Perhaps the biggest obstacle to belief in God in recent years has been a growing disillusionment with Christians and the church. No doubt the church has a historical closet full of skeletons. Even in our own lifetimes, horrendous evils have been exposed, with those who bear God’s name having done reprehensible things under the institutional cover of the church. So with the church’s moral currency bankrupted by religious hypocrisy, and when you consider that part of the Christian story supposedly involves a change brought about in the human heart by God, how do you explain Christians behaving badly?
There should be no room for any answer to a question this raw that does not begin with tremendous sorrow for those who have been harmed, closely followed by a deep protest against any ongoing existence of those evils. God Himself is intimately familiar with the terrible wounds that can accompany being the target of religious hypocrisy since the religious establishment, who were meant to be a spiritual safe haven, were the very ones whose dark actions of betrayal and injustice led to Jesus’ brutal execution.
