Faith in Public

Jared over at Exultate Justi has an outstanding piece on this topic. There's more at National Review Online. I've said my piece on it a time or two.

I do not see how faith and action can ever be separated, if you are following your faith in a consistant manner. Faith requires you to believe a certain way about things, and those beliefs require you to act in certain ways. This is hard for people without faith to understand. They cannot see what it is about faith that makes it so vital to people who have it. Part of the problem is us.

People of faith often are not living consistently. We say that we believe one thing, but in other areas of our lives, we act a different way. God is supposed to be a vital part of our lives, but we act as if He's jsut an old relative that we go to visit on Sundays. We nod at the message, we sing the songs, and nothing that happens within the walls of the church has any impact at all on our lives. We'd be better off staying home and sleeping in. The Barna group has a survey dealing with this issue. I was going to address it here, but after looking at it, I think it needs its own post. I may save that one until next week, while I'm writing papers.

If faith matters (and I say this to people of all faiths, not just Christianity), then it always matters. It matters when you go to school. It matters when you get to the office. It matters when you decide what you are going to read, or what you will watch. And it matters when you are elected to public office.

Unless you are John Kerry. Then, faith is a personal thing, not a public thing. It has no impact on anything he does outside of church. In many ways, he would fit in quite well with the average American evangelical.

And that's a shame.