In the search for truth and ordered, responsible living, Christianity has a tendency to act like it has a leg up on the rest of the world.

Ostensibly, it does. Biblical texts speak unambiguously of God's Truth, and the veracity of scripture as the revelation of God. If you're starting from a place where a personal God can be relied upon to exposit the important points of His interactions with humanity, and what He considers critical to healthy, successful living, as well as lay down His very detailed description of the plan for your redemption...well, then that's quite the head start.

But there's a problem. It's a problem I see repeating itself (without exaggeration) daily. For some reason, perhaps just in America, Christian Churches have stalled on the idea that the Bible is Truth. The potential fact that the Bible is Truth is implicitly useless if you and your cohorts are totally incapable of or unwilling to keep to said Truth with integrity, and to spend time and thought on discerning its appropriate application in day-to-day life.

We're very classically spotting the trees and missing the forest.

On one side, there's politically active Christian task forces campaigning against gay marriage, on the other, massive mainstream denominations are giving the nod to professing homosexuals in leadership and ministry. What the hell? Have we gone completely insane?

On the one hand, anti-gay marriage is energetically co-opting what is a personal, relational religious ideal into a belligerent, populist moralism, that seeks to dictate behavior on the same grand scale as DARE did with "just say no". Don't-do-it-because-it's-wrong-because-I-say-so has always been a shitty reason to do (or not do) anything. It's a cop out. It's an easy exit for those in authority (or trying to exercise authority) to avoid justifying their mandates.

On the other hand, we have established, long-lived embodiments of Christian doctrine farcically ignoring the biblical exposition (in both testaments) that unequivocally outlines the fact that homosexual lusts (and in fact all extra-marital sexual lust, I might point out) are the end product of the corruption of the human spirit. These things are on the long list that includes greed, pride, deceit, malice and a whole host of other human behavior that often feels GREAT in the moment but does us damage in time. And these churches are very casually dropping this from their consideration of the qualifications for church leadership.

It's two sides of the same coin, really. Coming back to the original points about integrity and thoughtful application, you've got the political crusaders applying their beliefs in an unthoughtful and disintegrated fashion, trying to enforce behavior on people who have never felt any call nor made any commitment to follow God's instruction on how to live and Who to look to for salvation. On the other hand you have people opening their hearts and understanding that American Christianity has been, for decades, stuck in a morass of unsympathetic, dogmatic monasticism and in the alarm of waking up to this tragedy, throwing out basic Christian doctrine with the ugly, ungodly censoriousness.

So I suppose I can make sense of it. The point of writing this? Well, perhaps I hope some folks can get something useful from it. For those on the outside looking in, if you're thinking that Christianity is, by and large, a bamboozling maze of contradictions, you're certainly not far off the mark, given the external behavior of a whole myriad of different groups. It's not supposed to be like this, but then, when humans are involved, how often does anything turn out the way it's supposed to?

I have faith that God will preserve His Truth on through this spate of abject silliness, if maybe only underground and out of sight. He can see the end, I trust, so I'm not really worried...but I do feel very moved to point some of this stupid shit out.

As a brief PS, hypocrisy is built into any Christian's life. By the nature of the faith, we aspire to and exposit values and behaviors that we inevitably fail to observe and act out. Take, for instance, my nearly lifelong disrespect for the principle of the mouth reflecting the heart. Even this post is littered with a brand of coarseness most folks find incongruous with pursuit of God. Individual hypocrisy, especially the endemic type, should be pointed out, but also forgiven. For my part, I'm rotten and busted, and I know it. Group hypocrisy, however, of the kind I decry in this post, is a different animal altogether. I am a man with poor self-discipline and some terrible habits. Denominations have no such cover of individual failing...avoidance of this kind of group departure is the whole point of the body of believers.