THIS WEEK'S BIBLE EXCHANGE POST: We're all liars

 If you tell the IRS you don't owe taxes on something, they're not going to just believe you. They're going to to want proof. If you say you donated something, you had better have a receipt, because the IRS will want to see it. There's a good reason for this. They don't trust you. That's not because IRS agents are inherently bad people. They've just been lied to. A lot.

People lie to the IRS all the time. In a country that revolted over taxes, cheating the government is almost seen as a patriotic duty. But a lie to the IRS or anybody else is still a lie.

It does beg the question, though, of why the Internal Revenue Service needs proof and Christians don't. After all, we're lied to just as much. Almost any pastor can tell horror stories of people who just want stuff and know that churches are a soft touch.

We often hear people say triumphantly that the United States of America is a Christian nation. It's not just in this country that people say that, either. Around the world, the words “American” and “Christian” are so closely associated in people's minds that however Americans act — and as a former sailor I can tell you that we sometimes act very badly — is assumed to be how Christians act, too.

But ask yourself this: if this was a Christian nation, would we be known everywhere for our greed and violence? Would we make immoral entertainment that brings in hundreds of billions of dollars every year both here and abroad? Would we be the world's largest importer of drugs and the world's largest exporter of pornography?

The way I see it, there are three ways to explain this discrepancy. The first is to say that the Bible was all well and good in days of yore, but we have to live in the here and now. The second explanation is even more ridiculous: that America doesn't have to obey Scripture because it's somehow special.

The third is that some of the 150 million or so people who claim to be born-again Christians in this country are lying. This seems to be by far the most likely scenario, if only because we lie all the time anyway.

In this time and place, there are still advantages to professing to believe in Christianity and to church membership. There are incentives to lie. Unfortunately, this means that there are many “members” who only show up for Christmas and Easter, or who get their names on a membership roll and never darken the doors of that place again.

Saying you're a Christian doesn't make you one, any more than claiming to be the king of the sea would mean that I was. That's like calling everyone you know and telling them you just got married, when what actually did was meet someone you like.

We need to stop just taking people at their word. If someone says he's a Christian, there should be some fruit of it in his life. Saying don't make it so.

[LC Bloom don't make it so, either. He's from Birmingham, Alabama and can be reached at lechroom@icloud.com. He also writes for Built for Glory (www.builtforglory.blogspot.com) and COBRASAURUS‼‼! (WWW.COBRASAURUS.BLOGSPOT.COM).]