By Jeffrey A. Schooley
Regressing? What to do when there aren’t many pros in being progressive
I’m probably a progressive Christian. But I didn’t start that way. In fact, I didn’t start as a Christian at all. I [insert your preferred language for converting here] during my senior year of high school. And when I did become a Christian, I was pretty stereotypically evangelical. I got rid of my Eminem albums for KJ-52 because, you know, all white guys who rap are more or less the same, right?
As I grew in my faith, I don’t think I lost much of my evangelical zeal – I still believe that Jesus Christ is Lord and our only hope for salvation and the Kingdom of God is through Christ – but that zeal did continue to broaden and broaden to include what Jesus’ lordship means in every aspect of life. I thought this made me a good evangelical, but I soon found conservative evangelical friends didn’t enjoy the social justice-y stuff so much.
As I grew in my intellect, I also realized that A LOT of what gets passed off as truth in evangelical circles was not so much based on the life, mis
sion, and ministry of Jesus Christ, but capitalism and conservative American politics. So I started to push back against my conservative evangelical friends and found – when I did so – that I stumbled into a whole new world of progressive Christian friends. Somewhere along the line, I quit self-identifying as an evangelical because I could never extricate that word from its political baggage. And so, by default, I found myself a progressive Christian.
If I can paint with a broad brush, I find that conservative or traditional Christianity is quite often based on principles of reason as much as doctrines of faith. There may be no better example of this than the Natural Law argument for the prohibition against same-sex intercourse. The reasoning goes that – even if we didn’t have any biblical attestation about human sexuality – we could see from our basic physiology and biology how sex is supposed to be performed. Quite often, in conservative circles, these extra-biblical principles are so profound and important that – in the end – you don’t even need Jesus Christ to reveal truth anymore. He mostly exists to confirm truth as we already can see it and know it, if we’re just reasonable enough.
One of the reasons I probably fell in with the progressives is my general disdain for what people call reason. You don’t have to read far into any decent book on postmodernity to realize there are profound shortcomings in the traditional understanding of reason and that the Enlightenment project was a catalyst for sexism, racism, and prejudice against people with mental disabilities.
Continuing to paint with my broad brush, I find that progressive thinking (Christian or otherwise) has always been deemed as such because it went against the (presumed) grain of the universe. Progressives were the rebels, the questioners, even the prophets. They pushed against fundamental principles. They chipped away at oppressive foundations. At their best, they created change. At their worst, they at least got people to critically examine their unspoken presuppositions. This seems to me to be a good work.
But something is happening. Maybe it’s because postmodernity is now in its third or fourth generation, but progressive – which used to be mostly responsive to oppressive tendencies – has become so canonized that it has lost its prophetic flare. If the old progressives used to push against the grain of the universe, the new progressives are just cruising down the slippery slope of a new grain of the universe. They have created some sort of new natural law. The reasoning typically goes something like this: We know that ‘X’ is a social construction. Social constructions are sites of power relations where the powerful create contexts that continually reify their own power. The solution is deconstruction and education.
You’ll notice that progressives – especially progressive Christians – who employ this line of reasoning have as much need for Jesus in their thinking as the traditionalists who used to ply their natural law thinking.
So now I’m at an impasse. I don’t know if I was ever a progressive Christian in the first place, but I do know I shared certain affinities. Mostly, I appreciated the ways they constantly challenged the examination of those hidden assumptions that can rule our lives if they go unchecked.
But I am now seeing – undoubtedly what conservative Christians have been seeing for the past decade or so – that progressive is just another power relation. It’s just another name by which power can be reified. At the point that progressives got their own canon of thought and created a grain of the universe, they lost their prophetic edge.
So what are my options?
I still can’t be a conservative evangelical. Especially as I watch Donald Trump win evangelical vote after evangelical vote. It’s not that I care about politics (I’m fairly ambivalent), but if evangelicals really are hopping into bed with a man of such clearly poor character, then they’ve become atheists in their actions, if not atheists with their lips.
I think my only option is to be regressive. I just don’t see many “pros” in being progressive any more. I don’t want to be part of a body of people who spend more time peering into the broken souls of others while failing to challenge their own hidden assumptions. I don’t want to be part of a people whose solutions to all social ills is mere deconstruction and education. That sounds all too Orwellian for me.
Some might say, “Well, you could just try being Christian for once,” but that sounds glib and condescending – even in my head. It also presumes that I set out to be either traditional or progressive in the first place. I didn’t.
I came to the faith as a young adult. I came seeking to be authentic and faithful. I’ve followed those around me who best modeled what that meant, as best I understood it. All of this is inevitable in discipleship.
So, my dear readers, what are the options? Have any of you struggled with these thoughts and feelings? Do you have a place where I can belong?