After Progress

Is "progressive" the only way to think about alternatives to conservative Christianity?

In a provocative recent column for the Christian Century, Stephanie Perdew explains why she has stopped using the term “progressive” to modify her Christianity:

For progressive is not really a descriptor of Christian theology. It is a political philosophy grown out of Western liberalism, itself grown out of a modernism that combines grand narratives and their reliance on reason, objectivity, and certainty with a liberal championing of individual liberty and free markets. Progressivism has pushed liberal politics toward using government intervention and regulation to bring about progress in realizing social equality, protecting civil liberties, and regulating industries and markets. But progressivism in the liberal tradition does not fundamentally critique its own origins and the ways it has profited from colonialism and capitalism.

I found myself agreeing in part, but departing where the claim seems to be that “progressive” Christianity needs to become more thoroughly progressive in order to merit the label. Clint Schnekloth responded:

In practice, I’ve never encountered someone who emphasizes the “progress” in progressive Christianity. Like many idiomatic descriptors, the word functions as a signal rather than a literal program. It gestures toward a cluster of commitments like welcome, inclusion, and theological openness, that may be imperfectly defined but are nonetheless widely recognized.

Clint makes the point that the label has done valuable work in his community, and I have no doubt that is true. As a signal of cultural positioning, “progressive” is useful, just as “traditionalist” or “conservative” are. But I’m not satisfied with those usages, either, however well they tell someone like me “stay away and find another church.” The work is all in the modifier, not the noun being modified.

In the simplest sense, I take “progressive Christianity” to be a term indicating alignment with social and political movements labeled “progressive” outside of specifically Christian discourse. But even there, we run into a problem of boundaries and definitions. A concern with the health and sustainability of the environment is usually coded as “progressive,” but that can take the form of an anti-growth austerity agenda, a pro-technological “eco-futurist” agenda, or other options landing somewhere between or outside those poles. The same could be said for many issues that profoundly structure daily life, from housing (NIMBY or YIMBY?) to trade and immigration to technological change more generally. Indeed one irony of the term “progressive” is that since the end of Communism, it has come to refer less and less to any notion of “progress,” and more and more to left-coded versions of historically right-wing positions on trade, technology, and ethnic nationalism.¹ So it’s a good term for indicating a cultural and political gestalt, but a limited term for specifying a program.

I don’t think the matter improves when we consider it theologically. The Phoenix Affirmations are a common touchstone for the 21st century marriage of whatever “progressive” means with Christianity, and while some of them are inoffensive enough, as a whole they are entirely inadequate. There is no person and work of Jesus, no proclamation, no revelation of any kind, really, only a gesture at the Scriptures as a sort of resource to be mined for helpful guidance in walking a “Path of Jesus.” Nearly every claim has “we” as the subject, making the whole exercise and its resulting portrait of Christianity into something we merely do, at our own initiative and by our own lights. Again one feels the absence of an actual structuring principle. Is it that we just know more than the benighted people of the past? Or have we improved morally? Are there fundamental philosophical commitments that we have been persuaded of that must perforce reshape how we articulate Christian faith? These would be interesting proposals and worth arguing over, but I rarely see them raised directly.

This wasn’t always true. Once upon a time, “liberal” or “modernist” Christianity relied on a theories of moral and intellectual progress (Darwinian, economic, scientific), stating in refreshingly non-relativistic terms that what some group of seminary faculty in 1920 got up to was just smarter and better than what they were doing in Nicaea or Chalcedon. Then the world went to hell in the most literal sense available at the time, and all the theories of secular progress were singed if not outright consumed in the flames.² Out the other end, the angel of history spat Death of God theology, which, whatever else you want to say for it, was not “progressive.” The critical theologies, like critical social and literary theories more generally, also tended not to offer a very clear picture of progress toward some kind of telos. Communism retained its glamour for some, particularly those who looked on the developing world with weary and guilty eyes, but even then I always sense an admixture of archaism, sentimentality, and ethno-nationalist nostalgia for a pristine world before the colonizers or imperialists.

So I, too, have tended to refrain from using the label “progressive,” if only because, put on the spot, I’d have to break it down into more concrete commitments that I should just state upfront anyway. But what language works to distinguish a Christian community that wants to distinguish itself from the varieties of Christianity that are, let’s face it, predominant in almost every part of the country?

The first place I tend to go is egalitarian. In contemporary usage, this refers to one side of a debate primarily among evangelical protestants over gender roles, with complementarians or patriarchal Christians proposing harder or softer versions of the subordination of women in the church, the home, and society at large. But I think the term can be applied more broadly, not just to gender and other categories as presently constructed (race, sexual orientation, ethnicity) but to an operative principle of theology and church life more generally. Yes, there were and are cultural contingencies that made it all but unthinkable to have, say, women in certain liturgical or governance roles in the church, and it is not necessary to unequivocally moralize all such contingencies. But it is necessary, I think, to insist that they are contingencies rather than essential and unchanging facts about the universe or God’s governance thereof. The image of God in creation and the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ touch directly and immediately on all humanity, period, full stop, with no essential dependency on human hierarchies to access the grace implicit in the former and explicit in the latter. It is church structure and church order that need to be justified as serving this essential equality, rather than the equality treated as derivative of a hierarchically-ordered revelation or church polity.

The second place I land is on Christian liberty. This is really just to say, again as a fundamental premise, that no human being is made righteous by conformity to works of the law. But this should not just be understood to exclude “works righteousness,” as Lutherans like to put it, but also the shadow laws that cluster around and within churches. At a first pass, this addresses norms of “respectability” (which, to be clear, tend to apply every bit as much in “progressive” contexts as in others), but beyond things like dress, taste, household composition, and political views, we are left with the fundamental responsibility of each one of us for both accepting and using the freedom intrinsic to human existence. That doesn’t mean that such freedom can’t be abused (“freedom” and “responsibility” are simply cognate terms in this perspective) and that communities need not organize themselves to protect themselves and each other from such abuses. But the freedom of a Christian is the fundamental premise against which structure, order, polity, and policy have to be justified, rather than vice versa.³

Finally, I think it’s worth reconsidering the battered old term liberal, not necessarily in its contemporary political usage or its more venerable philosophical sense but in the original meaning of possessing the virtue of liberality. “Generous” may be a more tractable word for this ethic of open-handed and -mindedness. Marilynne Robinson writes about it in her essays on Calvin and the Puritans in When I Was a Child I Read Books. And a recent episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast featured a historian who discusses the history of liberalism in politics much in Robinson’s terms, as an out-working not of the principle of “liberty” (with its chilly focus on markets and enumerated rights) but of the mutuality, largeness of spirit, and even, in certain circumstances, noblesse oblige that characterized “liberality.” It is not, to be sure, a primarily “critical” tradition. But it offers an attractive and, I think, theologically valid counterpoint to the overwhelming atmosphere of smallness, defensiveness, spiritual and political miserliness, that I find endemic in American Christianity. For an issue like religious pluralism, for instance, one can go through a whole set of precepts to derive the conclusion that all religions are pretty much the same, but I think it is better and more coherent to begin with the fundamental desirability of co-existence and of non-anxious and non-violent expressions of difference and then reason from there. One point where I differ with Phoenix Affirmation-style progressive Christianity is that I don’t see myself as having the authority to go around pronouncing anyone else’s religion as valid and revelatory of God. I’m doubtful that I can do that for my own! Who wants a “valid” religion anyway? Who wants anyone to explain such validity? Pluralism is not a conclusion deduced from claims about God and revelation, it’s an observed fact that both protects and is protected by the basic virtue of social and spiritual generosity. To the extent that our Christianity is not “liberal” in this sense, to the extent that it meets the world with a clenched fist and a motte-and-bailey mind, it is defective.

Equality, liberty, liberality: I suppose this sounds very Rawlsian or worse. The last of these is not even a principle but a virtue that one can only try to cultivate, and there is a danger in identifying yourself with the virtues you admire rather than the principles you can be held to. And what is missing here, deliberately, is a clear emancipatory project. Partly this is because I don’t think Christianity has been especially useful to emancipatory projects, partly it’s because if my main concern were emancipatory projects, I would just go and do them rather than trying to cram them into the image of Jesus of Nazareth. But maybe it’s the most predictably “progressive” tic of all: I suspect that true emancipatory projects are, for lack of a better word, dated. We may make things better or worse, and I hope the church is never indifferent to those possibilities. But whatever great turning of the age may be in store for us will not, I feel confident, be the projection of our own controversies and ideologies. “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” is a command whose profundity is never exhausted. If we are to be the instruments of the coming of the Kingdom of God, we’d be lucky to find out five minutes before it happens. The rest is prayer, praise, the day’s work, and open hands.

1. While Perdew focuses on the ways “progressive Christianity” is implicated in capitalism, imperialism, and so forth, on an even simpler and clearer level, it is easy for progressive Christians to overlook certain contradictions. One obvious example is the prevalence of anti-Jewish hermeneutic moves: the treatment of the Pharisees and the interpretation of first-century Jewish ethnic distinctiveness can easily veer close to anti-semitic claims. Another example is the (in)famous “Sparkle Creed,” which in its zeal to promote Jesus’s “two dads” completely erases the existence of his human mother. At its worst, American-style progressivism cultivates a self-regarding, self-praising style that leaves little room for such contradictions; closer to the median, it cultivates a highly dubious assumption that all kinds of oppression and all kinds of liberation pull in the same direction at once.

2. It did not help matters that a lot of “modernist” Christians were into things like eugenics.

3. I should note that I am using “freedom” and “liberty” here not in a strictly theological and anthropological sense. The faith of the church holds that our wills are bound by sin, which is true, and psychology, biology, and all the rest hold that what we call our “will” is itself a chaotic composite hemmed on all sides, which I don’t deny even if it isn’t another way of saying the same thing. Christian liberty here is more political, in the sense that it is underdetermined and free of compulsion apart from what comes from the preaching of the Word.