Skip to main content

Progressive Christianity is the non-alcoholic beer of religion

By Black Freethought ~

It's been awhile since I last wrote. During that time, I started to wrestle again with returning to Christianity. I thought I could deal with the cognitive dissonance by taking a more progressive view of the ancient faith tradition. I read materials from leading progressive Christian thinkers which basically told me that I could maintain and practice a non-supernatural version of the faith. After previously leaving the faith behind, I could no longer believe in those miraculous events. I discovered the "Ground of All Being" God concept from progressive theologian Paul Tillich. I thought that it was abstract and obtuse enough for me to be able to hold to the "good parts" of the faith while maintaining a non-supernatural outlook.

Hence, in 2016, I tried to practice Christianity by simply trying to follow the moral teachings of the Bible. However the deeper I got into the moral teachings, the more I realized how immoral at worst or nominally moral at best these prescriptive measures presented themselves. There really were no "good parts" to speak of. In addition, when I talked to my more fundamentalist peers I knew that when we spoke about God, we definitely possessed different viewpoints on this figure. They espoused the classic views while I was all abstract with Paul Tillich ideas about God. I soon began to realize that attempting to practice Christianity without the core beliefs of the virgin birth, resurrection, heaven, hell, Satan, original sin, and the like left me with a poor man's excuse of a religion. I felt like I was drinking non-alcoholic beer; it doesn't taste good plus you won't even get a buzz from it!

I found myself rejecting the fundamentalist interpretation of many core tenants of Christianity, yet I found the progressive interpretations just as lacking. Even as I returned to the pulpit, attempting to preach with the same fire and passion from a progressive position that focuses on helping the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized has merits but it lacks staying power because people prefer other less engaging topics. The more I tried to teach lessons from the progressive side, I realized that I disagreed with both progressive and traditional views because I no longer possessed a need to follow these teaching.

I tried to justify my rationale for continuing with Christianity because as an African-American, the Black Church was traditionally the one safe space where I didn't have to worry about the racism and struggles that awaited once I walked outside those doors. However, I began to question if the Black Church really was a safe space or was I simply believing a narrative that continually repeats itself within my community. When I think of people with non-traditional views of God, poor folks, LGBTQ community members, single moms, and others, I see that the Black Church really didn't provide a SAFE space for them to grow without shame.

As I began to consider my own experiences within the Black Church, I never felt accepted. Although Christianity/Church teaches love, acceptance, and nurturing, I did not truly ever feel any of those things. What I experienced was heartache and pain over and over again. I can relate to what Charlie Brown felt every time he thought Lucy would allow him to kick the football: pain, embarrassment, and rejection. The so-called love, acceptance, and nurturing would only come when people embrace an orthodoxy(a correct belief). Those who spoke out against the local church orthodoxy were shamed or rejected to force them to leave.

I found myself rejecting the fundamentalist interpretation of many core tenants of ChristianityAfter being away for about six years, I thought that this time would be different, the big tent of Christianity is enough for me to have progressive views along with a non-literal view of scripture. Instead, I discovered that I have evolved past this old and feeble religion. This belief system no longer had power over me, yet I still tried to bring change into this faith-based institution. I found out that the voices of change in the Christian community are small in number and eventually get silenced. The traditional views win by sheer numbers and influence. Besides, the watered down progressive views do not instill the same fear or respect that the fundamentalist views do.

Hence, it made no sense for me to continue down a road where I would be fighting an uphill battle against those who value tradition over progress or stability over change. The funny thing is even as a progressive Christian, my views still stood in opposition to many of my family and friends due to their maintenance of traditional Christian ideas. In order for me to have acceptance from those in my circle, I would have to hide my opinions, just like I did when I was previously a non-theist.

It occurred to me that when people truly care, accept, and embrace you, they do it fully without conditions. These people in the Christian community never truly embraced or accepted me even when I was a fundamentalist. Why was I steadily trying to gain acceptance from people who cared more about my beliefs than who I was as a person? It was a Sisyphean task to say the least and one that I no longer wanted to labor with.

As much I thought the progressive side of Christianity would appeal to my very liberal sensibilities, I found that there was more cognitive dissonance on the left than on the right. At least on the right or fundamentalist side, all I had to do was to cut off my thinking, shut my mouth, and believe.

A progressive view of Christianity still came from the religion which stripped my distant West African ancestors of their indigenous culture and created the conditions for Jim Crow racism in the United States. No amount of anti slavery interpretations of the scriptures and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speeches can ever change the reality of Christianity.

It boils down to this: Whenever I take the time to actually think about the world and the human condition, the position of Christianity becomes harder and harder to maintain. Contrary to popular belief, the more I studied scripture, the more faith it took for me to believe in the garbled text. As a Black man, I see how Christianity, White Supremacy, militarism, and uncontrolled capitalism have created the conditions that have afflicted people in our society. I am done trying to justify why I believe in a God who endorses genocide in the Old and New Testaments all while claiming to love humanity.

After spending a great portion of 2016 dabbling again with Christianity, I end the year firmly as an atheist, never to return that way again.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two