Does the world exhibit a standard superior to Christianity? How do I reflect my faith?

DAVE'S CAUTION: Anything you might observe about so-called Christians that is anything but admirable (even a rebuke, which should be with love and grace) is a grotesque distortion of the genuine follower of Christ--whether it be inquisitions, crusades, or described below--ask yourself: Is this what Jesus would say or do?

No talk here of “the crushing burden of piety,” as it has been called, or of religion as a “life sentence” instead of a life. Our walk with Christ, well learned, is a burden only as wings are to a bird or the engines are to an airplane. The mature children of light are like their Master. They know God and his Word, they think straight, and they live in the truth, because every essential dimension of their being has been transformed to serve God: heart, soul, mind, and strength.

We can understand the subsequent course of history only if we see it as a combination of the successes and the failures of those who became identified with Christ to be the light of their world in the character and power of Christ himself.

DARKNESS DECLARED TO BE LIGHT NOW, MODERN HUMANITY—say since the late 1800s—has lived in a rage of moral self-righteousness. In its intellectual leaders it has lived in an attitude of superiority and condemnation toward the morality of the culture that is, supposedly, “Christian.” Its “greatest” prophets—a line of those thought to be among our greatest thinkers—have weighed Jesus in the moral balances and found him wanting. In fact, they have found ways of treating him as inaccessible and have then concentrated on finding those who profess to be his followers wanting. Fearsome “Christian” types—the Enforcer, the Proper-Above-All, the Propagandist, the Happy Yappy, the Obsequious Self-Promoter, the Cowardly Faithful, the Heartlessly Successful, and on and on—are relentlessly hammered on as proving the moral bankruptcy of the way of Christ, though in fact these are human types, found in all cultures. Nevertheless, modern humanity has officially, in its governing institutions, forsaken the true light of the world, Jesus himself. In times of desperation they may still turn to him in prayer, but they do not think of him as the only one who knows reality and how the world should go. Meanwhile, all of the horrendous political movements of the twentieth century, from the Soviet form of Communism to Hitler’s Fascist state, from Maoism to Pol Pot—pled moral righteousness on their side and unrighteousness in their opponents as the justification for brutalities that no one would have thought possible before the fact. And the leaders of worldwide terrorism do the same. (The Nazi, for example, saw himself as morally superior to the Jew, the Gypsy, and others. That was the basis of his actions toward them. If there is to be an accurate history written of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it will have to give prominence to the fact that the highest ethical teaching the world has ever been given was rejected by the intellectual leaders of humanity in favor of teachings that opened the way to forms of human behavior more degraded than any the world had seen to that point. It is certainly no justification for all that historical horror to say that it was partly due to the failure of those who have professed Christ to stand throughout the earth as the manifest children of light. And yet that is a very essential part of the truth about our modern world. Still today those who are concerned about contemporary culture do not seem to fully realize what has happened—that those identified with Christ, and Christ himself, have come to be seen as morally inferior. They do not realize that the attacks on what we might call traditional Christian morality—or just “traditional values”—is a moral attack: an attack from the point of view of (supposed) moral superiority.  pp. 228-230 SOURCE