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Let me be clear up front. I am Christian, but I am not a Christian and don’t ever want to be again, at least in the sense of what that has come to mean today.

Being Christian is about how you live. Being a Christian is about what you believe, and what some Christians believe makes Christianity trivial, judgmental, mythological, offensive, and at times downright silly.

The latest protest by the kind of Christians I am talking about over the opening ceremony at the Olympic Games is another in a long line of examples of why I no longer call myself a Christian.

This one falls into the category of being just plain silly, almost laughable, except it does immense harm to the image of Christianity itself.

The opening ceremony had nothing to do with the Last Supper, and certainly wasn’t mocking it, but the reaction of the Christians who say it did shows how theologically shallow they are.

Apparently, we have a group of French Catholic Bishops to thank for getting the controversy started, with Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, an evangelical Christian, taking to X (Twitter) to add his criticism, and even the KC Chiefs placekicker, Harrison Butker, another evangelical Christian who became a household name when he told graduates at a women’s college in Kansas they should aspire to be housewives as God wanted them to be, getting his two-cents worth in on the opening ceremony (if worth even that).

You can’t make this stuff up.

The irony is that this ill-informed and ill-conceived reaction will have the opposite effect those engaged in it want. Instead of drawing people to Christianity, it will turn them away, just as it has been since the late 1990s.

In 1990, the Pew Research Center says that some 90% of Americans self-identified with Christianity when asked about their religious affiliation. That percentage has been fairly stable since 1776.

One of the things that tells us is that while by intention the United States is not a Christian nation, it always has been a nation whose population is majority Christian.

But that’s changing. In 2022 the percentage of Americans willing to say they are Christian dropped to 64%.

That’s a huge drop, and comes on the heels of the percentage of Christians attending church on a regular basis having dropped to less than 25%.

There is no single reason for this decline in both church attendance and Christian affiliation, but one of the primary ones is the kind of Christianity this protest over the Olympic Games opening ceremony represents.

It’s a Christianity that is offensive to people, morally arrogant, intrusive in trying to impose its will on others while being exclusive of people who don’t believe the stuff they believe.

It shows what I said at the beginning, a Christianity that is trivial, judgmental, mythological, offensive, and at times downright silly.

But here’s the thing. The people who don’t like this kind of Christianity are Christians. Think about it.

Given the fact that the majority of Americans identify with being Christians, the drop in that number comes from the same group of people – Christians.

That’s like your own family telling you they don’t want to be around you anymore, they don’t like who you’ve become so they don’t want to associate with you any longer.

What’s going on regarding the Olympics will only cause the same kind of reaction.

The likely results will be that even more people will be turned off by and away from Christianity.

But those Christians leading the charge will not be phased one bit. That’s because there is no one more tone deaf to the sound of their own voice and more blind to reactions to their actions than religious zealots.

It leaves those of us who seek to be Christian in the way we live frustrated that religious zealots make all of us look like them because they’re the ones who get in the news. Christians who loved the opening ceremony didn’t get a headline, only the ones who made Christianity look silly and shallow.

But there is some good news in this sad tale.

Contrary to what many people think, evangelical Christianity has been in significant decline here in the United States for the last several years, going from 26% of the Christian population in 2014 to less than 14% today.

If trends continue in this direction, a day might well come when evangelical Christianity will have passed from our midst because it never understood the difference between being a Christian and being Christian.