But Does The Data Support It?

Mark Woods, a managing editor for Christianity Today (no bio available), has just written an article for Christianity today lamenting the attitudes of European Christians toward religious foreigners to their own country (click here for the article and click there for the study on which his article is based). And the news is not good if you're a Christian, at least it isn't suppose to be good. The news is this, that Christians, regardless of their church attendance, are more likely to harbor attitudes that could be construed as at least being partially bigoted than the religiously unaffiliated.

What are those attitudes that indicate bigotry? Those attitudes were part of a survey given to people of Europe. Those who claim to be Christians are classified as Christians and a distinction was made for those who regularly attend a church from those who don't. The approximate statements are below:

1.  Immigrants from the Middle East are not honest.

2.  Immigration should be reduced.

3.  Islam is fundamentally incompatible with their national culture and values.

4.  Are not willing to accept Jews in one's family.

5.  Are not willing to accept Muslims in their family.

In all of the above statements, more Christian showed intolerance in their answers than the non-religiously affiliated. From this, Woods concludes that Christians see their own religion as a 'cultural marker,' as a sign of national identity and belonging to their own society. And Woods has some legitimately strong words for those for such Christians.

What are Woods's words of correction? He calls the use of religion as a marker of cultural identity a tool for discrimination that can marginalize people from other groups. But more importantly, he sees the use of Christianity as a marker of national belonging as idolatry, and I could not agree more with his view. I see what he sees here. Making the Christian faith a symbol that identifies one earthly belonging is to put that earthly belong ahead of Christ.

Basically, I express Woods's analysis in a different way. I simply say that all of us Christian belong to multiple groups. And the temptation for us Christians is let our loyalty and our sense of significance from belonging to those other groups can become so high that those groups replace Christ in our lives. And one of the signs where group loyalty to an earthly group becomes greater than our loyalty to Christ will be indicated by how we treat other people, especially those who are different from us.

But before we sign off  in complete agreement with Woods here, we should note that further studies are needed to confirm his analysis. Why is that the case? It is because in the study Woods references, the percentage of church attending Christians who believe in the God of the Bible registers at only 64% while 32% of church attending Christians believe in another kind of god. And for those non-church attending Christians, only 24% believe in the God of the Bible while 51% do not. Thus, without a more detailed set of statistics, we can't firmly conclude from the study cited by Woods that being a Bible believing Christian in Europe positively correlates with holding to bigoted views of others.

However, we should note that what Woods said about European Christians, might also be said about religiously conservative American Christians, especially those who support President Trump's policies. Many of them have at least partially conflated their version of Christianity with what it means to be an American or even a Westerner. And there are plenty of religiously conservative Christian leaders who direct people to accept that view as their write disparagingly about the growing Muslim population in Europe and America.

Now national identity is not the only cultural idol that religiously conservative American Christians bow down to. Those Christians are just as happy at bowing down to the idols of their pet political and economic ideologies as they are to their national identity. This is easily seen when a fellow Christian challenge their political and/or economic sacred cows. Such a fellow Christian is often treated as a unbeliever for challenging those allegiances.

Perhaps, what is currently hurting the Church's credibility and witness to Christ the most are the loyalties we believers have for the other groups we belong to. Though belonging to these groups is unavoidable if a Christian is to live in the world in a way in which one can do his/her part in carrying out the Great Commission, having too high of a loyalty to those groups is not.
 
So though Woods needs better data to support the point he wants to make, his warning to fellow Christians regarding their loyalty to other groups could not more important to heed as it is now.