I’m pretty frustrated with the American dialogue about religion. This is nothing new, I guess, but when the supposed super-liberal bastions that are alleged to more occasionally take my side are diametric agents of anger, then it’s time for me to talk about it.

It all started this morning, when this article from late last week caught my eye on Google News. The article in question is on the Huffington Post, the place known for being too liberal for my friend Greg in criticizing Barack Obama from time to time. Anyway, the point of the article is to list ways in which Christians tend to be bad Christians, while all the while touting their Christianity. This seemed like exciting, relevant stuff.

The first one on the list was as follows:

1) Too much money. “Wealthy Christian” should be an oxymoron. In Luke 12:33, Jesus says, “Sell your possessions and give to the poor.”

What a great start. I was sure that pacifism would be next on the list.

But instead, most of the rest of the list was about being judgmental, about being holier-than-thou. And interesting critique, and probably valid, but certainly not tops on the list of “Ways Christians Tend to Fail at Being Christian”. And certainly not needing to occupy half the list in repackaged titles like “Too invasive of others generally.” followed by “Too invasive of others personally.” Pacifism, meanwhile, made no appearance on the list.

Which is troubling, because Jesus might be the all-time pioneer of pacifism. Turning the other cheek is not exactly pro-war, nor is loving one’s enemies, one’s neighbors, or blessing the peacemakers. (And by “peacemakers”, Jesus was not referring to missiles.) While I’m not a Christian, it’s arguable that if Christianity really propounded the teachings of Jesus on non-violence, I would be. It would almost be worth the other trappings of organized religion to be associated with such a doctrine.

Of course, that’s not what the modern Church does, especially in the United States, where most congregations set aside a small part of every Sunday to pray for the success of those men and women engaged in killing Iraqis or Afghans. And while it’s obvious that most modern Christians fail to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and cast as many first stones as they can, the whole supporting murder thing seems just the slightest bit higher up the chain in terms of transgressions.

None of this would be so bad, of course, if I didn’t have to hear the flip side of the hypocrisy on my local NPR station later in the day. On today’s “Talk of the Nation”, they hoped to examine the issue of how to make the disenchanted youth in various American Muslim communities resistant to what they called “Jihad Cool”. But as the last caller aptly pointed out, the story had morphed from an examination of negligent forces inside certain fundamentalist communities to an outright assault on Islam’s tenets as a religion. The main guest, who had recently written a lengthy piece on the wife of the alleged would-be Times Square bomber, waved off this critique and said that Muslims need to recognize they have a chronic problem in all their communities.

So where are the people saying there’s a chronic problem in the Christian communities, the flag-waving groups making their children available as willing foot-soldiers in the imperialistic struggle to claim the Middle East for American corporations? Why don’t we have radio programs explaining that a weird conflation of nationalism and Apocalyptic evangelical fundamentalism has been heavily influencing foreign policy, leading to the slaughter of thousands? Is it because this fundamentally really is just another religious war, just another Crusade draped in supposedly secular flags?

Maybe it’s because the alleged terrorists getting caught up in alleged jihad never actually kill anyone, but they do it locally. While the people who drive to work in America and then direct the actions of lethal drone planes half a world away kill hundreds, usually innocent, but do so in a region so esoteric and physically distant that it feels more like a video game than a war.

It’s time to pray, all right. But not for the reasons you might think.