I'm sure you've heard someone ask to speak to the manager.
As this week is coming to a close, I’ve been asking myself, “If I were the manager of the progressive Christian movement in America (which, of course, I am not and do not want to be), what instructions would I give it?”
I've come up with five suggestions for progressive Christians collectively in America.
You may agree with them, you may not, but here's what I've been thinking about.
If we want to have a greater impact on this nation, if we want to undo some of the damage, if we want to offer something compelling, here are some things we can do:
1) We need to give people a sense of community and shared purpose.
Fifteen years ago, I was in a youth ministry workshop with Kara Powell, and she said something I’ve never forgotten: if you want young people to feel significant, give them something significant to be a part of. This is true of high school kids in your church, but it’s true of every human being alive on the planet. Purpose is persuasive. When we wonder why so many people, particularly young men, have gravitated toward a man and a movement that are predatory toward even them, it is partially because they have been told that they have a place, that they are part of something, that their voices are heard. Are we thinking about the felt needs of people and about creating something that will be an irresistible invitation?
I was at a church doing some consulting, and they were talking about the path to church membership. I asked them to begin thinking about how they can measure connection to human beings beyond their presence in a building for an hour on Sunday. From membership to partnership.
I shared that membership in a church is the last thing most people are thinking about, but every person they cross paths with is attracted to the idea of joining a movement. We don’t need to abandon our principles or alter our values, but we do need to stop trying to sell something no one wants. Community and significance are organic, relational, AND we need to do all that we can individually and collectively in giving people a sense that they're seen and heard and then giving them an opportunity to participate in something that is life-affirming and redemptive and measurable.
The reason that the MAGA movement and MAGA Christianity have had success is not because they have a better message, but because they have made people feel seen and understood and part of something, even if that acceptance was fraudulent and conditional and predatory. It has given a group of people who feel, whether rightly or wrongly, overlooked or alienated, like they were included.
2) We need a compelling prime motivation.
So, in other words, we need a fear substitute. We know that that's the engine that conservative religion runs on, so we need to give people something else.
“I miss hell.”
It was a startling admission coming from the longtime pastor of a 1000-member church in a bustling neighborhood just inside the West Philadelphia city limits, just a few minutes before a Sunday morning service. He’d punctuated the statement with a deep, throaty laugh, but he wasn’t joking as much as he was marveling at the admission as it was coming out of his mouth.
“Hell was helpful,” he said, his face growing solemn. “When I could leverage sin and hold eternal damnation over people’s heads, I could get them to do almost anything: volunteer, give, evangelize, vote—whatever needed doing. He explained that this fear was a kind of currency; a sanctified, ordained, and acceptable tool of explicit or just below-the-radar spiritual extortion. He went on to tell me that when his own faith shifted and his community slowly transitioned with him to a more progressive theology, he lost the ability to energize people easily through existential threat—and in a way he missed having something similarly catalytic to collectively move his people, lamenting that his congregation (while filled with engaged human beings who care deeply about the world), was far more passive than it had been before they get out of the condemnation business.
This is why the Conservative Evangelical movement in America is able to marshal its rank and file to vote for extremist candidates, to embrace nonsensical conspiracy theories, to tolerate abhorrent behavior from leaders, or to justify seemingly conflicting cruelty toward people: they’re terrified of getting it wrong and pissing off God. The fear of eternal torment (or the impulse to help other less morally-preferable souls avoid it) tends to drive religious people beyond what seems reasonable to more moderate believers or to the irreligious—and while it may be effective in mobilizing evangelistic outreach or moving voting blocks, it does little to perpetuate anything truly loving because it values conversion over conversation, and it’s also driving an exodus out of organized religion and we can’t ignore that.
But as people of faith, morality, and conscience, more than simply recognizing this unhealthy preoccupation with punching the ticket out of Hell, we also need to provide an equally compelling alternative that can motivate people around the threats against vulnerable humanity: communities where preserving bodies become as pressing as saving souls; places deeply spiritual people who know that for hungry people, salvation is a place of rice and beans, for exhausted sea-battered migrants, it is a soft bed on solid ground—can gather. The future of organized progressive religion has got to be built on something more redemptive than damnation-avoidance. It has to create urgency over something besides escaping wrath, because those returns are ever diminishing and really easy to weaponize against people we don’t like.
Can we generate urgency and motivate people through a message that focuses on protecting humanity and the planet?
3) We need to become better storytellers and story sellers.
MAGA is MAGA because… well, MAGA. Whether it’s Make America Great Again or America First or culture war rhetoric against BLM, CRT, or Woke, the Right understands that people need a simple, digestible message that sticks. We don’t want to eliminate critical thinking or oversimplify complex issues, but we can’t afford to allow our arrogance or our intellectualism to prevent us from speaking the language of the people we’re trying to reach. In a culture that is increasingly reluctant to stop in any one place very long or dig tremendously deep, we’re going to have to find ways to meet with people with impact and immediacy. (Youtube: online services. Yeah, that’s what a twenty-three-year-old guy wants to do: sit down for an hour and watch church announcements, three choral hymns, and a children’s parable. (Edit the sermon down into 5 90-second clips, put some music behind it, and give it a compelling title. You’re not becoming something you’re not, but you are giving people an easy onramp to connecting to your community.
One church I was working with had a beautiful Pride Sunday, and the pastor gave a phenomenal message on standing with the LGBTQ community. It was bold and powerful and just the kind of message people outside the church would respond to. They posted the service on YT, and do you know what it was titled?: June 11th, 2024 Service. Wow, that’s gonna show up in all kinds of YT searches.
We have a great story, but we need to be wiser and more creative in telling and selling it. If you have a message you believe is worth sharing, you need to be unapologetic in making sure you’re not your own best-kept secret. Individually and collectively, progressive and moderate people of faith need to let people know who we are.
4) We need to fight our kingdom-building and self-cancel culture.
70s former pastor, lifelong Christian: Progressive Christianity has created an alternative fundamentalism, marked by the same territorialism, gatekeeping, kingdom building, glory seeking of the unhealthy systems most of us made our exodus out of.
The progressive faith/humane middle community truly is a big-tent movement, which is admirable; however, as a result, we are experts at carving ourselves up and dividing our collective influence and quieting our collective voice. If cancel culture exists, it is a self-inflicted wound. The last election cycle was a reminder of how tribal and parochial we can be.
Our daily newsfeeds are littered with knee-jerk Liberal objections to mainstream candidates and public figures: questionable past behavior, one-time verbal gaffes, or previous political positions that we've decided are certain deal-breakers. We immediately disqualify potential allies in the name of our personal values or religious beliefs, allowing no gray space for compromise, no personal evolution for people, and no possibility of future alignment with them. We passionately partner in the work of our adversaries.
Worse, we easily find ourselves violently fighting with one another over matters that are, in fact, trivial when compared with all that hangs in the balance. As I watch tribes of deeply entrenched advocates of candidates warring with other Democrats over semantics and minutiae, I realize we're still not paying attention to our recent history at all.
Meanwhile, the other side, as always, is simply circling the wagons, making concessions, consolidating power, and gaining traction—spirituality and morality and virtue be damned. This is why we're where we are today.
For all their sermonizing and finger-wagging, Conservatives have never allowed their personal morality to get in the way of a political win. We do not want to compromise who we are individually or collectively, but I think we need to pay attention to what the greatest win is, the most important battle that we're facing (which is defeating theocracy), and being strategic in fighting it.
5) We need to seek to become partners instead of seeking to become owners of a movement.
With the numbers and the trends and the changes, liberal Christians are never going to be more than a minority group within a fringe movement. And since we’re never going to have or want political power, we’re going to need to figure out how to consolidate our efforts with those of Muslims, atheists, Jews, and humanists: to wield our collective voice, to exponentially multiply our shared influence, and to allow our values to have an impact on this nation that we don’t get to take credit for.
1) We need to give people a sense of community and shared purpose.
2) We need a compelling prime motivation
3) We need to become better storytellers and story sellers.
4) We need to fight our kingdom-building and self-cancel culture.
5) We need to seek to become partners instead of seeking to become owners.
I don’t think progressive Christians want Progressive Christianity to win; we want the ways of Jesus to win. We want compassion and mercy and generosity and decency to win. We want diversity and equity to win. That is always possible.
Friends, we do have a message that is worth fighting for, but we’re going to need to be more culturally aware, less arrogant in our posture, more strategic in our methods, and most importantly, we’re going to need to find a new way of measuring what success looks like.
Things are difficult right now. The grief is heavy. The attrition is real. The concern is justified. But all is not lost.
We and the Nones and the Dones and the disenfranchised and the disconnected and the deconstructed are all feeling the same helplessness, frustration, and failure, but that is because we are forgetting that though we alone can’t push back this minority religious movement, we can be part of the broad coalition of the humane middle that can.
Answering the question Has The Christian Left failed, implies a finality, a hard pass-fail, but the story is not over. The failure is in giving up.
