by Murray Sadler, originally published in SFH Newszine, issue #2
People often talk about whether or not our country is a Christian nation, but you never hear them talk about whether or not our town is Christian. This publication places a special emphasis on local and so the editor posed the question to me.
I don’t really have any interest in drilling down though. How would I even go about researching whether or not Farmington was Christian? Do I google “Is Farmington a Christian town?” Hey, Alexa, is Farmington going to heaven?
Wikipedia:
“Approximately 51.21% of the people in Farmington identify themselves as religious or affiliated with a religion. Many of these religious residents identify as Christians— 38.08% are Protestants, 7.65% are Roman Catholics, 5.03% identify with another Christian faith, 0.43% are Mormons, 0.03% belong to an Eastern religion, and 0.01% are Jewish.”
Okay so that is actually way less than I would have thought so I would say probably “no” Farmington cannot be considered to be Christian when only 51 percent of people are even associated with a religion. Buuut, on second thought, if you subtract out the non- christian religions, it is still over fifty percent.
SO WE ARE CHRISTIANS!
Well, that is good to know. But I am still intrigued as to whether this is enough. Do we need to make sure that our police officers are mostly Christians? Is this important? What percentage of police officers is allowed to not be Christian? Or maybe just our city leaders? Ambulance drivers? School teachers? Are the business leaders in your community people of faith?
When national politics are discussed, it seems like every politician is a Christian. Especially a lot of them that represent our area. When people define our national identity, associating as a Christian nation is common. But local identity, in the same way that hyper-local races don’t always associate with a party, has less attention paid to faith backgrounds. Although, if you go to a church, you would tend to include that as an extension of your social identity.
But how would a christian feel about not letting people grow their own food? Limiting how many chickens a struggling family can have to feed itself while egg prices at the super market go crazy? How would a christian feel about public money going to sweeten profits for an outside corporation (like a call center that will come and go when minimum wage gets too high for their liking) rather than being used to work with local entrepreneurs.
Christians should ponder these interesting questions.