It's Not Looking Good for Liberal Christianity

Date July 18, 2006 Posted by Amy Hall

It seems that liberal Christianity is not the wave of the future that so many people predicted, as Charlotte Allen explains in her LA Times editorial: Liberal Christianity is paying for its sins.  [Please note that I know of many orthodox individual Presbyterian and Episcopal churches (and grew up Presbyterian!), so the following doesn't describe every individual church.]

 

What sins, you ask?  Some examples:

 

The Presbyterian Church USA, at its general assembly in Birmingham, Ala., was turning itself into the laughingstock of the blogosphere by tacitly approving alternative designations for the supposedly sexist Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Among the suggested names were “Mother, Child and Womb” and “Rock, Redeemer and Friend.” Moved by the spirit of the Presbyterian revisionists, Beliefnet blogger Rod Dreher held a “Name That Trinity” contest. Entries included “Rock, Scissors and Paper” and “Larry, Curly and Moe”….

 

The Presbyterian Church USA is famous for its 1993 conference, cosponsored with the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and other mainline churches, in which participants “reimagined” God as “Our Maker Sophia” and held a feminist-inspired “milk and honey” ritual designed to replace traditional bread-and-wine Communion.

 

As if to one-up the Presbyterians in jettisoning age-old elements of Christian belief, the Episcopalians at Columbus overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord. When a Christian church cannot bring itself to endorse a bedrock Christian theological statement repeatedly found in the New Testament, it is not a serious Christian church. It's a Church of What's Happening Now, conferring a feel-good imprimatur on whatever the liberal elements of secular society deem permissible or politically correct….

 

The result of incidents and positions like these is a drastic drop in the percentage of protestants in mainline churches from 40% in 1960 to 12% today:

 

Some of the precipitous decline is due to lower birthrates among the generally blue-state mainliners, but it also is clear that millions of mainline adherents (and especially their children) have simply walked out of the pews never to return….

 

Incidentally, why the correlation here between blue states and mainliners?  Did liberal Christianity lead to blue-state conclusions, or did blue-state thinking lead to liberal Christianity?  Or is there a third factor involved, connecting the two?

 

When your religion says “whatever” on doctrinal matters, regards Jesus as just another wise teacher, refuses on principle to evangelize and lets you do pretty much what you want, it's a short step to deciding that one of the things you don't want to do is get up on Sunday morning and go to church.

 

Read the rest of the article here.

Related posts:

  1. Liberal Feelings vs. Judeo-Christian Values
  2. Beautiful, Alive, True Christianity
  3. ETS 2008 – Mark Wittmer "Machen on McLaren: A New Kind of Liberal?"
  4. CBN Interview With Mike Horton
  5. Christianity Is Vile to Atheists
  6. Sensitivity Run Amok

Category Posted in Amy's Posts, Main Page, Religion (General), Theology

5 Responses to “It's Not Looking Good for Liberal Christianity”

  1. Tyler Watson said:

    July 18th, 2006 at 10:07 am

    I'm curious if you're aware of the book, Why Liberal Churches Are Growing, edited by Martyn Percy and Ian S. Markham? I haven't read it, but have seen it at a few bookstores and thought it would be an interesting piece for y'all to have dialogue with. (By the way, the Amazon.com book description doesn't seem to match the title.)

  2. Amy said:

    July 18th, 2006 at 10:55 am

    I haven't heard of that book (and yeah, I think you're right about the description–LOL!), but I'm curious. I've never seen any statistics that suggested the liberal churches were growing in any significant way. It could be that they're growing, but at a much slower rate than the orthodox churches. That would explain why they're decreasing in the overall percentage of protestant Christians.

  3. Micah said:

    July 18th, 2006 at 11:57 am

    I don't have any statistical citations to back this up atm, but I'm pretty confident that as of the late 1990s the PCUSA had lost around 2 million members since the 60s.

  4. Tyler Watson said:

    July 18th, 2006 at 2:53 pm

    Yeah. I've heard that most denominations have been shrinking the last 50 years, with a couple exceptions. The book I mentioned stood out to me because it made a claim that didn't jive with the stats I've heard.

    The issue for me isn't whether a church is conservative or liberal, but orthodox. There are many fast-growing “conservative” churches that espouse and preach the Prosperity Gospel, which on certain days I'm ready to call heresey. There are other examples of “conservative” errors, but this is one example. Also, the piece that spurred this post lists female bishops as one of the errors of liberal churches, which is understandable, since the writer herself is Roman Catholic. I gladly affirm and encourage female ordination and would not put that in the same list as other errors the author mentions — I know that this stance is counter to many beliefs on this blog. Thankfully I, as only one person in the Church, don't get to determine what is heretical and what is orthodox.

  5. BornInZion said:

    August 23rd, 2006 at 8:35 pm

    Political liberals deny that there is true truth, so there would be little opposition from such a person to avoid uncomfortable truths of the bible in a liberal church.

    Political liberalism is mostly feeling based rather than rationally based. Such a person would be attracted to the “Love thy neighbor” part of the Gospel and tend to downplay the Jesus is the only salvation divisiveness of his message.

    To me, a blue state and liberal churches make perfect sense.
    Cheers!

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