Religion, Once About Peace, Now Associated With Violence

The book I'm reading, Why Religion Went Obsolete, discusses not theological issues but cultural changes in how religion is seen in society. Decades ago, mostly the author says before 1990, the view by the public of religion was religion is good. Around 1990 a multitude of forces made religion seem not good. This included on-line life, later marriages, later careers, scandals in the faith and others. One was an increase in the association of religion with violence. 

When I began this blog, about a dozen years ago, the attack called "9/11" was still in the news a lot. I remember writing about my exasperation with leaders like President W. Bush who called for "prayer." He gave a speech, not in some venue known to exude rational and secular thinking to offset the whacko religious views of the Muslim attackers, but in the National Cathedral. Can't people see, I wrote, that the whacko attacks on the World Trade Center (I was in that complex years earlier) were the work of the same phenomenon as sponsoring force for the National Cathedral, someone's god. 

The blogs I wrote about this were swamped the complaints. How could I compare the good God of Christianity with the bad god of Islam? While there were books and articles discussing the association of violence and religion they were not in outlets I encountered. In the above book, author and sociologist Christian Smith discusses at length the negative effect 9/11, the attack by Muslims, had on Christianity. He ran searches for the number of times news stories associated religion, i.e. Islam, with violence. The association appeared thousands of times. 

We don't have to search long to find today violence associated with Christianity. Dead doctors who performed abortions is one example. Just today there is in the news a sermon preached in a church in Indiana where the preacher curses homosexual and trans people and reminds his congregation God in the Bible wants homosexuals dead.   

I don't recall any poll asking people if they associate the Christian religion with violence. Yet, I agree with the author of the above book that the frequency of Christianity and religion in general with violence has to be one of the variables that is driving down Christian numbers.