A recent Religious Herald article [July 29] analyzes new research that predicts a coming rise in the number of religious progressives relative to moderates and conservatives. The analysis is troubling to me for a number of reasons.
First, it does not at all make clear the basis of this prediction. The evidence offered is recent survey data from the Public Religion Research Institute. Yet, on what grounds does the PRRI identify this coming shift? Is there some progressive groundswell of support coming that will shove the country’s religious landscape in this direction? Or is the research simply reflecting the fact that young people tend to more quickly identify with whatever are the progressive causes of the day and the current generation of young people is large?
Jonathan Waits
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It should be noted that the same young people tend to become less progressive and more conservative over time, so wouldn’t this perhaps point in the direction of an even further future conservative rise? The exact basis of their prediction would have been most helpful to know.
The second problem is a definitional one. Namely, how exactly is a religious progressive versus a religious conservative (to say nothing of a moderate) defined? Is the identification based mostly on theology, culture, politics, economics or some blend of all of these? What level of each is necessary to qualify for one label or the other?
For instance, what am I? Ithink gay marriage is an incompatible combination of terms and should be a nonstarter. So am I a conservative? I also think that the church has tended to treat homosexuals very badly, that they are fully deserving of Christ’s love, and that their homosexual identification and even activity presents no barrier to their initial taking up of the journey of following Christ. So am I a progressive?
I think Christians have a duty to care for creation and to be good stewards of the ecological gift God has given us, but I disagree strongly with oppressive economic solutions to so-called anthropogenic climate change. So am I a moderate?
This information would have been most helpful to know. Am I part of the rising crowd or the declining one?
The third and most significantly troubling aspect of the article was its tone. The tone of the PRRI findings was presented is that religious conservatives are a dying breed and if churches are going to thrive in the future, they need to become more progressive. As the author pivots to the challenge this presents for religious moderates — his real focus — the expert cited to frame the coming discussion is Brian McLaren, a religious progressive. Should we be at all surprised that McLaren’s advice is essentially for moderate churches to become more progressive in order to keep up? More action! Less doctrine! This will keep the young people coming.
Pardon me for not jumping up and down with excitement over this novel solution to the church’s problem. Perhaps we can frame things in slightly different terms. The church is struggling to connect with the culture as it drifts further and further from its more conservative moral foundations. More young people seem to be identifying with political causes currently in vogue on the political left which itself is becoming more and more openly hostile to traditional expressions of the church. How do we solve this conundrum?
Of course, we identify the church more with the same political and cultural causes and the young people will be more inclined to associate themselves with the church. If we’ll just capitulate to the culture more things will go well for us. That advice has a familiar, ancient and devious, ring to it.
The PRRI’s particular solution to the challenge of the increasing popularity of religious progressivism is to provide people with “more-action oriented, and less doctrinal, expressions of faith.” I have written previously about the folly of eschewing doctrine as the PRRI does, along with McLaren and other like-minded religious progressives. But to put a simple question to this: why not have both? Why not offer young people expressions of the church that are doctrinally clear and vision-driven?
I would argue that young people tend toward religious progressivism not because they’ve thought through all their ramifications, but because they are looking for a place to combine their desire to be involved in a religious community with the progressive ideology they have been fed with a spoon through primary and secondary schooling, and with a fire hose at the university level. Perhaps what they need isnot more progressivism, but clearer defenses of the merit of religious conservatism.
Raised in a mush-minded media-saturated environment, most young folks hunger for a clear, vision-driven purpose. Unfortunately for the religiously conservative and moderates, progressive causes like so-called gay marriage rights, saving the environment, getting rid of guns, effecting income equality, and the like, with the help of loud media megaphones, are the clearest visions on the block right now.
The solution to all of this, then, is not, as seems to be suggested for Cooperative Baptist Fellowship churches (apparently conservative churches are simply counted as hopeless), to become more progressive in order to better fit in with the current political, cultural and economic tastes of young people. The solution is to offer them a competing vision for advancing the kingdom of God that is rooted in historically orthodox understandings of Scripture which do not subjugate its meaning to current fashions and is clear, compelling and attractive.
Baptists may have once been more progressive, but when political progressivism left behind biblical orthodoxy in the days of the Social Gospel thanks to the leading of influential German theologians, Baptists tended to courageously side with orthodoxy leading them to become more politically conservative. As a result, Baptists have tended to have the most active, growing and vibrant expressions of the church around. But, in recent years, we have indeed lost the vision and therefore lost our cultural appeal. The solution, now as it was then, is not progressivism, but vision-driven orthodoxy.
Jonathan Waits ([email protected]) is pastor of Central Baptist Church in Church Road, Va.