In Defense of Progressive Christianity.

Pastor Dan at Street Prophets has an excellent (although lengthy) response to Charlotte Allen's opinion column in Sunday's LA Times about the death of progressive Christianity. It's worth reading. Here's a highlight for me:

...the modernist reading of scripture is a profound threat to conservative Christianity, for a number of reasons. Because it is an essentially democratic way of reading, it threatens the authority of pastors and church elders passing along The Truth paternalistically. And because it allows communities to read scripture differently, it makes a hash of the narrative of Absolute Truth on the march across the land.

We progressive Christians are really inconvenient. There are a lot of people who are quite heavily invested in the idea that all Christians care about is abortion and keeping the gay down. But here we come, with our little Bibles in hand, saying "well, umm, actually, in our church we like to accept people, and we seem to be more concerned about poverty than Ellen DeGeneres."

This infuriates right-wing Christians. It scares the crap out of them. They'd like you to think that progressive believers have submarined themselves with all their wild-eyed loonie beliefs, that our organizations can't attract anyone new, and we're all going to die out soon, before we have a chance to change anything.