When people look at us, do they see Christ?

A few weeks ago the Barna Group conducted a survey of 16- to 29-year-olds (Christians and non-Christians) to assess their impressions of Christianity. The findings, especially as Christians once again find ourselves poised to descend into the muck of national politics, ought to be troubling.

Researchers offered respondents 20 perceptions of Christians -- 10 positive and 10 negative -- and asked which apply. While considerable majorities perceive that Christianity has good values and principles, and is friendly, an even greater majority think it teaches the same basic ideas as other religions -- and that this is a good thing. Still greater percentages of respondents, meanwhile, perceive Christianity as judgmental and hypocritical.

Lest anyone conclude that this is simply the assessment of heathens, half of the Christians surveyed say that Christianity as practiced today in the U.S. is not only judgmental and hypocritical, but too political. It's hard to write off the opinions of the non-Christians regardless, because the average non-Christian respondent to the survey has five Christian friends, while four out of five regularly attended church themselves (probably as children) in the past.

Most disturbing is that the perception garnering greatest agreement among respondents is that Christianity means hostility to homosexuals. More than any other image, this best defines what Christianity is to young non-Christian Americans (80 percent of young Christians, meanwhile, confirm that it is an accurate perception of Christianity).

I can sense some commenters to this post already thumbing their way to Leviticus. My goal is not to provoke an argument about what Christ does or doesn't say regarding gays. My point is that our words and actions shape how others see Christ, and a highly-respected research organization reveals that a great many young people perceive Christians not as a body of grace-filled believers, but as a crowd of angry, hypocritical politicos. It puts me in mind of a vignette in Philip Yancey's The Jesus I Never Knew, about a woman whose life has been destroyed by drugs and prostitution. When someone asks her if she's thought of going to a church for help, she replies: "Church! Why would I ever go there? I was already feeling terrible about myself. They'd just make me feel worse."

Regarding the homosexuality finding, when researchers delved deeper, respondents told them that Christians not only hate the sin, but make clear their contempt for the sinner. A majority of young Christians, further, say that their churches have elevated the sin of homosexuality so that it is somehow a greater sin than others, all while failing to offer meaningful guidance about how to interact with gays in a manner reflective of Christ.

All of this -- the perceptions of how Christians behave toward homosexuals as well as the general perceptions about Christian hypocrisy and mercilessness -- can be summed in what the researchers say was one of the most common unprompted perceptions, that "Christianity in today's society no longer looks like Jesus."

We get overwrought, especially in election years, about the state of the country, and the evils of politicians (who almost always come, it seems, from one party and not the other). What if we took four years off from national politics, and devoted them instead to the politics of our own hearts? It seems that -- in the eyes of young Americans, at least -- many of us Christians are decidedly unchristian in our behavior.

Perhaps the silver lining in this cloud is that non-Christians seem to sense that Christ would not approve. Maybe, despite our sins of anger and hatred, despite our forgetting that we are forgiven as we forgive, and our overlooking that we are saved by grace alone, so that no man may boast -- perhaps we may at the very least not sully the name of Christ in our zeal to condemn.

I'm going to try to think less about what Jesus is going to say to other sinners on judgment day, and more about what he will say to me, and to all of us who claim to represent him.