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A school bus driver in a community next door to where I live named George Nathaniel III got fired this week for leading the children on his bus in prayer.

He describes his morning ritual this way: “We start out with a song, then each person will pray if they want to pray. If they don’t want to pray, they don’t have to pray. Then I will pray and ask them if they want to join me in prayer. Just give them something constructive and positive to go to school with.”

When the company with the school bus contract first heard about what he was doing they told him to stop. He refused, saying that they knew he was a minister when they hired him and should have expected him to want to pray with the children. That’s when they dismissed him.

He is suing for reinstatement. “They are trying to take away every right the Christian has to express our Christian belief,” he says, “in this supposed to have been Christian nation.”

It is this kind of nonsense that has given Christianity a bad name precisely because this is not, never has been, and hopefully never will be, a “Christian” nation. The Constitution is unequivocal. Freedom of religion can be practiced by individuals, but not by government institutions.

But that is not what concerns me in this story. It is, instead, the fact that George Nathaniel passes himself off as a minister. I don’t know the man, but given the two churches he serves noted in the extended version of the story in the local paper, I have little doubt that he is a self-made minister with no theological training and no denominational accountability.

This is a serious problem for American Christianity and one that is largely ignored. Self-proclaimed clergy do immense harm. They are like doctors with no training. They claim to preach the Bible yet have no formal education in the study of it, or church history, or Christian theology. Theological education does not make a minister competent, but without it there is no chance for competency.

Joel Osteen may be the most well known of these types of untrained ministers. He has had no theological education, which is why he preaches a “prosperity gospel” that all educated ministers and scholars know is a perversion of the biblical message. The fact that he draws thousands to his Houston “church” says nothing about his understanding of the Bible. It simply confirms that he is a great salesman.

Christianity has been the source of immense mischief in American life and politics, especially in recent years, led mostly by people who are theologically ignorant, but who nonetheless declare “the Bible says” or speak as if they alone know the will of God. They are the modern day embodiment of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry.

I remained convinced that over time our corrupt political system will spew these people out, but what will remain is the damage they have done to the credibility of Christianity itself. One way to begin limiting that damage is for people to take the time to find out if those who insist they are saying what the Bible says or what God wants are actually qualified to know what they are talking about.