After all, what an indictment. In our society the only uses of the word are pejorative. You don’t want people to think of you as “holier than thou,” do you, or a holy Joe. Holy cow, that would be awful.

How often have you heard the word used in a positive sense in memorable history? “I have the utmost regard for Polly; she is a very holy person,” or “that is a wonderful church; they have the reputation of being holy people.”

The term holy means to be separate from defilement. It is the opposite of profane. In American homes, the floor is profane. We walk on it with the same shoes we use to walk on the street polluted by who knows what. You would not think of eating off your kitchen floor. Conversely, dishes are holy. They are sanitized (made saintly—separated from their defilement) with hot water and soap and stacked away (separated) in the cabinet for the next use.

Likewise, Scripture calls us to be more like dishes than the kitchen floor, to be separate from the defilement of the world.

Doing so can lead to some negative results if we are not careful. We can become so detached from the world that we are not reaching or influencing it. We can develop a “holier than thou” attitude.

However, today’s evangelical community is well out of the danger zone in that regard. George Barna substantiated this conclusion in a recent survey. It comes as no surprise that the secular public is not into holiness, but Barna has discovered that only 46% of born again Americans believe that God expects them to be holy. Without even having holiness as a target, we tend to miss it on a regular basis.

Perhaps this indifference to holiness is motivated by our desire to mingle with the world so that we might reach people. Perhaps defilement results from pollution’s ready access to our homes and hearts through television, movies, the internet, music, and other conduits, that we have been beguiled by the same sensuality that allures the rest of the world.

Maybe it is the old pendulum swing, the effort to distance ourselves from an earlier era that did isolate itself and developed a self-righteous attitude. This may explain the lack of emphasis on holiness within the evangelical community.

The evangelical community can be applauded for being engaged with society. Much good has come out of that. However, traveling too far in that direction can result in the world reaching us instead of our reaching the world. In that case, we have nothing to win people to.

Barna concludes his finding with this challenge to Christian leaders in their ministry to their people: “To align their hearts with the notion of being holy, we must move them away from a ‘cheap grace’ theology and replace people’s self-absorption with focus on God and His ways. To help them pursue holiness, we must help them comprehend and accept biblical theology regarding God, Satan, the purposes of life on earth, the nature of spiritual transformation and maturity, and the necessity of bearing spiritual fruit.”

Following Barna’s agenda might instigate an evangelical reformation.