Back When "Progressive" Meant Hope, Change, and Creativity.
The first time I started labeling myself a "progressive Christian," my evangelical church was very confused. Understandably.
The other day I shared about my experience of growing out of the evangelical wineskin that had adequately contained my wine (aka, my religious self) for nearly 30 years.
Today I want to pick up where I left off and say a bit about the container that held my religious self for the next dozen years: progressive Christianity.
In Search of New Wineskin
Let’s go back to 2012.
I’ve got this new wine that’s been fermenting for several years—aka, religious beliefs and spiritual intuitions that no longer map on to much of my previous evangelical, baptist Christianity. However I don’t yet have a wineskin to hold it. To nurture it. To age it to full maturity.
As I said the other day, labels can be really helpful. Conversely, it can also feel rather disorienting to not have a label. Sure, it can be freeing too, of course. But we are tribal creatures, and I longed to be part of a group.
Several years prior to that time in my life I can recall (for the first time?) stumbling across the idea/concept of “progressive.” That would’ve been during the lead up to the Obama election of 2008, and at a time in my life when I was very politically naive. All I really knew about politics was a general hangover from my time in college, which was that everyone loudly and proudly supported Bush. Except for one guy, Tad. Tad walked the dormitory halls of Farrar Hall exclaiming his enthusiasm for John Kerry, and I remember being thoroughly confused.
Confused, but not curious.
Recall that I was a good fundamentalist evangelical back then. Getting curious about anything other than how to further theologically support your already held presuppositions was frowned upon.
Anyway, the ‘08 election neared and I’d just recently started my job at an evangelical megachurch in Arizona (well, mega-in-the-making, we weren’t there yet), and I start hearing this term progressive.
Enthusiasm for Being Progressive
For reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time, it struck a chord of resonance within me. There was something about a movement for change and hope… something about the idea of “progress…” that made sense to me.
Not just politically but spiritually.
You see, I believed then (and I still do now) that our best days are ahead of us. As individuals, as communities, as societies, as a planet. I believe in the power of love. I have hope for peace and reconciliation. These are core values of what I think it means to be a Christian.
I also remember seeing the way that the Obama movement reached out across multiple demographics. The plurality coalitions of race, gender, socio-economic status and so on struck me as quite “Kingdom-y” in its diversity.
I realize that may be a rudimentary assessment (of both the Obama coalitions, and, of the demographics of God’s Kingdom), but as I’ve written about before, the Bible illustrates over and over a God who prefers diversity.
So when I saw something that looked and felt diverse, and that talked about change, and that seemed to ignite hope in myself and others… well, forgive me for saying it, but doesn’t that sound like the trajectory set by Jesus and chased after by the early church?
Don’t mishear me, I’m not comparing Obama to Jesus. What I’m saying is, the movement happening in/around that time conjured up the kinds of emotions and imaginations that, in my estimation, map on pretty well to what it looks like when we seek the Kingdom of God on earth (as it is in heaven).
All that to say, while I didn’t have much of a grasp back then on what it meant to politically align with the left or the Democrats, I nonetheless became fond of the label progressive.
What Did Progressive Mean to Me?
Back then I would’ve described being progressive as being about and for things such as:
hope
change
growth
transformation
diversity
equality
movement
creativity
tolerance
It was more of a mindset.
A vibe.
An orientation.
To say it again, it was about this insistence that progress is both possible and desirable.
It also seemed to me a healthy corrective for some of the ways in which our country had stagnated around sameness. We live in a beautifully diverse country, and yet so many of our systems and our institutions disproportionately benefit the same kinds of people over and over again. And the people who run and lead these institutions also tend to look the same.
At the risk of oversimplification:
Uniformity and sameness are signs of Empire.
Diversity and difference are signs of God’s Kingdom.
When I first started (secretly) identifying as a progressive back then it felt generative. Being a progressive meant that I looked at the future and said, “What can we create… together?” It signaled dreaming and imagination for what could be.
Rather than stick with the status quo, a progressive posture asked, “What’s not working for the maximum flourishing of the most amount of people, and how do we fix it?”
When I read the Gospels and study the historical Jesus it’s hard to not conclude that, in his day, and as it related to his posture/attitude toward the religious elite, Jesus would’ve been very much seen as “progressive” for his time. Not progressive as in the label/identity that we think of it today, but progressive in the adjective and verb senses.
His teachings, his actions, his attitude, they all had this way of calling the stagnant waters of his community to stir up, be renewed, and do better.
As a follower of Jesus I found myself likewise drawn to a posture of, “Where has the church missed the mark? Where have we forgotten the plot? How might we be leaving certain people behind or on the outside?”
My First Evangelical Pushback to “Progressive”
I think it was around 2010—about two years after I started thinking of myself as progressive, but still a year or so before getting fired and leaving evangelicalism altogether—when I first got confronted by the reality that not all evangelical Christians like myself thought “progressive” was a good wineskin.
At that time, in addition to my role as the Worship & Arts Pastor, I was also our church’s de facto tech/comms guy and in charge of our website and newsletter. One afternoon I sent out a newsletter about some upcoming events and I included a blurb about a refresh on our website.
The refresh (which I oversaw) included new copy (which I wrote). All fine and well, except that when you clicked on the “About Us” link and read the description I wrote about our church… well, let’s just say some folks had objections.
I called our church—an evangelical (and by now) megachurch in the heart of wealthy, conservative Arizona—a “progressive Church.”
The people were not having it.
And I don’t blame them for being weirded out. By that time, at a larger cultural and societal level, the term “progressive” had nearly become synonymous with “Democrat.” Yet I still hadn’t fully understood that. To me, I was still very much vibing with the general energy of being progressive. Not being a progressive.
And our church was, in some ways, actively doing progressive kinds of things. Our Lead Pastor would regularly write the local paper decrying the dehumanization of prisoners and women by Sheriff Joe. We would do incredible missions-style work over in Africa (less focused on saving souls and more focused on medical care, and putting shoes on barefeet, and training leaders). We put a lot of energy into racial injustices, and talked frequently about the Kingdom of God as being here and now.
Anyway, in my mind we felt like a progressive Church. The quick and intense reaction of people from our church, when they read that description, told me I was very much wrong.
Because for them “progressive” meant things like killing babies and communism.
For them, the religious convictions of evangelicalism and the political intuitions of progressivism were at odds with one another.
I saw “progressive Christianity” as a way to articulate a modern day manifestation of living out the teachings of Jesus in 21st century America.
They saw “progressive” Christianity as an oxymoron at best, and absolute heresy at worst.
Obviously I edited the website when I realized my error, when I understood that that term meant wildly different things to them/me.
But it was a kind of Rubicon crossing moment for me.
Though I accepted that our church was not a progressive Christian church, it became clear to me that I, Colby, was nonetheless a progressive Christian.
At first that just meant “progressive” as in “the things listed above.” But eventually that would come to also mean “progressive” as in “aligned with certain socio-political ideas and values.”
More on that later.
NORTH CAROLINA THIS WEEKEND
If you are in/near/around the Cary area this weekend then I invite you to come on out to one of three opportunities!
UnClobber Workshop
Saturday, Nov 8
9am - 2pmChurch at Cary Presbyterian (where I’ll be preaching)
Sunday, Nov 9
10:30amAuthor Event (Not an Oxymoron) right after church
Sunday, Nov 9
11:30am