Category Archives: LGBTQ

Sex and the Single Christian (A New Christianity? Part 3)

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In this essay I continue my review of David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity, this time focusing on a single chapter: “Sex: From Sexual Purity to Covenant Realism.” It would take a small book to deal thoroughly with the substance and rhetoric of this chapter. Almost every sentence calls for comment. In some cases the choice of one word instead of another places Gushee and me worlds apart. I will try to distill Gushee’s essential argument as efficiently and fairly as possible before I offer my critique.

Introduction

Gushee opens with a rather contemptuous summation of evangelicals’ view of sex: “no sex for no body outside straight marriage” (p. 119; emphasis original). The double negative in the expression “no sex for no body” seems intended to give the impression that evangelicals are a bunch of backwoods hicks hailing from somewhere in hills of flyover country. And the reference to “straight” marriage, which a few years ago would have been considered redundant, needles those who adhere stubbornly to marriage as it has been understood for a thousand generations. The evangelical view of sex, according to Gushee, has caused great suffering for LGBTQ people and shame for young people, gay and straight, who cannot live up to it. In this chapter, Gushee argues for a sexual ethic “that sets enthusiastic mutual consent as a floor and covenant marriage as its main norm” (p. 119).

The Bible on Sexual Purity

Gushee admits that Paul teaches that for Christians there should be “no sex for no body outside straight marriage.” Jesus’s strict teaching against lust and divorce in the Sermon on the Mount tends in the same direction. In the hands of evangelicals, however, the New Testament texts are made to imply not only that sex “outside straight marriage” is forbidden but that it is dangerous, dirty, and shameful. But the Old Testament book of Song of Solomon celebrates the body and sex in graphic language. “We have tended,” complains Gushee, “toward too much Paul and not enough Song of Solomon, too much “spirit” and not enough “body” (p. 122).

Purity, Gender, and Sex

Drawing on Linda Kay Klein’s book, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free, Gushee argues that the evangelical “purity culture and abstinence-only sex education” movement of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was a spectacular failure. It made no difference in the sexual activity of evangelical young people as compared to non-evangelical young people. But it did “increase the experience of sexual guilt and anxiety and decrease sexual efficacy and satisfaction, especially among women” (p. 123). Additionally, the patriarchy associated with the purity culture facilitated “male sexual misconduct” and “clergy sexual abuse” (p. 123).

One observation before I leave this section: Gushee leads us to the edge of an inference that he does not explicitly draw: the odd characteristics, failures, and negative effects of the evangelical sexual purity movement in advocating the biblical morality of sex, casts doubt on the workability of the biblical view itself. As we shall see in the next two sections, Gushee actually makes this leap.

At the Intersection of Nature and Culture

Nature urges post-puberty young people to engage in sex as often as possible. But cultures recognize the need for rules to govern sexual activity for the sake of social peace and the welfare of children. Most cultures encourage some form of marriage as the best social arrangement to channel natural sexual desire toward socially productive ends. Marriage works best, however, if the gap between the onset of puberty and marriage is not too long. In contemporary America puberty happens between 10 and 12 years old on average but marriage is not contracted until around 30 years old. This means that there is an 18- to 20-year gap between puberty and marriage. According to Gushee,

Religious and cultural constraints cannot be expected to prevail over nature for twenty years, not even for devout Christians…We need a sexual ethic that makes sense amid today’s cultural circumstances but that still pays attention to the real problems that the Christian sex-in-marriage alone ethic was trying to solve (pp. 126-27).

Evangelicals and LGBTQ People: What Went Wrong

In their resistance to the gay rights movement of the 1960s, 70s, and 80’s, evangelicals used “hateful” and “disgust-producing rhetoric” to paint gay people in the worst possible light. Evangelical leaders seemed oblivious to the trauma and terror their rhetoric caused to the closeted LGBTQ evangelicals in their churches, families, and schools. What went wrong? Gushee answers that evangelicals displayed “an inability to deal with reality because the Bible did not appear to permit it” (p. 128; emphasis original). Evangelicals could not accept the “unassimilable reality” that a certain percentage of the population is attracted sexually to persons of the same sex. Scientists now understand that homosexuality is a “routine variation reported in all times and cultures” (p. 129). The problems that plague LGBTQ people do not derive from their sexual orientation as such but from the “stigma (and persecution) inflicted on this population” (p. 129). What needs to change is “not gay and lesbian people, but the cultural worldviews that stigmatize and harm them” (p. 129). Evangelicals need to change.

For this to happen, however, post-evangelicals must find “new ways of interpreting the Bible, ways that reinterpret the handful of condemnatory passages and elevate the many passages that potentially lead to better treatment and full inclusion” (p. 129). Tradition must be abandoned and replaced by “experience and other sources” as contexts within which to interpret the Bible’s statements concern same-sex activity. We must “adjust faith to the legitimate discoveries of science” (p. 129). The choice of dogma over people is driving believers out of the evangelical fold.

The exiles know that a religion that systematically harms vulnerable groups of people is not a good thing in the world. It is the opposite of Christian humanism; it is inhumanity in the name of Christ (p. 130).

Toward a Post-Evangelical Sexual Ethics

Gushee proposes a two-tiered sexual ethic. Covenant marriage should be the aspirational norm by which every other use of sex is measured. In covenant marriage, people pledge to take care of each other through thick and thin. For all the reasons cultures down through the ages have encouraged it, marriage is still the best place to direct sexual energy toward personal and social wellbeing. Although Gushee does not mention gay marriage in this immediate context, it is clear that he includes these marriages within his category of covenant marriage. He says,

I personally affirm that full acceptance of LGBTQ people is a nonnegotiable dimension of post-evangelical Christianity, and most others in this terrain seem to feel the same way (p. 130).

Covenant marriage may be the ideal, but any workable sexual ethic must articulate a minimum as well as an ideal norm. Young unmarried people will have sex, so we must provide guidance for those not ready for marriage. Gushee offers as a minimum standard this rule: sexual encounters should be conducted with “mutual enthusiastic consent,” because “irresponsible, exploitative, and sadistic sexuality is extremely dangerous. It can deeply harm others and self” (p. 130). Marriage is Gushee’s ideal, but he is willing to make “a concession to reality”: if “legal marriage is unreachable or unwise,” it would nevertheless be “best” for partners “to structure long-term romantic-sexual relationships in a covenantal fashion” (p. 133).

Interestingly, Gushee finds himself defending a more conservative position than fellow post-evangelicals Nadia Bolz-Weber, who recommends “sexual flourishing” as a new norm for sexual behavior, and Brandan Robertson, who considers polyamory (many sexual partners) as an acceptable Christian option. Gushee’s defense of his position, by the way, amounts to a plea not to go to extremes in reacting to the perfectionism of the purity culture. A plea, not an argument.

Three Critical Observations

1. Humanist, Utilitarian, Pragmatic, and Libertarian but Not Christian Ethics

Gushee is a professor of Christian ethics. He has written elsewhere on sex and marriage and other ethical topics. I’ve not read those works, but I am very clear that this chapter is not an exercise in Christian ethics. I am not speaking here merely of the fact that I disagree with his conclusions. Every argument, every observation, and every conclusion is based on avoiding harm and pursuing psychological/sociological wellbeing in this life. None of his conclusions helps us understand what we “ought” to do, none speaks of divine commands, and none roots our obligations in a Christian vision of creation, salvation, or redemption. Instead he uses “science,” psychological and sociological expertise, utilitarian thinking, and personal testimony to determine what are constructive and destructive—not right and wrong!—ways to use sex. The Christian language Gushee uses is ornamental and, without loss to the argument, could be jettisoned. The basic principle of his ethics (in this chapter) is consent. Even his ideal of marriage is derived from human experience of what works for this-worldly ends. Marriage is not “holy.” It’s not a sacrament. It’s not a mystery (Eph. 5:32). It is, rather, a beneficial social construct.

2. Misplaced Appeal to Science

Gushee appeals to facts, reality, and science in a way I find questionable. He takes the statistic about the number of LGBTQ people in the population as possessing moral significance. But it cannot carry such weight, because statistical studies describe what is whereas morality prescribes what ought to be. You cannot move from what is to what ought to be without introducting moral principles derived from sufficient moral grounds. His appeal to science is especially troubling. He implies that the discovery of the universal presence of LGBTQ people in human society parallels the discovery that the Sun, not earth, is the center of observed planetary movement. After Galileo, we had to reinterpret the biblical texts that seem to imply erroneously that the earth does not move and is the center of planetary motion. In the same way we must now reinterpret biblical texts that condemn same-sex activity…because we now know these texts are wrong.

But Gushee’s analogy between biblical references to empirical facts and its moral teaching is misplaced. For the parallel to hold, one would need to discover from some other source the moral knowledge that same-sex activity is good and right. And this source cannot be empirical science, for empirical science produces only empirical knowledge. Gushee does not explicitly admit that he relies on a source of moral knowledge of greater authority than the Bible, but he does so nonetheless. And that moral source is progressive culture as it comes to expression in the self-testimony of LGBTQ people.

3. Psychologically Implausible

Does anyone really believe that telling hormone-intoxicated teenagers that “enthusiastic mutual consent” is the minimum ethical floor for having sex and that “covenant marriage is its main norm” (p. 119), will do anything but clear the way for having sex early and often? What teenager would choose the hard way when their teachers tell them that it is morally acceptable to take the easy path? Can you imagine a responsible Christian parent telling their sixteen year old son or daughter, “Don’t have sex unless you are “enthusiastic and your partner consents”? Our sex-drenched culture has been telling them this for decades!

Shouldn’t Christian ethicists have something better to say?

Next Time: We will examine Gushee’s chapters on politics and race.

A New Christianity? A Post-Evangelical Progressive Vision (Part 1)

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In the previous two posts I reviewed a book by a far-left representative of progressive Christianity, namely David A. Kaden, Christianity in Blue. Today I will begin a review of David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2020; pp. 225). A Baptist, a “self-identified progressive evangelical” (p. 5) and a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University (Macon, Georgia), Gushee advocates a position much closer to traditional and biblical Christianity than does Kaden. As the book’s title proclaims, Gushee rejects evangelicalism and proposes a “New Christianity,” which he calls “post-evangelicalism.” This “new Christianity” is animated by a spirit of “Christian humanism.”

The book divides into three parts and nine chapters. Part one deals with the question of the sources of authority for theology and ethics. Part two deals with three central theological topics, God, Jesus, and the church. Part three explores the topic of ethics. I will briefly summarize each chapter and for the most part save my critical assessment until we have the entire argument before us.

Part One: Authorities: Listening and Learning

1. Evangelicalism: Cutting Loose from an Invented Community

According to Gushee, modern evangelicalism “was invented through a historical retrieval and rebranding move undertaken by an ambitious group of reformers within the US Protestant fundamentalist community of the 1940s” (p. 15). Evangelicalism, according to Gushee, “was never more than fundamentalism with lipstick on” (p. 27). From the beginning, the evangelical movement set its sights on recapturing American culture from political and theological progressives. By the 1970s, an “identity fusion” (p. 24) between white evangelicals and the Republican Party had been accomplished. However for a minority of moderate to left-leaning evangelicals, the overwhelming support of evangelicals (81%) for Donald Trump in the 2016 election “became a bridge too far” (p. 25). The evangelicalism of today is white, Republican, fundamentalist, sexist, homophobic, and racist. Evangelicalism revealed its true colors in 2016 and thus provoked a “massive exodus” (p. 28) that continues today.

2. Scripture: From Inerrancy to the Church’s Book

According to Gushee, evangelicalism’s union with right-wing politics is not the only thing driving the mass exodus. Its fundamentalist view of the Bible as “inerrant” creates huge intellectual, theological, and ethical problems for many people. Leaving aside the history and detailed description of the doctrine of inerrancy, the bottom line is that evangelicals accept the Bible as the Word of God, true in everything it asserts in matters of faith and morality. Gushee raises six objections to the evangelical/fundamentalist view of the Bible. (1) The Bible is obviously a human product, and “any human product is subject to human limits and various kinds of error” (p. 31). But Gushee does not for this reason reject the Bible as of no use to the church. In place of the doctrine of inerrancy, he proposes a theory of “limited inspiration” wherein “some scriptural texts consistently demonstrate that they are inspired by God because they prove so useful in Christian experience for drawing people to Jesus and his way” (p. 32; emphasis original). These “inspired” texts serve as a “canon within a canon” (p. 33). Jesus’s teaching that we are to love God and our neighbor serves as the criterion for what is canonical. (2) The Bible is a collection of ancient documents, written in three different languages and set in cultures vastly different from ours. Our attempts to interpret the Bible are beset by many exegetical obscurities and translation problems. Understanding the Bible is not as simple as “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” (p. 35). (3) The “Bible does not interpret itself” (p. 35). Human beings do the interpreting. Because human interpreters are “flawed, limited, and self-interested,” a post-evangelical approach “will emphasize a communal process of interpreting Scripture, which occurs in an ongoing conversation between individual Christians, clergy, scholars, and the historic church, with the help of God’s Spirit” (pp. 36-37).

(4) The Bible is the church’s book. These texts became “sacred” to the church “because they were believed to bear witness to Jesus and to help people find salvation through him” (p. 37; emphasis original). Gushee proposes an alternative way to understand the Bible as sacred Scripture to replace inerrancy: “That way is to recognize that the Bible is and always has been the church’s book” (p. 38). What does it mean to read the Bible as “the church’s book”? The next point sheds some light on this question. (5) According to Gushee, Christians can learn much from the Jewish way of reading the Bible. At least some Jews read the Hebrew Bible as “a dialogue between God and God’s people” (p. 39) rather than a one-way communication. Christians have a responsibility, claims Gushee, “to read texts in ways that bless rather than harm human beings” (p. 40). Gushee quotes Elie Wiesel with approval: “If even the most authoritative teaching, the most sacred text, leads to dehumanization, to humiliation, to harm, then we must reject it” (p. 40).

(6) Finally, the doctrines of the inerrancy and all-sufficiency of Scripture distracts us from seeking God’s voice in other places: “These include tradition, science, reason, experience, intuition, community, and relationships” (p. 41). Gushee continues: “The power of a narrow evangelical biblicism must be broken, but you can’t replace something with nothing. We need to open ourselves to other ways of discerning truth” (p. 41).

3. Resources: Hearing God’s Voice Beyond Scripture

It seems to be a defining characteristic of “progressive” Christianity of whatever stripe that it seeks insight into God’s character and will from sources in addition to Scripture. Moreover, progressives are willing to judge and correct Scripture’s teachings about God and morality in view of these other sources. In this chapter Gushee outlines “a new approach to listening for God’s voice and discerning God’s will” in sources other than the Bible (p. 45). He proposes three sources in addition to Scripture to which we should listen for guidance. (1) The first is internal to the church, its tradition, and communal life. Gushee does not advocate treating tradition as an authority to which we must submit our own judgment. He recommends that post-evangelicals “not bow before tradition, or dismiss it with a sneer, but to understand its shaping role in creating Christianity as we know it” (p. 50). That is to say, post-evangelicals need to develop a historical awareness of the forces determining their doctrinal and moral biases and the biases of others. Only then will they be able to listen seriously to the second and third sources. (2) The second set of supplementary sources for discerning God’s will are “reason, experience, intuition, relationships, and community” (p. 51), all of which are located and grounded in natural human capacities. Reason detects and rejects logical and factual contradictions even if those contradictions are found in the Bible. Gushee gives as an example the contradiction between the biblical assertions that God is love and the biblical command to the invading Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan. Experience also teaches what is good and bad, healthy and harmful, humanizing and dehumanizing, and what God’s will is and what is not. According to Gushee, the experience of LGBTQ+ people is a source of knowledge of God’s will and must not be denied on the basis of Bible texts and their traditional interpretation. (3) The arts and sciences can also serve as sources for hearing God’s voice. Post-evangelicals must take the conclusions of the sciences with respect to climate change, homosexuality, and other areas of scientific discovery seriously.

The Progressive View of Authority: A Preliminary Assessment

As will become even more obvious in the next chapters, the views that set progressive Christianity apart from traditional/biblical Christianity cannot be derived from the Bible. From where, then, do they come? In part one, Gushee makes it clear that progressive Christianity looks to reason and experience to justify its proposed changes to biblical/traditional Christianity. Hence the church’s traditional teaching that the Bible alone is the ultimate norm of Christian faith and morals must be rejected. To defend their progressive views, progressives reinterpret,* correct, reject, or even condemn the teaching of Scripture. God’s “voice” in personal experience, political movements, culture, and psychology in certain cases trumps Scripture. Apparently the “progress” of progressive Christianity depends on a constant flow of new divine revelations. It should not escape notice that these new revelations track almost perfectly, albeit a few months behind, with advances in secular culture and politics.

*To interpret means to explain an obscure text in other words and concepts clearer to the listener. The goal of interpretation is to unite the mind of the listener with the original meaning of the text along with its full implications and applications. To reinterpret usually means not merely to challenge older, established interpretations but to read an alien meaning into the text with as much plausibility as one can create. It is to hijack the accrued authority of a text and place it in service of a meaning more acceptable to the interpreter. Many reinterpretations involve distortion, deception, and downright lies.

Next Time: We will examine part two, “Theology: Believing and Belonging” wherein Gushee proposes progressive views of Jesus, God, and the Church.

Are Progressives the New Evangelicals?

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Since I finished my recent review of Roger Olson’s book Against Liberal Theology: Putting the Brakes on Progressive Christianity (July 15 and 19, 2022), I’ve wanted to write something on “progressive Christianity.” As you might recall, I criticized Olson’s book for not describing “Progressive Christianity” in detail. In the intervening month I looked for books, podcasts, and essays to see if I could detect a central theme or principle in self-described “Progressive Christian” materials. I discovered that progressive writers are quite diverse theologically. And this can be very confusing because liberals are always progressive but progressives are not always liberal. That is to say, some progressives deny outright or radically reinterpret traditional Christian dogmas while others confess them. What, then, do all progressive Christians (liberals and non-liberals) have in common that makes them “progressive”?

What Makes Progressives Progressive?

My answer to this question must be somewhat tentative at this point. But I will advance an opinion that may need refinement with further study: The “progressive” label as it is applicable to both groups refers to moral rather than theological matters. All progressives believe in the possibility and the fact of moral progress. Christian progressives believe that certain moral insights of modern progressive culture are morally superior to the church’s traditional moral teaching even if that teaching appears to be based on the Bible. Among these progressive changes are looser attitudes toward divorce, gender identity, casual sex, abortion, and homosexuality.

I dare say that most Christian progressives could not explain why modern progressive morality is superior to traditional moral teaching. Tradition just “feels” wrong to them whereas progressive morality “feels” right. Traditional morality “feels” oppressive, intrusive, judgmental, unfair, unrealistic, inhumane, and antiquated. And it produces unhappiness. Progressive morality breathes freedom and allows each person to seek happiness in their own way. And it frees Christians from having to play the role of the “morality police.”

It won’t come as a surprise to readers of this blog when I charge that Christian progressives find progressive morality compelling because they have–whether they realize it or not–internalized the fundamental anthropological principle that has animated the progressive movement for over 300 years:

In its inner essence the human being is free from all alien limits. Its self-appointed task in life is to liberate itself from all external limits and actualize its unique, inner self in the world. Its happiness depends on completing this task.

According to this principle, moral progress in a society is measured by how much self-determination it grants to individuals to pursue their happiness through self-actualization of their inner selves. Needless to say a progressive society will not inhibit the individual’s quest for happiness and, indeed, it will fight against all who would hinder this quest.

Are Progressives the New Evangelicals?

Modern evangelicalism was invented (perhaps reinvented) after WW II by evangelist Billy Graham and theologian Carl F. H. Henry. Between 1925 and 1947, “fundamentalism” had become a term of abuse hurled at conservative Christians. After the Scopes Trial, it became abundantly clear that the fundamentalists had lost the cultural battle and had been exiled from the mainstream to the cultural “backwater” of small town and rural America. Many fundamentalists dusted off their feet and retreated to their cultural islands. Fundamentalists were pictured by the national media as Bible-thumping, science-denying, overalls-wearing hillbillies. After the War, Carl F. H. Henry called on conservative Christians to return to the cultural center of American life under the name of evangelical. Evangelicals founded journals, learned societies, and colleges. They became professors, doctors, and lawyers. By 1976 they had become a significant force in American politics.

After 1990, however, the cultural influence of evangelicalism leveled off and began to decline. After 2010, that decline accelerated so much that the term “evangelical” has become in 2022 analogous to the term “fundamentalist” in 1922. For those enamored by progressive culture, evangelicals are homophobic, transphobic, climate-deniers, and white supremacists. Are such contemporary progressives as Jim Wallis, Jen Hatmaker, Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Rob Bell attempting to do to evangelicalism what Carl F. H, Henry and Billy Graham did to fundamentalism? Do progressive Christians aim to become the new evangelicals?

I conclude with a quote from a recent critic of progressivism:

For many departing evangelicals, progressivism feels new, fresh, and relevant. But it is actually not new at all—progressivism is only a replay of old-line Protestant Liberalism. This matters because their Protestant Liberalism is among the fastest dying religions in the world. Evangelicals are coming to Liberalism at exactly the moment that Liberalism is proving to provide no real life (David Young, A Grand Illusion: How Progressive Christianity Undermines Biblical Faith, Renew, 2019, p. 14).

I belief Young is correct in his contention that progressive Christianity is unstable and will lead inevitably to liberalism. Let me make a prediction: Progressive Christianity will not become the new evangelicalism. When a departing evangelical runs out of evangelicalism they achieve too much inertial force to stop in the half way house of progressive Christianity. They will move rapidly into liberalism and from there on into secularism. The progressive principle is not consistent with any philosophy resembling Christianity, for it is the deification of humanity.

Introducing a New Series: The Christian Moral Vision and the Ironies of “Progressive” Culture

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The Heart of Progressive Culture

After thinking for months about social justice and critical race theory in relation to biblical Christianity, the church, and parachurch institutions, my mind has turned again to the deep moral crisis that has engulfed our culture, especially the culture of the USA. My intuition is this: The center and driving force of the ascendant culture that dominates higher education, many state and local governments, most of the media, nearly all the big cities, popular culture, and entertainment is a moral vacuum that has been eating away for centuries at the moral foundation that guided Western civilization for sixteen hundred years. Despite its utopian rhetoric to the contrary, the ascendant culture offers no alternative moral vision to replace the one it is destroying. Its central moral principle is wholly negative: we must remove all limits and destroy all oppressors and oppressive structures. Supposedly, once all oppressive structures are removed, the authentic human self—hitherto suppressed—will be free to find complete happiness in expressing itself in uninhibited external activity.

The Secret

However as I will argue in this series, a principle that defines all limits as oppressive will also destroy the self, efface the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, wisdom and folly, reason and impulse, and being and nothing. The secret of the ascendant culture—supposedly progressive and enlightened but actually primitive and dark—is nihilism, the universal critical principle, the enemy of all being. In principle it negates God, creation, nature, moral law, community, and every other objective structure that it thinks constricts the self from becoming whatever the imagination envisions and desires. The arbitrary human will to power over itself and all being is its god. This god can create nothing, but it can destroy everything.

I’ve written on this subject in previous essays, and I want to incorporate some of those thoughts into this series. On April 04, 2014 I began an eleven part series on “Faith and the Contemporary Moral Crisis.” I see no need to rewrite those essays. So, I will begin this new series by reblogging edited versions of the essays in that series. Interspersed with and following those essays I will post new material that expands on some theoretical points and addresses our new situation seven years later.

New Developments

There have been four developments in the intervening years that I found surprising, though in hindsight I can see that they were predictable seven years ago and indeed inevitable. (1) The racialization of all social interactions. In the last few years, the liberal ideals of a colorblind society and merit-based economic advancement have been rejected by the ascendant culture as manifestations of white privilege. (2) The mainstreaming of the intersectional notion of personal identity. Since proving that one is a victim of oppression has become a ticket to recognition by progressive culture, the more oppressed groups to which one belongs the higher one’s status in this culture.

(3) The exponential growth in the popular acceptance of the complete disjunction between biological sex and gender identity. Of course, acceptance of transgenderism and gender fluidity was preceded over the last 30 years by acceptance of LGBQ identities and inevitably will be succeeded by other gender identities and those that transcend other boundaries. Again, given the moral nihilism at the heart of modern culture this development is perfectly understandable. For in principle, progressive culture finds all limits oppressive, and there are many boundaries that have not yet been recognized as limits. And for progressive culture only the oppressed have the right to identify their oppressors. No one is allowed to argue with them.

(4) Most surprising and disheartening is the rapid acceptance of the three developments mentioned above by people who claim to be Christians, especially from younger generations. In the 1960s there was a movement within academic theology called “Christian Atheism.” What I am seeing now is a popular as well as an academic movement I call “Christian Nihilism.” These people and those tempted to join them are at the center of my target audience. I hope I can help them see what they are doing. Perhaps they will reconsider their path.

Once you recognize the nihilism at the heart of progressive culture, all becomes clear. And there is no escape from the iron logic of nihilism from within progressivism. For to escape it, you would need to limit it. And that cannot happen because progressivism admits no limiting principle! There is only one way out: we must reject nihilism completely and rediscover the Creator.