Am I A Progressive?
Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash
We want to introduce you to Amar Peterman. Amar is a writer and public theologian. He is also going to be speaking at our 2022 Enfleshing Witness gathering in October. To get you better acquainted we share the following, originally published on Amar’s blog, “This Common Life.”
In a recent essay for Sojourners, Josiah Daniels offered several explanations for how his experience at a conservative Christian college made him a “leftist.” Daniels notes that after a year in college, he didn’t identify as a conservative Christian. Seeking an alternative, he found an emergent church that met in an old mall. “I knew friends and professors who identified as “progressives” had found a home there,” Daniels comments. “I started attending as well. But eventually, I realized ‘progressive Christianity’ was just as vacuous as conservative Christianity.”
While I am not a “leftist” like my friend Josiah, his concerns regarding progressivism resonate with me. I, too, knew that whatever “conservative” Christianity was, it was not for me. And, like Josiah, I ventured into the realm of “progressive” Christianity only to find it just as performative and empty.
The problem I see today is that “conservative” and “progressive” as identifying labels denote space and proximity to an idea or object. They are relative terms.
Let’s take my education as an example: While Moody Bible may be considered “conservative” in most contexts, placed next to Bob Jones University or Pensacola Christian College, it is far left. Similarly, Princeton Seminary may often be seen as “progressive” but placed next to Union Seminary or even Harvard Divinity, it may be labeled as conservative. Neither place is “conservative” or “progressive” on its own. It can only be defined as such when placed in context to something else.
The conservative-progressive spectrum, I believe, is a false binary used to categorize and make assumptions about those around us. Both “conservative” and “progressive” are handcuffs that align us with an in-group and ultimately distract us from thinking and acting with charity, nuance, and love. When we take on these identities as our own, we allow them to form our imagination of faith, our world, and the ideological “other.” We also place ourselves within the social commitments that these labels hold which limit our ability to speak truth in love.
While I do not think that this binary will ever go away, I do believe that our society and the church would do best to break free of these chains that bind us to ways of thinking and being that are rooted in the secular rather than the sacred. Our communion ought to be marked by Jesus Christ, not these false identifiers.
My hope in both my writing and faith practice is to follow the Spirit in our world today. At times, this may align me with what is “progressive;” in other circumstances, I’ll be “conservative.” But what is most important to me is loving my neighbor as I seek to follow and testify to God’s sacred and redemptive action in this diverse, complex, dynamically alive world.
