I haven't been a regular church-goer in years. We've tried a number of
different congregations in the area, from conservative Presbyterian
(what I grew up in) to more liberal, mainstream churches to a house
church with six members. Every place we've gone seems to be at one of two extremes.
At one end of the spectrum are the more liberal congregations. They have a concern for social justice and equality that I find appealing, but theologically, they're basically Unitarian-lite. It doesn't seem to matter so very much what you believe, as long as you're a nice person. I'm all for being nice to people, but if that's the be-all and end-all of your theological structure, it seems kind of pointless to get up early to go to church and sit around with other nice people. I want a faith that will challenge me, that demands better things of me than what I am. It needs to be dynamic, to say "This matters."
On the other hand, there are the more conservative churches. They believe that faith matters. Unfortunately, they've gotten confused about exactly what it is that's so important to God. They've allowed their faith to be co-opted by the Republican party, and they've let things creep in that are not explicitly Christian (anti-tax positions, an emphasis on legislating morality,enmity to science) or decidedly un-Christian (positions anti-environmental and anti-poor) or out-and-out evil (defending torture when it's our country torturing people). All of these things are taken as gospel (literally) by too many Christians in this country.
I think it's perhaps because evangelical Christians have become accustomed to believing what they're told without questioning. Certainly, the Bible calls for us to be people of faith, but even Paul defines faith as "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith is believing without evidence, not closing your eyes and putting your hands over your ears and ignoring the evidence in front of you. The best example of this is probably Young Earth Creationism. Some forty percent of Americans cling to the idea that the earth is six thousand years old, despite the wealth of scientific evidence to the contrary, because they're afraid of what it would mean to the rest of their beliefs to be wrong about that one thing. I can't accept that God wants us to believe what's obviously not true--a God big enough to create the universe is big enough to take our investigation of it without crumbling.
Nonetheless, Christians who are predisposed to accepting what they hear from the pulpit or read in books by high-profile Christian authors are in real danger of other ideas sneaking in. When you turn off your critical thinking, when you accept that the Republican party is God's party and George Bush is his annointed leader, it's a very small step to convincing yourself that whatever they do must be right; that it must be God's will. If America invades Iraq, it must be for good reasons. If the President says that global warming isn't happening, it must be true--even if the black-and-white evidence says otherwise. If we're torturing people, well then, it must be the right thing to do. Somehow.