Sorry for the sensational title, but I suppose it caught your attention, no?

Very few people go "congregation hopping" in their lifetime.  The fact of the matter is, the congregation you join in your youth usually becomes a part of your identity.  Everyone you know goes to that congregation.  Friends, family, co-workers you see every week or maybe every day for 20 years.   It becomes a part of your extended family.  

Unless there is something fundamentally wrong with the principles the congregation or community is founded upon,  I believe its actually MORE ETHICAL to stay and change things from within that community when you notice something you disagree with.  Just picking up and leaving your community and the people within it is not only cowardly, it is also irresponsible.  

In a lot of ways, I think I probably feel the same way about the U.S. as Obama feels about his church.  I was born and raised in the U.S.  There were some things I disliked about growing up here as someone with yellow skin and slanty eyes, but there are so many more things I love about growing up here.  Its a part of my identity. Its a part of my being -- I am an American.   I am appalled of my country's illegal invasion and torturing of Iraqis and its racial stereotyping of Muslims and brown-skinned people.  I am also quite thoroughly disgusted by my current government and the people some of the people who represent it.
 
Anytime I wanted to I could just "quit" America and move to Japan without a visa and live just as easy a life. Yet despite that fact, I choose to stay here and change our current situation from within.  Everyone I love lives here, everything I have ever known exists on these lands.  I choose to fight to change my community rather than run away from it.  Do I agree with everything that my country does or says?  No.  But I love it for what its founded upon and the spirit of what it represents.  It is who I am.