The Shame of American Christianity I am not a Christian. I do not belong to any church, and I do not speak from inside the faith. What I am is an observer. A witness. Someone who has spent a lifetime watching American Christianity from the outside and trying to make sense of the enormous gap between the teachings of Jesus and the behavior of many who claim to follow Him. And from where I stand, that gap is not a crack. It is a canyon. Even as an outsider, I can see the beauty in the teachings of Jesus. Compassion. Humility. Justice. Mercy. Feeding the hungry. Caring for the poor. Loving your neighbor. Loving your enemy. These are powerful, transformative ideas. They are the kind of values that could change the world if people actually lived them. But that is not what I see in much of American Christianity today. What I see instead is a faith tangled up in politics, power, and money. A faith that often behaves in ways that look nothing like the man it claims to follow. And the shame of...