Mainstream Christianity is associated with hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and homophobia…according to a majority of young people, including Christians. The fact that today’s most prominent Christians are so, well, unChristian (you know, tossing to the wind any sense of charity, tolerance and love for your common man) is not lost on young people.

My faith in the future: restored.

So while Jesus spoke extensively about the sanctity of marriage (meaning: not getting divorced), helping the poor, and loving the unloved, why have public figures like James Dobson, Donald Wildmon, the late Jerry Falwell, and power bottom Ted Haggard more closely resembled the Pharisees Jesus also most famously talked about?

Simple answer: it’s easy to insist on condemning exactly those behaviors you know you’ll never commit. Hence the obsession among the Dobsons and Falwells of the world with abortion and homosexuality.

(Closet cases like Haggard are just misguided hangers-on.)

I mean, why is it that the only people protesting in front of abortion clinics seem to be men and postmenopausal women? How convenient.

Let’s ignore all those religious edicts that condemn divorce, infidelity, hell, even murder (gotta keep that option open for a rainy day) and make abortion and gay sex the lynchpin of your platform of ethics. A very easy way for the biggest, most evil sinners to give themselves the illusion that they’ve taken the moral high-ground — eliminate all mention of those sins you’re repeatedly guilty of!

Today’s teenagers, apparently, aren’t used to just listening to the loudest, fattest, oldest man on television and take his blathering to be the gospel. This generation grew up with The Real World and child celebrities divorcing themselves from their parents. Truthfully, blind obedience to arbitrary authority has never been this country’s youth’s strong suit.

And thank God for that (no pun intended!).