What Do Christians Look Like to People Who Aren’t Christians? Part 1

The summer after I graduated high school, I remember having a conversation with an atheist friend who told me that there are a lot of fake Christians at her school. What made them fake? They claimed to be Christians. They went to church, but they also had engaged in premarital sex, perhaps on more than one occasion. Now, even as a young Christian, long before seminary, I knew that wasn’t a disqualifier. Committing a sin doesn’t make a person cease to be a Christian. We are all sinners, and we continue to sin. No one is perfect. We rely on God’s grace. However, it was an informative conversation, so much so that I haven’t forgotten more than a decade later, because it showed me what an atheist believed were the qualifications of a Christian. What did a Christian look like to this friend? Someone who was perfect, but the bigger curiosity is how she came to believe this.

Perhaps she read Matthew 5:48 or heard someone talking about it. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus certainly has high expectations of Christian behavior. While I’m sure Jesus meant for this perfection to apply to every aspect of Christian life, we should note that in the particular context of this verse, Jesus is talking about loving your enemies. We need to be kind and gracious to people outside our immediate circle, because God cares for the entire world. Perfection, in this verse, refers to the scope of our love.

Now, while my friend is, and was, a pretty smart person, I don’t think she got this idea from reading Matthew itself. Perhaps she got it from Christians. We could imagine Christians at high school acting like they are morally superior. I probably did. Before we are old enough to develop wisdom and humility, being one of the few people to go to church and read the Bible makes us a little too self-assured. Maybe some of those Christians at her school had judged her or her friends for small things that they did. Maybe they were petty hypocrites. Maybe they defined the behavior of a real Christian and then failed to achieve it. Of course, it doesn’t really seem fair for just any Christian to set the boundaries of what a Christian is or is not. Everyone would say that the true Christians are the ones who believe, worship, and act like they do, potentially to the exclusion of everyone else. Nonetheless, what the average Christian tells other people about Christianity, will largely determine how other people see Christianity.

Of course, I don’t want to assume that her classmates were hypocrites. Maybe they were perfectly reasonable Christians, sinners and saints, who attended church and high school and went about their lives normally. If that were the case, where did my friend get this view of Christians as being defined by fervent devotion to moral perfection? Portrayals of Christians in movies and TV shows are quite varied. Sometimes, Christians make movies that portray Christians in the best possible light, while casting others as caricatures. The God’s Not Dead series tends to treat atheists as if they are dishonest, anxious people who don’t care about anything but themselves and taking down Christians. I know a lot of atheists, and they usually don’t act like that. Sometimes, Christians are cast as complex, nuanced characters, but these movies are often so long and/or artistic that they aren’t accessible to general audiences. There are some exceptions, but even the exceptions tend to be popular among Christians, not non-Christians. In movies that are popular among young people, Christians are often portrayed as either not explicitly Christian—their religious beliefs do nothing to drive the plot or their character motivations—or absurd caricatures of Christians—their faith is their only defining characteristic. When I was in high school, the teen romantic comedy Easy A, was popular. In this movie, Amanda Bynes plays a hyper-judgmental Christian, who leads a prayer group and acts as a consistent antagonist throughout the film. Of course, we should remember that at the time, the Westboro Baptist Church was gaining notoriety in the real world for being hyper-judgmental. This movie didn’t invent this trope, they lampooned things that were happening in real life for comedic effect, but this caricature is what ends up in the hands of young people. Christian portrayals in movies and TV shows certainly impact how people in general, but especially young people view Christians in the real world.

Finally, sometimes Christian leaders or popular figures who identify as Christian but don’t actually work in a church also impact what people think Christians are like. In the information age, there are thousands of YouTubers and TikTokers who are trying to game the algorithm and get attention from young people absently and endlessly scrolling through their phones. Between funny relatable jokes and dance trends, young people who don’t know much about the church may stumble upon particularly popular or controversial videos in which Christianity is mentioned. Some might find progressive Christians saying that most of church history and theology is bad theology. Some might find conservative Christians using the Bible to react to current cultural issues, acting as culture warriors and treating Christianity as a political movement. Christianity can look like just about anything we can imagine now. In my own wandering on YouTube, I’ve found numerous videos that I would consider wrong, and very bad representations of what we believe. However, while I could explain why they are wrong, I don’t think I am the intended audience. These are for young people and/or people outside of Christianity. Some want to align young men with a particular socio-political movement against feminism and liberalism. Some want to invite people who have been hurt by the church back to a different kind of church, one that doesn’t share anything with the church that hurt them.

I’m not sure a teenager or an atheist would be able to correct the record and point out the ways in which these influences fail to represent Christianity. I’m not sure an atheist in 2011 could tell the theological difference between the antagonistic Christians in Easy A, the Westboro Baptist Church, and the Christians they interact with on a daily basis. Sure one group is funny, one is genuinely unsettling, and the other is just there, but how do we actually talk about the differences? This becomes the responsibility of the church. We have to do the work to correct our own record and deploy a narrative that runs counter to the caricatures that society and “Christian influencers” have thrust upon us. How do we do that? Well, that is a challenging question that will take some time to answer. For now, ponder the problem. We’ll talk more on what to do about it next week.