How UnChristian are we?

 Sometime ago I read and wrote about Dan Kimball's book They like Jesus but not the Church and then followed it up with a series of posts on whether the same conclusions Dan reached in the US were also true of the UK. You can read those posts here, here, here, here, here and finally here. 

Now I'm reading a new book called Unchristian: What a new generation really thinks about Christianity...and why it matters by David Kinnaman from the Barna Research Group in the US, and I thought I'd do the same thing here. Dan K was clearly on target as there is plenty of common ground between the two. The difference is that Dan's book was based on anecdotal evidence from Dan's personal conversations and experiences, David's on the other hand is the result of lots of serious market research. 

So this looks at what the outsider thinks about Christians, Christianity, the church and Jesus. Actually it's narrower than that it focuses on what the generation between 16-29 think about those things, (the Buster and Mosaic generations) as that has the most influence on the future trends. There were six major negative associations felt by an overwhelming majority of young people outisde the church in the US. They are:

1. Christians are hypocritical (85%)
2. Christians are too focused on getting converts 
3. Christians are anti-homosexual and therefore bigoted (91%!)
4. Christians are old-fashioned, boring and out of touch with reality
5. Christians are overtly motivated by a political agenda (and a right-wing agenda at that)
6. Christians are judgemental (87%)

I'll think I'll add a poll on these and see what readers think and see if I can get more than 5 votes this time...