In this article, I want to give my take on progressive Christianity and how it is likely to differ from the Christianity that has predominated throughout much of the last two or three thousand years of history.
My predictions and conclusions are based on my extensive study of developmental psychology, cultural and societal evolution, meditation and spirituality, along with nearly a decade of practicing and teaching meditation.
I hope this will be an inspiring and promising (and accurate) description of what is to come in the next few generations.
The Caveats
Before I outline my high-level ideas for what a community advocating progressive christianity would look like, I want to address some caveats first.
We must recognise that all expression of religion comes from those who participate in it, and is therefore a function of their worldview, values, beliefs, and ideas. There are around seven major levels of human development, each of which will create its own spirituality! In fact, all major levels have already been expressing their spirituality since the dawn of humankind.
As such, we can’t create a progressive Christianity and expect everyone to abide by it through laws or rules. This is a top-down approach that fundamentally disrespects other religious expressions and stages of faith.
I also believe it’s naive to think that suddenly there will be a “day of judgment” in which the whole world converts to progressive Christianity and we will live in everlasting Paradise. This shortsighted vision has always plagued us and our religious traditions and created remarkable fragmentation within the human family.
Evolution tends to work slowly and in mysterious ways. In the moment, it may be unclear how our actions contribute to the advancement of society. But looking back, the chain of evolution seems inevitable.
We must trust in that, more than in our own interest to impose progressivism on those who aren’t ready and who would just as readily impose their less-than-progressive ideology on us. In any case, this isn’t about ideology, but about enacting a spirituality that caters to the natural tendencies of our modern and postmodern sensibilities.
What we can do is create pockets of progressive Christianity, attract those who are interested, and slowly let it take root and propagate. Only those who are ready for this brand of Christianity will be willing to participate anyway. As we do this, we’re being the change we want to see, creating ripples in the ocean of society and culture.
As we do, we may slowly influence pre-existing religious institutions by showing them that spirituality can be inclusive, can fit with modern and postmodern sensibilities, and has a place in the world. Through osmosis, those institutions may then be transformed by our bold evolutionary actions.
In doing this, evolution is on our side: the tendency of humans is to evolve through the major stages of development. So, in building progressive communities, we’re enabling evolution to take its natural course, rather than distorting, blocking and warping it, like traditional religion tends to do.
The Need for Progressive Christianity
I also believe we’re experiencing a great need for progressive Christianity, and progressive religion in general, brought about by our own development into higher levels of human growth. This is especially true in modern countries.
Undoubtedly, the church is dead in much of the modern, informational world. We’re sick of traditional religion. In fact, we may be simply indifferent to it. It doesn’t even trigger us: we see it as a curious vestige of our collective past, one that should remain as such.
We’re at the point where entire generations are being born, growing, living as adults, then passing away, without a true life of faith or spirituality. Their faith is really a kind of anti-faith, consisting of ideas such as “The Bible is nonsense”, “Religion people are quacks”, “Faith is childish”, “God is a delusion”, and so on.
We might pat ourselves on the backs for not buying in to Biblical myths, but I sense that behind this appearance there is a corresponding modern malaise: deep down we yearn for transcendent meaning. Perhaps we even suspect that it exists but don’t know how to access it.
And as people move into modern and postmodern levels of development, they need spiritual community suitable for their level of growth. If not, they’ll feel deprived and unsatisfied.
Though we should celebrate the modern mutation of mind for ridding us of millennia of religious dogma, it should also be criticised for offering no real faith structure in return. It offers no convincing or empowering answer to the fundamental questions of why we are here, what life is all about, and what it all means.
Science does not and can not quench our need for meaning, at least not in its current elaboration. It does not provide us with a convincing “ultimate environment” in which all of life can be understood and grounded. It reduces all things to matter, and all matter to atoms (of which 99% is “empty space”), and all atoms to quarks and sub-atomic particles, and all quarks to strings… always kicking the can down the road, never quite settling on an ultimate environment.
It intrinsically tells us that our entire life is just the accidental product of material “stuff” that has no larger significance or reality to it – “It’s all just atoms after all,” “It’s all just random, directionless evolution.” However we look at it, the modern worldview is entirely divested of divinity.
That’s not to say we should naively adopt beliefs to fill the hole. We should, instead, come into direct contact with the answers to the questions of why, what, and what for. We should, instead, realise that faith traditions have always offered us methodologies for developing our faith life, ones that can be practiced within a modern and postmodern framework.
We can certainly make the argument that modern spiritual movements are flourishing, but I find many of them ignore or bypass the question of how to integrate them with long-established faith traditions. They’re still fundamentally caught in the modern trap of rejecting religion wholesale.
That said, the void of meaning offers one ray of hope: we’ve been emptied of the old, and are now empty. If our cup is already full, it can’t be filled. Our void of meaning has well and truly emptied our cup. This state may be painful and uncertain, but I see it as a kind of purgatory (pardon the pun): it’s a fertile ground for new elaborations of faith to appear, take root and flourish in the next few generations.
It’s fertile ground for non-sectarian, eclectic, practical, direct, metaphorical, non-dogmatic, non-religious religious practice (yes, non-religious religious practice). And that is where progressive Christianity comes in.
Let’s now discuss the features that groups involved in progressive Christianity are likely to exhibit.
Progressive Christianity is Personal
Before we begin, I want to reiterate that the following isn’t intended to be a prescription from on high. It’s my attempt at capturing what a typical community of this kind would look like. Since each of the key aspects of progressive Christianity has a psychological correlate, any change or principle or “rule” I suggest is likely to seem self-evident and be upheld in such communities regardless of whether it’s formally prescribed or not.
The first feature is that the group enables and permits personal freedom.
Many Christian groups operate from pre-modern, pre-rational assumptions, principles and worldviews. As such, the elements of their faith are grounded in Mythic belief rather than Rational deduction, their worldview is sectarian and insular, they espouse adherence and servility, prescribe rigid rules to live by, encourage abstinence and austerity, and build their system of truth on the literal interpretation of a single book.
It typically denies personal freedom: individual interests must be subsumed to the collective interests of family, faith group and church, and freedom is restricted when it comes to marriage, sexuality, and so forth.
An obvious feature of progressive Christianity is its emphasis on personal freedom. Under this view, marriage and parenthood is not a sin or hindrance to faith. Instead, progressive principles guide the way, and personal freedom prevails.
Men and women are treated equally, with no automatic hierarchy dividing the two. Homosexuality and gender fluidity is permissible both among followers and the leaders. It’s racially inclusive, welcoming people of all colours and backgrounds, and even of different faith systems.
In fact, it’s not even that personal freedom has to be explicitly prescribed: it’s that the rigid limitations typical of fundamentalist religions disappear, and adherents are simply free to live their life as they please.
Progressive Christianity is Metaphorical, Not Literal
Another feature of progressive Christianity is that the Bible and all Christian scriptures are interpreted metaphorically rather than literally. Though this may seem like a subtle shift, it signifies a dramatic change in how we approach spiritual life.
As mentioned, the predominant level of faith in Christianity is the Mythic. One of the reasons for its name is because it interprets teachings, maxims and stories literally.
This may seem confusing to people who are beyond this level of development in their growth, so let me explain what literal belief means. Regardless of how strange it seems, we should realise that this is just how the Mythic mind works. It simply can’t help but take things literally.
When the Mythic mind hears of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark, Moses’ Parting of the Red Sea, the Virgin Mary, and even the Resurrection of Jesus, it interprets these as being real, tangible, historical events that actually took place at some point.
In fact, the Mythic mind takes the Bible to be the 100% truth and word of God, a series of immaculate, unquestionable maxims by which life works and which we should follow in order to live correctly.
The literal interpretation of the Bible has formed the backbone of the Christian enterprise for hundreds of years, and likewise its demise is behind the church’s demise.
Of course, the Rational mind reacts to this angrily, denouncing belief in the reality of these myths as absurd and childish. Thus, we have the fabled image of Thomas Jefferson cutting up his Bible and creating his own, rational version.
The progressive, postmodern mind looks at these biblical truths and sees them as attempts to capture and transmit certain aspects of universal truth in a metaphorical way. While it may reject the reality of, for example, the Virgin Mary, it will attempt to find the deep spiritual truth enclosed in the Virgin Mary as a symbol.
The Bible comes to life once more. After the wholesale rejection at the Rational stage, the Bible is now seen as a kind of riddle: a transmitter of truths that can’t adequately be transmitted through mere words and symbols, an inducer of higher stages of consciousness and realisation.
I can’t go into detail about what the great Christian symbols represent in this article, so to find out more, please read my articles The Spiritual Meaning of Christmas and The Meaning of the Birth of Jesus.
You might like my episode on the symbolism of the Christian Cross.
Acknowledges & Integrates Other Traditions
Another key feature is that a progressive Christianity will acknowledge and integrate teachings from other spiritual traditions into the core of its teachings.
When we reach a certain level of faith stage development, around stage 5, we naturally begin to open to other faith systems and synthesise them into one giant web of teachings, pointers and methodologies. We start to see how they complement one another, how they differ, and how they ultimately point to the same realities though with different parlance, vocabulary, symbolism and practices.
Such a Christianity, as crazy as it sounds to Traditional or Rational people, will look to Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism, Judaism, Taoism, Zen and any other spiritual system to bolster and flesh out the symbology and practices that are typical of Christianity.
No longer will it proclaim that there is only one true way to God. Rather, it will recognise that there are a multitude of ways to God, and that God itself is just one symbol among many, a symbol for an ultimate reality that can never be limited to mere description or symbol.
From a slightly different perspective, such a Christianity will no longer see Christianity as being inherently superior or even important. The systems and symbols we use to describe God and help others to realise God are simply means to an end. If the means function well, we retain their essence. If they don’t, we look elsewhere for guidance and inspiration. If the means are too shrouded in religious baggage to function effectively, we discard them.
This may seem like I’m speculating or well-wishing or even being naïve, but integration and synthesis is the natural tendency of the higher stages of human development. It’s not a forced act: it’s an act brought by a recognition of the innate wholeness and complementariness of all systems of truth in all fields. That is, they were never in opposition to begin with.
In our case, progressive Christianity will recognise the innate wholeness and complementariness of all religious systems the world over.
It’s Practical
Finally, I can envisage that progressive Christianity will be an eminently practical enterprise.
The modern worldview has made people extremely skeptical of dogma and hearsay. No longer can these be used as an instrument for enforcing adherence or righteous behaviour, backed up by the promise of an everlasting paradise in some distant future.
Nowadays, people don’t want to believe. They want to know. They want to grow, understand themselves, make sense of life, build skills, see visible, practical results in their day to day life. They will only listen to an authority figure if that person is competent.
As such, I can see a re-emergence of widespread Christian practice: meditation and centering prayer practiced not to appease a judgmental God, but to encourage self-transformation. All symbols, stories and rituals will be channeled to the practical end of self-transformation and self-realisation.
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