You’ve dealt with them before. At your church, as a volunteer, on your staff, as customers.

Toxic people, are well, toxic.

An unhealthy person can infect your team like toxins infect the human body. After some exposure, everyone feels sick.

The optimist in you and me hopes toxic people will become better. The good news is, sometimes they do.

Unhealthy people can grow healthier with the right care and attention in a healthy environment.

But some toxic people just don’t. Some remain difficult, despite all attempts.

And as you know, if you don’t address toxic people—or worse, let them gain influence—they can infect your whole organization, diminishing your effectiveness and taking everyone’s focus off the mission.

So…how can you tell early on that the person you’re dealing with might be that person?

Here are 6 signs:

1. They come on too strong. In my experience as a pastor, the people who show up and want to make it headline news are rarely (I’m being generous here) healthy people. What’s perplexing is that the people who end up being the most toxic at the end of the relationship are over-the-top positive when they first meet you. I have learned to be suspect when people tell me on first meeting and first hearing that ‘That’s the best message I’ve ever heard in my life!” or “This is the best church I’ve ever been to anywhere.” I find usually the people who are moderately impressed or even neutral on first visit and warm up over time are the ones who are most healthy in the long run.

More than one-third of Americans support removing the phrase “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, according to a study released this week.

The study conducted in May by The Seidewitz Group on behalf of the American Humanist Association (AHA), reports that 34 percent of respondents expressed support for adopting a new version of the pledge. It was released Sept. 2.

“The current wording of the Pledge marginalizes atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nontheists because it presents them as less patriotic, simply because they do not believe in God,” said Roy Speckhardt, AHA executive director, in a press release.

The AHA, which advocates "an ethical and life-affirming philosophy free of belief in any gods and other supernatural forces," frequently represents individuals or groups in lawsuits seeking to remove religious references from the public sphere.

In April, the Association's Appignani Humanist Legal Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of a group of New Jersey parents to have "under God" removed from the Pledge.

The AHA, which queried 1,000 adults, said 21 percent of Christians support the removal of “under God,” while 43 percent of individuals of other faiths were favorable to the proposition.

Among those who had no specific faith, 62 percent backed the idea, while a clear majority (90 percent) of atheists wanted God removed.

The American Humanist Association will be announcing the launch of a new campaign on Sept. 8 to garner support for efforts to rewrite the Pledge, says the AHA statement.

According to an AHA statement, the study was initiated to respond to a 2013 poll by Lifeway Research, which found only 8 percent of American adults supported deleting the reference to God in the Pledge.

This week’s episode is called “Does Religion Make You Happy?” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can alsoread the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

We undertook this episode in response to a listener question from Joel Rogers, a tax accountant in Birmingham, Ala. Here’s what he wrote:

Being devout Southern Baptists my parents have steadfastly been giving 10% of their income to the church their whole lives. I recently voiced my opinion that I thought that was too [much to] give, and my parents and I got into an argument.

After a little back-and-forth, my parents conceded tithing at 10% may not be the exact amount ‘God’ expects, but my mother said something that stuck with me. She said the 10% they give to the church makes them happier than anything else they spend money on.

I’ve read that people who go to religious institutions consistently are happier than their counterparts. The economist inside me says that money (not given to the church) would make a non-tither happier, all things equal. So, will exchanging 10% of your income for the right to participate in a religious congregation statistically increase or decrease your happiness?

Joel is in effect asking two questions, related but separate. One is whether giving away money – in this case, to a religious institution – makes you happier. The other is whether religion itself makes you happier. Neither question is easy to answer, but we’ll do our best.

In the episode you’ll hear from Laurence Iannaccone, an economist at Chapman University who specializes in the economics of religion. Iannaccone says there is a strong correlation between religious giving and happiness but, as you’ll find out, just because giving and happiness seem to go hand in hand doesn’t mean the giving causes the happiness.