What's wrong with (so-called) "liberal Christianity"?
By: Billy Rojas
So-called "liberal Christianity" is a huge mistake. Not because "conservative
Christianity"
is right -it has its own serious shortcomings, some of which are also huge -
and not because
militant Atheists like Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens hate
all forms
of religion starting with Christian faith, but because it isn't even
"Christian" in any
meaningful sense. The "Christian era" of liberal Christianity came to an end
some time toward the end of the 1960s or no later than ca. 1978 or 1979.
In some places liberal Christianity is little more than the religious wing of
the Democratic
Party; in other places, like Eugene, Oregon, it has become a 'Christianized'
version
of the Baha'i Faith, or maybe a form of Theosophy. Think of it as
Unitarianism in vestments.
It is 'Unitarianism' which takes itself as seriously as only the most
self-righteous
"true believers" -in Hoffer's sense- take themselves seriously.
This is not to say that everything about liberal Christianity is a failure.
The irony
-and tragedy- of liberal Christianity is that it has a good deal very right.
Speaking personally
it has been liberating not to feel any need to believe in the purported
miracles described
in the four Gospels. That is, in most of those "miracles." I cannot discount
all of them
and certainly the resurrection accounts have genuine plausibility and pathos
that
cannot be ignored. They are realistic, they acknowledge that some people at the
time
were skeptical, and they are not fictions in the manner of various Greco-Roman
religions of the era.
But in Matthew 27, even though it is my favorite Gospel, we read that, after
Jesus' crucifixion, "the graves opened, and many saints were raised from sleep;
and coming out of their graves after his resurrection they entered the Holy City
where many saw them." This has to be the most cringe-worthy passage in the
entire
New Testament, something that is utterly outlandish and clearly was so much
pious fantasy. Everything else in Matthew makes sense, or is no worse than
questionable,
even if there are other miracles we can doubt or deny ever happened.
But do Christians need to place credence in miracle stories? Not even most
Evangelicals
are "hard line" about this. For which we can thank liberal Christians of
approximately
a century ago. And we can thank those same Christian liberals for new focus on
human suffering -and on growing awareness that people of other faiths
advocate truths
we would do well to make our own, like Buddhist emphasis on the need for
a kind of 'spiritual psychology' so that we can better understand ourselves
in a world that is chock full of illusion, deceptions, and falsehoods large and
small.
Yet when all is said, Reinhold Niebuhr expressed it best; liberal Christianity
has taken us to the place where we end up with a 'new deity,' viz., “A god
without wrath,"
who "brought men without sin, into a kingdom without judgment,
through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross”
This quote is front and center in an article by Michael Bird that appeared in
Patheos
on August 15, 2001, "Liberal Christianity -A Critique." But let us begin
with
an essay by Ross Douthat from the New York Times for July 14, 2012, entitled.
"Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?"
There are a number of important points to make, starting from Douthat's
observations,
but what is most striking -to judge from material that I have read which
deals with
Douthat's critique- is that today's so-called "liberal Christians" are in
denial
about nearly everything Douthat said.
Note the quotation marks. My preferred use the word "liberal" is the usage that
is associated with John Stuart Mill or John Dewey or Supreme Court Justice,
William O. Douglas; it is also how liberal was used by Franklin Delano
Roosevelt,
a man who was unashamedly Christian, who prayed regularly, and who, when
meeting with Winston Churchill on board a battleship to decide upon a strategy
to win WWII, was sure to hold Christian worship services during which guidance
from the Almighty was sought for the dangers ahead.
Liberal Christianity of that era also meant Albert Schweitzer's example of
Christian
sacrifice, -of time, of work, and of commitment- whatever it took to witness
for
faith in Christ regardless of hardship. About which, today's ersatz liberal
Christians
are another species entirely. In any case, I have no interest at all in
demonizing
the word "liberal" and, in important ways, think of myself as liberal. Its
just that
my definition of the term is approximately 180 degrees the opposite of
how modern-day Leftist "Christians" understand the concept.
What Douthat pointed out was that, with statistics for the decade 2000-2010
first available,
the picture for the Episcopal Church in America was dreadful. Or horrifying.
How bad was it? Church attendance figures "showed something between a decline
and
a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance
dropped<http://archive.episcopalchurch.org/documents/ASA_by_ProvinceDiocese2000-2010.pdf>
23 percent, and
not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase." And it
wasn't
only Episcopalians who were on the skids; the picture was -and is- pretty
much the same
for all (all) so-called liberal denominations -the one exception being the
ABC, the
American Baptist Church (formerly American Baptist Convention), which has
remained
at about 5 million souls for the past 50 years, a Church group that, among
mainline
organizations, is the least liberal and the least concerned with trends on the
political Left.
Even so, a steady-state population total is not good news since the US
population in that time
has increased by over 50%. And everywhere else there is absolute decline,
sometimes massive hemorrhaging.
Yet, despite the empirical evidence, nobody on the religious Left has shown any
willingness at all to try and address the problem. Quite the opposite. There
has been
doubling down on views that have led to the collapse of membership totals.
There is zero acknowledgement that anything basic about the theology of the
religious Left could possibly be wrong.
As Douthat added, as "liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed
out<http://www.crosscurrents.org/dorrien200506.htm>, the Christianity
that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement
was much more
dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in
Bible study,
family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive
reform in
the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the
need of personal
redemption and the importance of Christian missions.” But today, "by contrast,
the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be
offering
anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism."
And they are not offering anything much by way of actual Christian religion.
Also
quite the opposite. Douthat also observed, "liberal Christianity" is "
flexible to the
point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every
form,
willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology
entirely
in favor of secular political causes." And, although Douthat did not say so,
it is self-righteous in the extreme about its stands on issues of the day
since, you see, it commands all truth on these matters and everyone who
disagrees is of the Devil.
I have written about Evangelical self-righteousness and can report that it is
very bad.
But compared to the self-righteousness in evidence on the religious Left,
it is a model of moderation and humility. Today's religious Lefties can
best be compared to the Leninist Bolsheviks who overthrew the Czarist
regime in Russia in 1917 and ushered in 70 years of Atheist zealotry
that resulted in massive persecutions and nationwide attacks
against the Russian Orthodox Church as well as all other forms
of religion in the country.
To be sure, there is little sign of Russian style extremism among American
'liberal Christians.' But there is some, and it is disheartening because it is
anti-Christian in spirit and belief. At least it is if your yardstick is the
kind
of actually liberal Christian faith that animated Albert Schweitzer or, for that
matter, that inspired heralded leaders of the past from Walter Rauschenbusch
to Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Paul Tillich to Martin Luther King.
But there is no question whatsoever that liberal (so-called) Christians demand
that anyone who disagrees with them should be excluded from the public square.
After all, they -and only they- have access to the Truth and any other views
are necessarily Fascist or neo-Nazi or God-knows-what, in any case, are
outside the Pale.
There is ZERO comprehension of the fact that others may have perfectly good
reasons
to think that the "liberal" Christians are the ones who are self-deluded and
who have lost any sense of moral compass that actually means anything
with objective value. They can't be wrong, they just can't, because, you see,
they are captive of true-believer syndrome and are incapable of admitting
even the possibility that they might be wrong about ANYTHING.
And these same ersatz Christians not only try to silence Christians on their
Right,
they silence anyone with an independent view of faith, whether people who think
like
Niebuhr or moderns who march to their own drummer, such as Jordan Peterson.
They also valorize Islam, which, in any of its orthodox forms, is intolerant of
all
other religions, which is the moral antithesis of any kind of historic
Christian faith
whether liberal like Schweitzer or like conservatives of the 20th century.
Many millions
of Americans now are skeptical about Islam who, in 1999, did not even give
Muhammad's
religion a second thought; other millions are downright critical of a religion
which
has spawned not a couple of dozen crazies like the erstwhile 'protestors'
associated
with Operation Rescue, but literally hundreds of thousands of killers or
would-be
killers, in any case, lots of people who belong in mental institutions or
prisons
who, however, are lionized by Hamas and Hezbollah and the mullahs of Iran
and by various fanatic groups underwritten by nations like Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia.
Not even to count the criminal insanity that self identifies as the "Islamic
State."
All of which the "Christian Left" regards as equivalent to a handful of
Operation Rescue types.
Look at any television series created by Dick Wolf, otherwise a superlative
screen writer.
Christians are always foaming-at-the-mouth lunatics who murder innocent people
because of their sick and depraved religion; Muslims are always misunderstood
peaceful people who would not hurt a fly. This is a complete reversal
of the facts, indeed, it is a gross distortion of reality.
News flash: Most Americans are not that stupid. They know damned well
that Left-wing 'Christians' are not telling them the truth.
To return to Douthat's essay, for many reasons liberal Christianity is going
through
a crisis of epic proportions; there may be local success stories, that seems
to be
the case in Eugene, Oregon, but overwhelmingly, nationwide, the story is grim.
That kind of (so-called) Christianity has about as much purchase on the future
as did Pagans in the Roman Empire three or four centuries after Christ.
Their days are numbered.
As Douthat put it:
"Both religious and secular liberals have been loath to recognize this crisis.
Leaders of
liberal churches have alternated between a Monty Python-esque “it’s just a
flesh wound!”
bravado and a weird self-righteousness about their looming extinction."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/magazine/19WWLN_Q4.html?pagewanted=print>
To explain further, "liberals" have tried everything. Each Left-wing political
cause
to come down the pike since about 1970 has been eagerly embraced by Christian
Leftists,
made into a new form of supposedly Christian theology (liberation theology, et.
al.),
whether homosexual in character or gender feminist or black racial separatist
or you-name-it.
"Liberal commentators...consistently hail these forms of Christianity as a
model for the future"
but without ever facing the fact that none of these changes has met with
anything but
more and more loss of members.
"Traditional believers, both Protestant and Catholic," added Douthat, "have not
necessarily
thrived in this environment. The most successful Christian bodies have often
been
politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of
health and wealth
rather than the full New Testament message."
"But if conservative Christianity has often been compromised, liberal
Christianity
has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran,
Presbyterian —
that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an
Episcopal-style plunge
in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most
progressive-minded
religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to
sustain themselves."
Worse: Whether or not "Christian liberals" choose to admit it, they are in the
midst
of a crisis that threatens their very existence.
About that, there should not be the least dispute.
There was a rousing defense :-/ of the Episcopal position in an article entitled
"An entirely different critique of 'liberal' Christianity" by P. Joshua Griffin,
posted at the Episcopal News Service site. The author took a dim view of
Douthat's comments and cited various other "liberal Christians " to this effect.
But what this was, was an exercise in denial. When all was said the problem
of loss of half or more of the Episcopal denomination in the past few decades
was a non-problem, because, after all, 'we Episcopalians have the Truth and
what could possibly be wrong?' Therefore, nothing is wrong that a little
belt-tightening won't fix.
There also was this rejoinder: Douthat "ties declining Sunday attendance in the
Episcopal Church to the erosion of “traditional” Christianity, as apparently
evidenced
by our continued recognition of gay and lesbian people as people."
Well, put that way, obviously Immanuel Kant was a bigoted "homophobe," so was
Teddy Roosevelt, another serious Christian believer, so was Eisenhower,
Martin Luther King as well as Martin Luther per se, and so were literally
hundreds of millions of other Christians of the past. As well, we might mention
Eric Fromm, a Jew and a Democratic Socialist, who, along with his partner,
noted psychotherapist Karen Horney, condemned homosexuality as morally
depraved and a form of mental illness.
Which is to say that there are very persuasive empirical grounds to consider
homosexuality
as pathological and the entire "homosexual rights" movement as based on another
gargantuan mistake. As if "liberal" "Christians" regard the testimony of the
Bible
as in any way relevant to the subject since, of course, which Leftist
'Christians'
never acknowledge or admit, the Judaeo-Christian scriptures condemn
homosexuality
(usually called "sodomy") in no less than 30 passages, 15 found in the Old
Testament,
the Hebrew Bible, and another 15 in the New Testament.
What the Episcopal Church did was to toss out the moral witness of the Bible
and replace it with the 'far more relevant' preachments of Alfred Kinsey and
Herbert Marcuse and other famous sex reform celebrities whose conclusions
were false from the beginning and counter to decades of scientific research
into the relationship between homosexuality and mental illness.
But, hey, what does science have to so with anything? What does the Bible have
to do
with anything, either?
It isn't just homosexuality that is at issue.
The Episcopal News Service article went onto quote Rev. Winnie Varghese, writing
in the Huffington Post, to the effect that "liberal and progressive Christians
believe
…[that] those liberation movements from the 1960s on… were right, and [that]
our church should change in response to that revelation.” Rev. Varghese is
right:
the movement of God is towards the elimination of social domination and toward
a leveling of hierarchical categories of human identity—that much is clear in
the arc of the Biblical narrative. God’s Spirit, we believe, erodes all
formulations
that hold some people at the margins so as to benefit the few."
Which is quite a distortion of the worth of various 1960s era movements and,
indeed,
an outrageous thing to say about some of them: Like the Weather Underground
and
its (literal) bomb throwers, or the Marcuse-inspired Cultural Marxists, or the
militant
and violent Anarchists of the era, or the fanatics among women's
liberationists, viz,
the Andrea Dworkin crowd of rabid male bashers, the Afro-centrists of various
persuasions, few of whom were historically literate, and on and on.
This is to say that there is little (hardly any) self criticism on the Left of
its predecessors
and just about no understanding that the vast majority of Americans do not
identify
with yesterday's Left-wing heroes. At that, at least a few of those heroes no
longer
identify with their youthful selves, viz., Jane Fonda, now an actual Christian
believer
even if she has her own views on religion that are not necessarily orthodox.
Instead, the Episcopal Church finds comfort in bromides such as Varghese's
remark
that "the Spirit moves to challenge and overturn long-standing hierarchies of
domination,"
and that what Christianity is all about is destroying social privilege.
Actually, while
that may sometimes be the effect, there is -so to speak- a helluva lot more to
Christian faith than that, like:
Being a decent person to other people, respecting other people,
nurturing families, providing responsible care for children,
using any available wealth for one's community not only for one's self,
putting love first wherever it should be, especially in relationships between
men and women,
trying to see to it that superstitions are disbelieved and such practices as
idolatry are opposed,
insisting that people should have religious freedom,
to cite just some Christian priorities.
Christianity is NOT a form of 'primitive Marxism.' That is not -at all- how
actual Christians
see the world or their place in it. The animating idea is helpfulness to
others, not
something else even though sometimes bad people may need a good swift kick
or much worse. Speaking personally, it was an outrage that at least a
representative
number of unethical leaders of finance capital were not convicted of felony
crimes
for their part in the economic disaster of 2008-2009 and given lengthy prison
sentences
for their gross malfeasance and irresponsibility with the resources of
America's people.
However, while "justice" is decidedly part of the picture, intrinsic to
Christian faith,
Christianity cannot be reduced to a movement that seeks social justice.
It is multi-dimensional and intensely personal. You can say that Christian
faith
is mostly about relationships, between men and women, between parents
and their children, between elders and the young, between friends,
between leaders and the people they have responsibility for,
between stewards of wealth and those who depend upon them,
between teachers and their students, but most of most of all,
between a Christian and Jesus.
In practical terms, what Christians have traditionally sought for is conversion
of people
to a faith in which they also seek the best for other people. It has never been
anti-corporation, for example. The ideal is to awaken the spirit within so that
those with wealth or power want to share their blessings with others.
Needless to say, this does not always work. Sometimes faith is virtually
powerless against
the effects of greed, envy, selfishness, ego-centeredness, status seeking,
and
a laundry list of other sins. Hence, following a number of comments that the
Apostle Paul said
about the legitimate place of government in our lives, many Christians of
history have
been avid political reformers. That was certainly true for Teddy Roosevelt as
it was for FDR,
and it was true for Truman and Eisenhower as it was for any number of 19th
century
political leaders. And not just Democrats or Republicans; the Populist movement
of the 1880s and 1890s was also Christian in inspiration. As was the early
Socialist
movement in America -with the caveat that it could also be a reform movement
in some places which was animated by Jewish faith.
Now, however, on the O-so-enlightened Religious Left, what Christian faith is
really about
is, in the words of the Episcopal article, "challenging the power of coal, oil,
and gas industries
and the big banks."
How about reforming these industries and businesses?
But that is not the Gospel that the Religious Left preaches, instead we get a
call
to "resistance."
We also get a call to "reconciliation," but with whom? We are not told -even
if we
can guess: Other Left-wingers with whom we already agree about most issues.
In other words, "liberal Christians" are neither liberal nor seriously
Christian;
they are Cultural Marxists in drag.
-------------------------------------------------
Finally, let us return to Michael Bird's critique of 'liberal Christianity.'
"The world looks on with a crooked smile as the liberals acclaim their entire
concurrence
with all the values of the left-wing intelligentsia." And this is the crux of
the problem
even if there is more to the story.
Such as the postscript, that "tragically theological liberalism claims to offer
patronage
to a group of intellectuals who no longer want it." Bird then added an
observation that
should be updated for 2018, he wrote in 2011, but his point is as relevant as
when he
wrote it:
"By removing a personal and speaking God from the church, they [Left wing
'Christians']
have nothing to say to people that they can’t already hear from Oprah, John
Stewart,
CNN, or the New York Times."
Liberal Christianity, so-called, is "morally bankrupt." Not always, not in
every case,
and the efforts of Oregon's Rev. Dan Bryant, despite his theologically
incoherent views,
has done a great deal to act as a leader in a serious effort to put an end to
homelessness
in the city of Eugene, which is more than can be said of anyone else locally.
Yet Bird's
observation rings painfully true most of the time:
Usually it is "Catholics and Evangelicals who actually do ground zero work in
social care."
And who adopts more interracial children or who among white Christians adopts
the most black babies? Hint, it isn't "liberal Christians," it is Evangelicals;
it isn't even close
But generally "liberalism had nothing of any value to give to ordinary people."
And it isn't just Bird who made this observation; Martin Luther King, as far
back
as 1948, said almost the exact same thing, and that at a time when Christian
liberals
still were Christians. Even then, however, minus counter examples like
Schweitzer,
Christian liberalism was, at heart, often (or very often) simply a religious
affirmation of the views of the political Left. And, although with
qualification for
specific issues, who needs that? Just as it would be folly if a form of
"Christianity"
simply offered a gussied up version of the principles of the political Right.
As for the intelligentsia, Bird said that he had been to enough meetings with
this crowd
and what he always heard was "religious discourse [that] sounds like a cross
between
Marcion and Marx. Why would you get up early Sunday morning to listen to that?"
The rise of liberal Christianity in the 19th century was partly a movement to
elevate
Jesus among the peoples of the non-Christian world as someone with the status
of moral exemplar for all mankind.
This was part of the interfaith movement of that time which first climaxed at
the
World Parliament of Religions at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893.
The objective was to seek grounds for mutual respect between the religions of
the world,
or among many of those religions, for the common good.
Even at that time many people realized that religious parochialism and
antagonisms
were dysfunctional and militated against "peace on Earth and good will toward
men."
And women.
But that Jesus was also Christ crucified, Christ who sacrificed everything for
the sake
of others. That Jesus could also accept others; this is certainly one valid
interpretation
of John 10: 14-18, the passage about "other sheep not of this fold."
And Jesus is described in the Book of Hebrews as the new Melchizedek, a
Canaanite
high priest who definitely was not a Hebrew, and certainly not an Anglican or
Lutheran
or Baptist of Catholic or any other kind of "Christian" as we understand the
term.
Which is to say that Jesus himself was outside the fold as people of his time
comprehended the concept.
Jesus could plausibly be the moral exemplar for all humanity. Again, to speak
personally,
this would also mean that Gautama could serve as the Tathagata, the teacher to
all mankind, and Zararthustra as the prophet for mankind, and so forth.
This would leave out what should be left out, which primarily means Islam,
but otherwise it opens the door to human brotherhood as widely as thinkable.
This is a faith that, while it takes a variety of different forms, nonetheless
shares
a common morality to serve us all -well into the future, as far as we can see.
But that Jesus is dead, 'liberal Christians" have killed him. At least he is
dead to
'liberal Christians.' They now promote as Jesus the illegitimate offspring of
Marx's daughter
and Herbert Marcuse, a creature whose 'gospel' consists of "anything goes"
libertarianism
and amoral nihilism. "Liberal Christianity" is a travesty of liberalism
and a travesty of Christianity. It is high time to call it what it is
and leave it in the dust.
And it is time to "re-invent" Christianity itself, that is, for Christian faith
to be regenerated, to be renewed for the 21st century and for the many
centuries to come.
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