An atheist friend looks at a devout, church-involved Christian who blew up his life with adultery and says:
"I am over here minding my own business, not hurting anybody, and look at what you people in the church are doing."
That hits hard. And it raises a brutal question: are Christians actually any better than secular people when it comes to crime, adultery, and basic morality, or are we just hypocrites with a Jesus label?
In Part 1 of this two-episode series, we walk through that real story and then start digging into what the research actually says about crime, infidelity, and religiosity. We talk about the gap between what Christianity claims and how Christians actually live, the failure of church discipline, spiritual warfare, and why the data gets so messy any time you try to compare "Christians" and "secular people."
Part 2 will zoom in on what the Bible actually says about sin and hypocrisy, and then dig into the deeper question: where does morality come from in the first place, with help from C. S. Lewis and Mere Christianity.
In this episode:
[1] Intro, paper, printers, and feeling 7,000 years old [2] The real story: a devout, church-involved Christian in adultery [3] An atheist friend saying, "Look what your people are doing" [4] Why hypocrisy in the church hurts so much [5] Church as a hospital for sinners vs a showroom for the "put together" [6] The temptation to hide sin so we do not "tarnish the brand" [7] What Christianity actually claims about sin, grace, and transformation [8] Two big problems in the Western church: inversion and people-pleasing [9] Why following Jesus can make life harder, not easier (spiritual warfare) [10] Why crime data does not cleanly separate "Christian vs atheist" [11] What studies and meta-analyses say about religiosity, crime, and delinquency [12] What the research says about infidelity, church involvement, and cheating [13] Bible Belt vs more secular areas, and why poverty and culture matter [14] Jonestown, Waco, Westboro, and cults that wreck Christian credibility [15] Fatherlessness, crime, and an analogy for forgetting God as Father [16] Why Christians are still human, but a healthy church path pushes away from sin [17] Why the issue is not "our team is better," but whether we are honest about sin
Questions for the comments:
[1] Have you personally seen serious immorality or hypocrisy inside a church? [2] How did your church handle it: ignore, quietly bury it, or deal with it openly and biblically? [3] Did it pull you toward Jesus, away from him, or just make you more cautious about church?
Come back for Part 2, where we open the Bible on Christians and sin, and then ask where morality itself comes from.
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