Progressive and Conservative

...in politics and in Christianity

At “The Gospel Coalition,” Trevin Wax, in 3 Surprises from New Research on ‘Progressive’ and ‘Conservative’ Christians, highlights a new book – One Faith No Longer: the Transformation of Christianity in Red and Blue America. The authors are George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk, published this year (2021) by the New York University Press. Looks very interesting. Here are some excerpts from the book, interspersed with a few comments.

“Based on this research we highlight here that progressive Christians emphasize political values relating to social justice issues as they determine who is part of their in-group; they tend to be less concerned about theological agreement. Conservative Christians, however, do not put strong emphasis on political agreement in order to determine if you are one of them—their major concern is whether you agree with them on core theological points. The bottom line we seek to illuminate in this book is that progressive and conservative Christians use entirely different factors for determining their social identity and moral values.” (page 4)

Yancey and Quosigk “argue that the ways in which these two groups deal with questions of meaning are so different that it is time to regard them as distinct religious groups rather than as subgroups under the same religious umbrella.” (page 4)

“...the divide between theologically progressive and conservative Christians is so great that one can realistically think of them as completely different religious groups.” (page 5)

They begin in the “Introduction” contrasting two sons of prominent Southern Baptist preachers – Franklin Graham (Billy Graham) and Jonathan Merritt (James Merritt). How different Christians construct their social identities “help them to determine whom to include and whom to exclude as part of their social circles.” (page 3)

In their definitions of conservative and progressive Christians, the authors use theological rather than political criteria. Conservative Christians believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God and that Jesus is the only way of salvation. Progressive Christians reject the Bible as the inerrant word of God and deny that Jesus is the only way of salvation.

“A substantial part of how progressive Christians identify themselves is by exposing clearly what they are not—namely, conservative Christians.” (page 17)

Because of their approach, progressives easily accept non-Christians (members of diverse religious and non-religious groups such as Muslims and atheists) in their political circles if those non-Christians are politically progressive, while at the same time being very intolerant of conservative Christians!