San Francisco, USA - A survey last year by LifeWay Research, a US Christian think-tank, revealed that a majority of adults who said they believed in God never went to church. The reason: 72 per cent of non-churchgoers said they thought the church "was full of hypocrites."Another survey by Barna Group, a Christian survey organization, found that young adults in particular are rejecting the institution - and Christianity in general - because it is perceived to be anti-gay, too political and hypocritical.
"You see the mistakes of prominent [Christian] leaders," said David Kinnaman, president of The Barna Group, "and that solidifies people's perspectives about Christians as hypocrites or living hypocritical lifestyles."
In fact, given the spate of negative incidents that have dogged the church in recent years it's a wonder that just 72 per cent of non-churchgoers have such negative opinions. Some might say that given the litanies of misconduct by prominent church leaders in recent years it's a wonder how many church institutions survive at all.
The most damning cases involve the thousands of acts of sex abuse committed by Catholic priests in the US, and the role of leading church officials to hush up the crimes. This attempt to protect the perpetrators and hide the abuse often involved shuffling suspect priests from one parish to another, where they found themselves able to exploit a whole new pool of victims.
The numbers involved are simply staggering. The John Jay Report, commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2004, found accusations against 4,392 priests in the US, equaling about 4 per cent of all US priests between 1950 and 2002.
The report also found that most allegations of abuse were never reported to police by bishops - and 95 per cent of the priests were never charged with a crime. Nearly 30 per cent of the victims were abused for two to four years, while an additional 10 percent were abused for up to nine years. Just 149 priests - serial paedophiles - abused 2,960, or 27 per cent, of the children.
But the Catholic church was far from the only Christian institution to be hit by sexual scandal. One of the country's most influential Evangelicals, the Reverend Ted Haggard was forced to resign as leader of the New Life megachurch in 2006, after it emerged that he had paid a male prostitute for sex and drugs over a three year period. Haggard was also forced to resign the presidency of the influential National Association of Evangelicals an umbrella group representing more than 45,000 churches with 30 million members.
The man who Haggard was involved with said he decided to come forward because of Haggard's support for a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in Colorado.
"He is up there preaching that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and he's going behind his wife's back and seeing a gay man for sex," said Mike Jones. "I felt like I owed it to the gay community to expose the hypocrisy."
The scandal continued the following year when Earl Paulk, the 80- year-old leader of a Georgia megachurch was revealed to have slept with brother's wife and fathered her child. The expose that he was actually the father of his supposed nephew came after a court- ordered paternity test in connection with the lawsuit of another woman who claimed Paulk manipulated her into a four year affair by telling her it was her only path to salvation.
Given such actions it's not surprising that a poll in June by the independent Pew Centre found Americans to be as spiritual as ever - but with the vast majority carving out individual belief frameworks.
"Americans are deeply suspicious of institutional religion," saidstudy author John Green. "Some see religion as about money, rules and power. That's not a positive connotation for everyone."
"Americans believe in everything. It's a spiritual salad bar," commented sociologist Michael Lindsay of Rice University. "Rather than religious leaders setting the cultural agenda it's Oprah Winfrey."