A recent study that got a lot of attention suggests Americans are becoming less religious, with 15 percent  now claiming no religious belief, outpacing all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists. Here’s the USA Today story on the survey, or you can reread the entire survey for yourself here.

There’s been lots of hand-wringing and finger-pointing as a result of this survey, and I suppose we’ll all put our own spin on it, based on our particular perspective. Some have suggested that this is the result of Christianity losing its way and bowing to the culture.

I would suggest a different, if somewhat related, cause. We Christians have fought among ourselves for so long, displaying such judgmental, “you-gotta-believe-just-like-me” approaches that it’s no wonder people turn away.

In some ways, it reminds me of the situation faced by the Reformers in the 16th Century. Their response to the excesses of the church then was a return to the basics. That seems a proper response in the 21st Century as well.

It’s time we started talking more about what we DO believe — and then behaving as if we actually do believe it, rather than trying to focus on what’s wrong with everybody else.

Let’s talk about grace. Then let’s be graceful.

Let’s talk about love. Then let’s be loving.

Let’s talk about helping others. Then let’s help others.

Let’s quit bashing people over the head with the Bible. Then let’s actually read the WHOLE thing.

We’ll never make the church pure, and indeed that’s not our responsibility or even our charge.

Our charge is to be faithful. There’s a quotation I use on one of my email account signatures that I think describes a lot of the problem. It’s from C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce: “There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”

Isn’t it so true? We shouldn’t be surprised when we present a judgmental face to the world, and then get judged by it. We shouldn’t be surprised that those outside the church see our fights inside it and label us as hypocrites. We shouldn’t be surprised when we preach a gospel of love, and then proceed to hate.

And it just keeps getting worse. A recent “Time” magazine story ranked what it called “The New Calvinism” number three on a list of ideas changing the world. “Calvinism is back, … ,” the article said. “John Calvin’s 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism’s latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.” Read the entire article here.

This “new Calvinism” Time sees is the old TULIP, hyper-Calvinism that serious Calvin scholars dismiss, but it is what the world sees.

And on a recent edition of Nightline “Face-Off,” the debate was whether Satan existed. Who did the producers choose to tackle this question? Philosopher Deepak Chopra and Bishop Carlton Pearson said “no” while Mark Driscoll of the Mars Hill Church and Annie Lobert, founder of something called “Hookers for Jesus” said “yes.” Where was a mainline, Reformed voice? (For that matter, where was a real scholar?) It wasn’t there because we’ve become invisible in the public arena.

We have abdicated the marketplace of ideas. It’s time we rejoined it. It’s time we reclaimed what it means to be evangelical, and demonstrated that to the world. It’s time we reasserted the concept of grace that Calvin and Luther and the other reformers preached.

It’s time to quit fighting about who’s in and who’s out and just feed and tend Christ’s sheep.

Grace and peace,

John