Progressive Christianity

Some autobiography: I grew up in a community of theologically conservative, evangelical Christians. There, in accord with the stereotype, salvation was principally an individual matter. Despite avowed rejection of “legalism” in opposition to salvation by grace through faith, Christian practice centered on individual morality and tangential behavioral matters, e.g., (not) swearing, drinking, or smoking, i.e., the “purity code” of the community. Structural matters of public policy, justice, discrimination, poverty, war and peace, in contrast to the needs of individuals, were not on our radar. The mid-century evangelical world was to a serious degree shaped by what it was against, and that included “liberalism” and its “social gospel,” which in caricature at least was an alternative to genuine Christian faith. In retrospect, this seems to have gone so far as to make the Pauline epistles the focus of preaching and teaching. In practice, what mattered about Jesus was being born of a virgin and then his cross and resurrection; nothing in between seems to have been important. I suspect that we implicitly thought paying much heed to the Gospels was the province of liberalism and its allegiance to Jesus the mere moral teacher. There was some slight tilt toward the Republicans, though this was never regarded as a matter of much import. There were certainly members of my church in good standing, in fact in leadership positions, who were Democrats, but any investment in political matters beyond being a good, law-abiding citizen—St. Paul apparently commanded this in Romans—and voting, would have been looked down upon as “worldly.”

In the 1970’s this changed rapidly and drastically, so that by the 1980’s there was little daylight between evangelical Christianity and the political right. Theological conservatives discovered their own social gospel, a package of moral values and political polices intended to mold society in accord with them. The etiology of this, in the social changes in the later 1960’s and after, as well as in cultural resentments going back to the early 20th century, are well-known and I won’t rehearse them here. Aside from the merits or demerits of any of the particular beliefs of the “religious right,” I believe we now see that this was a disaster. Today, many young (and not so young) people who grew up in this religious culture rightly reject the identification of faith in Jesus Christ with commitment to a conservative political program, the uncritically held values of the white middle class, free market capitalism, and American nationalism, and, hoping to find an authentic faith, look elsewhere.

As a professor in a Christian, i.e., evangelical, college, I have seen this going on for a long time. There is a common, but by no means universal, trajectory. The student arrives at college raised with the conviction that a particular collection of moral, social, cultural, and political beliefs are essential and incontestable matters of Christian faith. Theory aside, in practice this student has his entire life been taught, for instance, that a particular stance on abortion or homosexuality, or on evolution, is not just important to the Christian faith, but more important than, say, the deity and resurrection of Christ. (I hope there is a difference between what is still officially taught in the evangelical churches, and the unnuanced messages their young people imbibe, but I am no longer sure.) For some students, often the most committed and brightest, the experience of higher education is an ongoing crisis. Even in what is overall still a relatively conservative (theologically, socially, and even politically) campus environment, they absorb many challenges to the politicized, enculturated Christian faith in which they were raised. Some simply jettison the totalistic ideology of their past in favor of a new one, rejecting the morally and intellectually bankrupt evangelical culture in favor of the leftist political monoculture of the academy and this country’s ruling elites. One package is dropped and a new one takes its place, the contents of neither ever have been closely examined. Raised as an evangelical Christian but having spent my career in the academic world, what I find striking is the formal similarity: a package of beliefs in which familiarity creates an impression of internal coherence, serious critical questions are made invisible, and the believer taught to find satisfaction in being smarter and better than non-believers. (It is amusing to encounter the young person who sees himself as a rebel and individualist in virtue of adopting wholesale the values, beliefs, and attitudes of the educational establishment, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and the United States government. The only rebellion is against one’s déclassé parents.)

Others retain their Christian faith but seek an expression of it free of American evangelicalism, adopting something sometimes called progressive Christianity. Insofar as I understand it, much here is laudable: the rejection of biblical literalism, abandonment of evangelicalism’s purity code as well as its facile certitude, giving up belief in damnation, rejection of the assumption that non-Christians must be either stupid or wicked, openness to women in ministry, inclusion for LGBT’s.…in general, the discovery that it is possible to be a Christian without trying not to be a human being.

On the other hand progressive Christianity is troubling when it makes a political ideology an integral component of the Christian faith. Many young people seem to be making exactly the same mistake an earlier generation of Christians made, but now by making faith a front for the dogma of the Left, rather than the Right.

Christian faith is not just belief. It is trust in the God who in Christ reconciles the world to himself, and that trust calls for action. Christian action is not properly contained in individual life, but belongs in all areas of human activity, including our social, cultural, and political existence. But faithful Christianity is not a matter of making one’s own a pre-packaged bundle of values, beliefs, and commitments. The evangelical culture’s worldview rhetoric probably makes this seem reasonable. So does the growing tendency on our highly polarized political scene to demonize and silence opponents. In contrast faithfulness calls upon us to break open the ideological packages and to think through the issues with honesty and freedom. It seems to me that this is in short supply in “progressive Christianity,” just as it is on the Christian Right.