Some of my best friends are Christians. They’re nice people. I try to think of them when the public saints are preaching that their family is more valuable than mine, their marriage more sacred. It’s a Christian Nation, the saved tell us, and if we don’t like it we can put up or shut up.

You’d think that if we were a Christian Nation, Christlike behavior would be rampant. But in my experience, Christians are not much different from the rest of us. Most of them are decent enough, some are a credit to their faith and some I wouldn’t trust with my cat.

A recent study supports my theory that individuals tend to follow their own light, regardless of their professed religion.

Dr. Farr Curlin, of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics surveyed 1,144 physicians across the United States. His findings–
…35 percent of doctors who described themselves as either atheist, agnostic, or without religious affiliation said they practiced medicine among the underserved, compared to 31 percent of religious physicians.

“Everybody knows caring for the poor is a good thing,” noted Curlin, who describes himself as an orthodox Protestant Christian. “Yet there are a lot of reasons to not care for the poor. A lot of selfish reasons. Because it’s hard and it costs you. But what religious communities do with respect to those behaviors that are good, but are costly, is give people support and exhortation to live up to that calling, even though it’s hard.”

My first job as a nurse was at a clinic that served mostly Medicaid and uninsured people. Sometimes we had to work twice as hard, because we were seeing people who had not had any medical care for a long time. It was a great job, it taught me most of what I know about community health. At one point I was working with a group of doctors, nurses and support staff that included a Hindu, a Muslim, an Orthodox Christian, an Evangelical Christian, a Catholic, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Jew, a Buddhist and my Pagan self. We didn’t talk about religion much, we were very busy, but to do the job right you had to have heart.

One of the study doctors, Peter Ubel, said it well…

“Now, you might expect it to be different for doctors who are religious,” Ubel added. “But I would say that morality is not owned by religious people. In fact, many agnostics are driven by a strong sense of right and wrong. And so one thing that comes out of this study is to remind people of that fact. And it suggests that if you want to know if people have good intentions, don’t ask them if they go to church on Sunday. Judge people by their actions, not by their congregation.”

Amen to that.