SECULAR progressivism has colonised Christianity, and the resulting progressive faith has become the acceptable religion of middle-class niceness. Their desire is for a Jesus who fits in with their pre-conceived notions of what is right and proper, not the Jesus of the Bible.
Jesus spoke to those who were broken and hurting with understanding and compassion. He lashed with His tongue, and knotted cords, those who perverted the Bible and paraded their religiosity. Jesus was not a ‘nice’ man and Christianity is not a ‘nice’ religion.
Progressive Christians are today’s version of the Marcionite heresy, which rejected the harsh, tyrant ‘God’ who supposedly imposed the Old Testament on that stiff-necked people, the Jews. Marcionites even rejected much of the New Testament, reducing it from 27 to 11 severely edited books.
Traditional Christianity and progressive Christianity are two different religions. Progressive Christians are moralistic therapeutic deists who see the main goal of life as happiness and feeling secure and at peace. They focus on feelings and spurn the doctrinal claims that cause division. Religious observance is mainly effectual for building a sense of community among the disadvantaged, and providing a platform for social action.
Yet progressivism produces the very best Christians, or so they assure us. They are far too nice to say so directly, rather it is done implicitly by criticising all those who fail to share progressive views as lacking compassion or being judgmental and mean-spirited.
Through two millennia Christians have taught that abortion and infanticide are horrendous crimes, which should be suppressed by law. This belief is expressed in one of the earliest Christian books, the Didache (AD 65-80). It drove Christians to rescue infants abandoned beyond the walls of Rome because they were inconvenient, and to excommunicate anyone who took part in an abortion.
Progressive Christians even use Scripture to teach us that abortion is justified: ‘When people talk about “Our body is a temple of God, and holy” I see that as I have the right to choices over my body, and the freedom to make the decisions that are right for me.’ Their position is that abortion, although ultimately a matter of personal choice, is sad but no worse than detaining illegal immigrants.
Traditional Christians teach that sex is blessed by God only in a monogamous, male/female marriage, which protects children, the family structure and society. The progressive Christian, however, knows that Paul and Leviticus, the Church Fathers and councils, the Reformers and the great theologians throughout history were all utterly wrong, and probably bigoted homophobes. Sexual sins are increasingly seen as lifestyle choices, and those condemning such choices are usually projecting their own secret sins.
Throughout history until today’s more enlightened times Christianity, and Judaism before it, has wallowed in Pharisaical discrimination against homosexual people. It is the House of Commons, the media and film actors who are today’s moral arbiters.
Traditional Christians have deluded themselves with typically constricted binary thinking into imagining there are only two types of human, male and female. The progressive Christian knows, thanks to Facebook, that the situation is much more complex and that one’s gender is a fluid construct which must be accommodated and welcomed, however expressed.
Traditional Christians understand that man made in the image of God is the one truly responsible part of creation. As well as bringing immense opportunities of fulfilling our task mandated in Genesis 1 this also brings obligations, a major one being that we are held personally accountable for our actions.
The progressive Christian thinks society bears the responsibility for sin. All inequality is the fruit of the exploitation of the weak by the powerful, and is the ultimate source of sin.
Making moral judgments is repressive. Concerning making wrong moral choices, one female minister said, ‘I would have to honour the conscience of that person and walk with them through what they would choose.’ Making judgments about others indicates you are the one who is bad and a hypocrite because you do bad things too.
The early church and traditional Christians today teach that Christians should defend the common good. This includes controlling the influx of large numbers of people who might claim the hard-earned goods of the native population, replace their culture, or even persecute their religion. Early Christians didn’t demand that the Roman Empire admit the Vandals, Goths or Huns. Many even served in the army to keep them out, following the advice of unenlightened men such as Ambrose and Augustine
To argue this today is to invite opprobrium from the enlightened progressive Christian. If you do not wholeheartedly agree with their ‘welcome whoever shows up’ position, financially support them, change our laws to suit them, you are anathema.
Jim Wallis of the progressive magazine Sojourners, speaking of America’s immigration policies, says: ‘Trump is not the anti-Christ. He is too small. But what he runs – the politics – that’s anti-Christ.’ Wallis has admitted being funded by atheist billionaire George Soros as part of his Open Society ‘rented evangelicals’ initiative.
Some Catholics have the same position. ‘We are before the anti-Christ’, said a priest at mass in St Peter’s, Rome, of Italian Prime Minister Matteo Salvini because of his determination to stop accepting hundreds of thousands of Muslim economic migrants into recession-racked, unemployment-plagued Italy.
The progressive Christian ideal is an extremist faith which is unattainable in practice without destroying the Christian-based roots of Western society. Denying the right of nations and cultures to preserve their heritage, keep their freedom, and pass on to their children their faith, the progressive church, if allowed to retain control, would die out, and deservedly so. Unfortunately it would also bring huge collateral damage in its death throes.
