The 85/16 Problem — And Why It Starts With Us

There's a number that won't leave me alone.

Actually, two numbers. And the gap between them is the reason this blog exists.

Researchers from the Barna Group asked young non-Christians and former believers to describe their view of Jesus. Eighty-five percent said favorable. Eighty-five percent. The guy who touched lepers, defended the woman everyone else wanted to stone, and ate dinner with people the religious crowd wouldn't be caught dead with — people still like him. A lot.

Then they asked the same people about Christians.

Sixteen percent.

Sit with that for a second.

Jesus has an 85% approval rating. His followers have a 16% approval rating. That's a 69-point gap. In any other context — a product, a political candidate, a brand — that gap would trigger a complete overhaul. A crisis meeting. A fundamental rethinking of everything.

In the church, we mostly just keep doing what we're doing.

I want to be clear about something before we go any further, because I know what the defensive response looks like. I've had it myself.

The world is just anti-Christian now. Culture has shifted. What do you expect?

Maybe. But that's not what the research shows. People aren't rejecting Jesus. They're giving Jesus an 85% favorable rating. They're not walking away from the carpenter from Nazareth who talked about loving your enemies and caring for the poor and leaving the 99 to find the one that was lost.

They're walking away from us.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome about this exact problem two thousand years ago: "God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you." Not because of God. Because of his people.

And Jesus — the most patient man who ever lived, the one who had endless grace for prostitutes and tax collectors and doubters — reserved his harshest words not for the obvious sinners, but for the religious people who were blocking others from seeing God. Seven times in Matthew 23 he calls them hypocrites. He calls them blind guides and whitewashed tombs. And he says the words that I keep coming back to:

That's not ancient history. That's a mirror.

I started this blog — and the book that led to it — convinced I was writing about other Christians. The loud ones. The ones on social media. The ones making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

God had other plans.

About halfway through the writing process, I was sitting with what I'd put on the page and something the Holy Spirit has a habit of doing happened: he turned it around on me.

I thought about the people I'd quietly written off. The assumptions I'd made without knowing the story. The times I'd used truth as a weapon instead of a door. The moments I'd been so committed to being right that I forgot to be kind. The ways my politics had started to crowd out my theology without me noticing.

I wasn't the obvious problem. I was the subtle one — the kind that's harder to see, and maybe more dangerous because of it.

That's when I understood what I was really writing.

This is not a blog about bashing Christians. I am one. I love the church — the real one, the one that quietly serves and genuinely sacrifices and shows up when nobody's watching. There's more of that church than the headlines suggest, and I want to honor it.

But I also can't look away from 85 and 16. I can't unsee the gap.

Salt and Iron exists because I believe the gap is closeable. Not by trying harder to be nicer, not by softening the message, not by pretending the problems don't exist — but by doing the honest, uncomfortable work of examining the distance between what we claim and how we live.

Salt doesn't preserve by smelling like salt. It has to make contact. Iron doesn't sharpen iron from across the room. There has to be friction.

That's what we're going to do here. Every other Tuesday, in whatever length it takes, on whatever topic needs it. Sometimes confessional. Sometimes theological. Sometimes just a short sharp thing that needed to be said.

Always honest. Always in the direction of more window, less wall.

The gap is real. We helped create it. And some of us are willing to say so.

That's where we start.