David Kinnaman is an expert on what the devout among us think. As president of a polling outfit called The Barna Group, a California-based group that studies trends in religion and spirituality, he spends his time pouring over data, analyzing what we believe and why.
Kinnaman and his co-author Gabe Lyons polled Millenials to find out what terms came to mind when they thought of Christians and the results included unflattering ones like judgmental, antihomosexual, hypocritical, too political and sheltered. The duo took those results and wrote a book, UnChristian.
Recently Kinnaman stopped by the Bully! Pulpit Show to talk about the book. The entire conversation can be seen here. and a chapter from the book is available here.
Follow Mark Joseph on Twitter: www.twitter.com/markmjm
As for evangelical Christians they obviously feel that it is their religious duty to set their face against much in contemporary life, preferring to home-school their children, for instance. They are convinced that accepting Darwinian evolution will lead to the abdication of traditional morality. If the universe was the result of purely random development (the Big Bang or some other)and we are a collocation of atoms, we can do what we want. The contemporary problem may be to establish the importance of the ethical apart from religious sanctions, which strict Christians tend to think impossible.
A Christian in Europe would not think drinking and smoking sinful but a certain kind of American Christian would.
The Millenial view of Christians may be an incomplete, because time-bound, one.