The Babylon Bee, a popular and generally funny Christian satire faux-news site, blasted the PCUSA church’s affirmation of same-sex clergy by joking that they also “announced their official endorsement of pride, gossip, sorcery, covetousness, theft, and sexual immorality as a general category.”
Ouch. That’s my church you’re talking about, and I hope my pastor never sees that headline.
The folks down at Babylon Bee are not the only ones I’ve heard accuse progressive Christian denominations of being wishy-washy and “not serious about sin.” As I shifted to the left, I worried about that too, having heard it so loudly and often.
For that reason, I thought I might write about what we do “get serious” about, if not monogamous relationships between consenting adults.
A good place to begin is racial injustice. For many conservatives, that’s a bit of a controversy buzzword, somewhere between infant baptism and abortion. We’re not talking about Black Lives Matter, right? First, let’s go back to something a little less controversial these days, but which resulted in a big split not long ago.
Mississippi professor Morton H. Smith of Jackson’s Reformed Theological Seminary asserted that integration would lead to intermarriage and “destroy the divinely created diversity of humankind and help establish Communist domination.” In How Is the Gold Become Dim: The Decline of the Presbyterian Church, U. S. (1973), he wrote: “The fact is that slavery had been legislated in the Bible, and therefore the Presbyterians in the South refrained from condemning slavery as sinful. The same can be said of the matter of segregation. The fact is that God Himself segregated Israel from the Canaanites.”
This disagreement among conservative and liberal Presbyterians resulted in the split, with PCA leaders such as Smith and Nelson Bell supporting segregation, while PCUSA became the bad liberal side that called it sin.
Today, PCUSA supports Black Lives Matter for the same reason they opposed segregation, “to raise awareness of institutional racism in our society and the church.” Many Episcopal leaders such as Rev. Broderick Greers also proudly support it. So while there are plenty of individual members who don’t necessarily endorse BLM or everything the movement does, racism is still pretty high on the bad list.
Progressive churches also historically challenge misogyny. The first female Presbyterian minister was sent out as an “evangelical preacher” in 1893. That is, mainline denominations fought sexism and worked to create change 20 years before women could even vote. So as much as we are sometimes accused of bowing to popular culture, feminism wasn’t exactly cool in 19th century America. Today, we have nearly as many female as male pastors.
Churches like mine condemn ways of living and systems of governing that deny the divine image within us all. This does include pride, gossip, theft, etc. Episcopal priest Matthew Fox lists 10 sins he considers deadly, and I’ve chosen to highlight a few that seemed particularly poignant:
- Causing another person to suffer
- Ignoring, which includes choosing not to see, hear, or feel another person’s suffering
- Overindulgence; that is, not practicing moderation
- Severing relationships and cutting ourselves off from others
- Favoritism based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or profession
- Loss of passion, particularly for helping others
He concludes, “Sin is that which devours…becoming an addict or a slave to that which does not beautify us. Sin kills the flesh and dampens the spirit.”
Certainly not all “liberal Christians” believe the same things, and I can’t speak for all of us. And I’m not an expert, but this is an overview of what we generally try to avoid.
Even if the skeptical reader leaves thinking that mainline churches get it wrong, I hope to at least clear up the notion that we don’t take sin seriously or that we’ll let anything go. Some sins, like pride and theft, are viewed the same as in any conservative church. Some hot-button cultural issues are viewed differently. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t serious.
