Liberal Christians Aren’t Doing the World Any Favors
Trying to keep scripture relevant instead of letting antiquated and absurd belief systems die does more harm than good.
I’ll start this piece by admitting conservative Christians are a more dangerous bunch than liberal ones. They’re violent. They’re hateful. They’re a serious threat to democracy and society in general.
Yet sometimes I find liberal Christians a lot more annoying. Their constant attempts to make the Bible not say what it clearly says are beyond irritating. More than that, they’re insidiously harmful.
Contextualizing Ancient Bigotry
Liberal Christians always try to use sophistry and buzzwords like “interpretation” and “context” to render horrendous Bible verses more palatable to a modern audience. In their desperation to keep their faith relevant, they often twist Biblical words more than even the most raving Christian Nationalist preacher.
They come up with ludicrous and downright silly arguments to explain away immorality commanded or condoned by scripture.
No. Paul and Peter weren’t “talking to specific individuals” when they commanded that women be forced into silence in church and submission in the home. They were the products of an intensely misogynistic society, and Christendom has spent almost its entire existence following their bigoted words to the letter.
No. “God” wasn’t making “incremental shifts” when he condoned slavery in both the Old and New Testaments. The Bible and its allegedly divinely inspired authors permit slavery and even lay out rules for its practice — rules that were often no better than those of contemporary gentile societies.
Yes. God really did command ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Yes. The Bible mandates the violent murder of queerfolk and promiscuous women.
Liberal Christians can try to twist these and other passages all they want, but at the end of the day, is it really all that shocking that a bunch of sexist and homophobic societies produced a bunch of sexist and homophobic writers who said a bunch of sexist and homophobic things?
Considering the virulently misogynistic cultures that spawned both the Old and New Testaments, is there any reason to believe that verses like the aforementioned don’t say what they mean and mean what they say?
There’s not — not to those of us who support the end of organized religion, at least. Skeptics and secularists see religious texts for what they are: historical literature. Ancient epic fiction. Products of their time. Gold mines of archeological information.
We also see them for what they’re not. They are not inspired by deities. They are not sacred. They are not moral. They are not manuals for how to live a good 21st-century life.
Liberal Christians try to justify their continued adherence to obsolete and depraved ancient moral codes by attempting to superimpose an egalitarian, 21st-century, secular humanist worldview onto the writings of primitive patriarchs instead of just being secular humanists.
Secular humanism is not incompatible with belief in a deity, after all. It’s just incompatible with Abrahamic religion.
Unfortunately, liberal Christians can’t admit that though organized religions once had an important job to do, their old functions are now served by better (if still imperfect) systems of justice, moral philosophy, national government, and law enforcement.
What religion once did, we can now accomplish through preserving and proliferating secular democracy, ethically developing science and technology, and — most importantly — working together to create a more fair and equal global civilization.
Religions and religious texts have outlived their utility, but liberal Christians cannot admit this. So they constantly perform unbelievable feats of mental gymnastics rather than let go of antiquated ideologies that are becoming ever more irrelevant to contemporary society.
Unfortunately, this stubbornness does a lot more harm than well-meaning liberal Christians realize.
Hazardous to Societal Health
Not only has religion outlived its utility, but it is now an active detriment to society. Nowadays, organized religion creates mass delusion, stalls scientific progress, hinders education, and contributes to societal regression and civil unrest.
Worse still, it allows large swaths of the human population to continue operating on the basis of “answers that can’t be questioned” instead of “questions that can’t be [or have not yet been] answered.
Once upon a time, religion was a necessary evil that helped to facilitate social cohesion and control throughout massive territories. Now, it’s just a purposeless evil. It keeps us stuck in a cycle of arguing over a bunch of dead guys who lived in the desert thousands of years ago — dead guys who may or may not have even existed.
We should be having conversations about AI ethics, the next breakthrough in space exploration, and democratizing life extension technology.
Instead, we’re talking about whether a bunch of potentially mythical dead guys really meant it when they said slavery is morally acceptable or that women were created to be their husband’s servants — and liberal Christians are a major contributor to the continuance of these futile and self-defeating conversations.
These Christians might argue that they’re helping by proving said dead guys “didn’t really mean it,” but what they’re actually doing is preventing more rational heads from convincing everyone that it doesn’t matter what the dead guys meant.
It doesn’t matter what some dead guys whose names start with J or P think about anything. Their opinions, teachings, and writings are irrelevant to almost everyone except a few nerdy academics who focus on ancient history.
We need to move on, to push forward, to continuously improve our ethical codes and social justice practices so that we can achieve a better civilization for everyone, but liberal Christians won’t let us.
Worse than just forcing these ancient texts to remain relevant long past their expiration dates, liberal Christians also help support and legitimize their not-so-liberal coreligionists.
This phenomenon is most evident in Catholicism. I’ve met tons of very liberal Catholics who don’t actually take the Bible all that seriously and aren’t that connected to the Church in their daily lives.
Yet they still lend support and donate money to an organization that forces childbirth on unwilling women, actively impedes gender equality, steals babies, tortures queer kids, contributes to the spread of HIV, covers up for pedophiles, engages in cultural genocide, helped thousands of Nazis escape justice, and hoards vast wealth that its parishioners donated with charitable intentions.
Liberal Protestants lend legitimacy to conservatives and fundamentalists too, though in a less obvious way.
The existence of liberal denominations like the Methodists or the Episcopalians contributes to the mass cultural delusion that Christianity, and really any organized religion, can be “fixed” or “modernized.” Unfortunately, these liberal sects are nothing but exceptions to the rule that real, true reform is impossible.
We already tried it — many times, in fact. It hasn’t gone so well.
Every time an organized Abrahamic religion divides itself, it causes more strife, more war, more persecution, more division, and more violence. This isn’t going to change because a few liberal Christians try to revamp some of the Bible’s most unsavory passages.
Bottom Line
Christianity is a complex ideology that has shaped world history for the last 2,000 years — and not usually for the better.
If the last couple of millennia have proven anything, it’s that Christianity cannot be reformed to the point of being rendered beneficial — or even harmless — to modern society.
All this ideology does is update itself just enough to trick the next generation into falling for it so that it can keep colonizing, pillaging, and plundering to the benefit of a few men (kind of like capitalism).
Liberal Christians aren’t helping civilization by modernizing their faith. They’re hurting civilization by preventing the current generations from pulling the wool off their eyes.