“Progressive” Religion Or Just Religion?

Last week HuffPo Religion‘s executive editor Paul Raushenbush wrote about a “stunning resurgence” of progressive Christianity. The right, he notes, had been the “default religious voice” of the final three decades of the twentieth century—but its loud, extended run may be over.

Why did progressive religion languish for so long? Ed Kilgore has explained this way: 1) the religious left is a smaller and less homogeneous movement than religious conservatism; 2) secular progressives have little use for religion; and 3) when political progressives do decide to reach out to faith groups, they generally reach out to conservatives.

This last challenge, Kilgore reminds us, tends to reinforce the belief of both religious conservatives and many secular observers that the only authentic faith traditions are those that identify godliness with patriarchal cultural conservatism and/or literalist approaches to sacred texts.

This discussion about progressive religion reminds me of the discourse around moderate Islam. These modifiers for religious identity represent an attempt to map spiritually motivated social engagement onto broader political trends in a way that distorts both religion and politics. “Progressive” is usually shorthand for the blue side of our nuance-flattening red/blue political division. When the term “moderate Muslim” is used, the person speaking or writing is usually a non-Muslim who is trying to gauge where Muslims fall in a stark “us vs. them” perspective on the world.

This conceptual polarization presents a number of problems for religious groups and their potential for political impact.

Using modifiers to characterize spiritual commitments—whether “progressive” Christianity (for example) or “moderate” Islam— promotes the idea that groups with progressive or moderate values are outliers within their own traditions. And, conversely, this rhetoric privileges the points of view of coreligionists who adopt a more insular or exclusivist interpretation of a shared tradition.

So modifying “Christianity” with the word “progressive” tacitly accepts (or subtly asserts) that the values of progressives aren’t at the heart of what Christianity is all about.

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