How are we to interpret the Pew survey that more than a quarter of adult Americans have left the faith of their childhood (44% if one counts shifts among Protestant denominations)? It may be one of the more important findings about religion in America to be published in recent years. Is this affiliation switching a good thing? It certainly shows the reality of religious freedom in America. People feel freer now to switch from parish to parish and from denomination to denomination. We have many options, many channels to choose from. It's hard not to argue that having 100 channels to choose from is better than having only two or three, or just one as happens in so many places.

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First of all, it is important to state emphatically that there are no grounds to the rumor that Jesus is a registered Republican. He himself was asked (Matthew 21, 15-23) if he were voting with the Jewish Nationalists or the Herodian (accommodation with Rome) party. ("Should we be paying taxes to Caesar?") His answer, seemingly evasive, made clear that his teaching was not concerned with man's political arrangements, but with the salvation of his soul.

In his recent book "Jesus of Nazareth" Pope Benedict XVI makes the following observation: "While the Torah presents a very definite social order, giving the people a juridical and social framework for war and peace, for just politics and for daily life, there is nothing like that to be found in Jesus' teaching. Discipleship of Jesus offers no politically concrete program for structuring society." (p.114)

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Did Jesus literally rise from the dead? Twenty-five years after the event St. Paul gave this unambiguous answer: "If Christ has not risen, our preaching is in vain and so too is your faith" (I Cor.15,14).

The message of the first believers was not the Sermon on the Mount; it was Resurrection. "I recall to your minds the gospel I preached...what I also received...that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day." (I Cor.15,1-5). The risen Christ is not a reanimated corpse; "what is sown perishable, is raised imperishable" (I Cor.15,42); but raised he was. An un-risen Jesus is an un-divine Jesus, and instead of Christianity what we have is an ethical teaching shorn of the supernatural, a pallid deism, or what Flannery O'Connor famously called "the Church of Christ without Christ," "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.