Steve Thorngate writes about a recent conference for liberal Christians hosted by the Plymouth Center for Progressive Christian Faith.  He makes a good point when he says that, if there’s nothing distinctive about liberal, pluralistic, mainline Christianity, then there’s no surprise that nobody listens to them.

A Christianity this pluralistic is unlikely to alienate its allies. But is there anything distinct about it? The Christian right’s unique focus on personal piety and morality, narrowly defined, reshaped conservatism. But progressive Christians are broadly inclusive and care about the same political issues as other progressives. Their action alerts often read like MoveOn’s, but with scripture. Why should anyone care?

A good question.  Especially when their conferences include exchanges like this one:

The conference also featured several non-Christian speakers, including Rabbi Or Rose of Hebrew College. “As a Jew,” Rose noted, “I can’t accept that Jesus is the incarnate God.”

“Some of us Christians don’t believe that, either,” a woman responded, to murmurs of agreement. It was a telling moment, as many Christians see this as the singularly defining element of the faith.

Liberal Christians seem to have a good sense of the needs of communities and how the church should be serving them, but it’s a sense that’s founded on secular ideology masking as old-timey faith.  I’m all about justice, for individuals and for societies.  But it’s a justice founded on the absolute lawmaker and lawgiver, not on radical egalitarianism and utopianism.

Every time conservatives point out the preponderance of liberals in higher education, the response is usually the same: What a bunch of crybabies. 

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Last week, we blogged on the Times essay by David  Kirkpatrick titled “The Evangelical Crackup,” about the splintering of the Christian right.  One Evangelical says this isn’t the case, though. Evangelicals aren’t cracking up, because we never were a bloc in the first place.

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I think conservatives like Stephen Colbert because, well, for the same reason conservatives like Ignatius Reilly of A Confederacy of Dunces.  While both Colbert and Reilly seem to be lampooning conservatism with their satire of it, they’re actually revealing what’s good about it, and what’s bad about the other.  When Colbert, on his show, offers a “tribute to the ladies” by inviting Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem on the show to bake apple pies, he’s not just saying something about sexism.  He’s saying something about the paradox of feminism, too. 

But what’s Colbert really like? 

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…is the title of a great big piece in the Times magazine about the changing politics of the pulpit and the church.  The story begins with Terry Fox, a conservative Southern Baptist minister forced out of his church for getting too political: “The board of deacons had told him that his activism was getting in the way of the Gospel. ‘It just wasn’t pertinent,’ Associate Pastor Gayle Tenbrook [said].’”

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in the pews, but he was stunned that the church’s lay leaders had turned on him. “They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” he told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

The gospel has to do with everything, but the pulpit is not a political stump, and pastors - both liberal and conservative - confuse the two at their peril.  Read the rest of this magnum opus here.