Progressive Christianity Quotes

God’s Politics: Why the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn’t get it.

I have had the advantage of a radical Christian upbringing

When I was a young priest in the 1960s and 1970s, there was much experimentation and confusion in the Church. Teachers and clergy were encouraged to communicate an experience of God's love, but to do it without reference to the Creed, the sacraments, or the tradition.

Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies - sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.

My parents were a little more on the hippie spectrum of Christianity - they weren't liberal Christians by any means, they were pretty conservative - but they preached mostly about love and caring for people, so I grew up with a lot of compassion and empathy.

It's a new day for the Democrats when it comes to matters of faith, and the younger Evangelicals are aware of this and many of them are moving into the Democratic camp.

During my 2004 presidential campaign, I was fond of saying that it was high time for the Christian right to meet the right Christians.

For the Jesus Revolutionaries, the answer was clear: Jesus would not be out waging "preventative" wars. Jesus would not be withholding medicine from people who could not afford it. Jesus would not cast stones at people of races, sexual orientatons, or genders other than His own. Jesus would not condone the failing, viperous, scandalplagued hierarchy of some churches. Jesus would welcome everyone to his his table. He would love them, and he would find peace.

We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.

[We need reforms] to make the Negro church a place where colored men and women of education and energy can work for the best things regardless of their belief or disbelief in unimportant dogmas and ancient and outworn creeds.

I do not read many periodicals, and I have little or no contact with progressive Christians, so I don't really know what goes on with them. It seemed to me that very often, the progressive Christianity was an initial step in de-Christianization, but this was probably unfair.

In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It's time we did the same for homophobia.

I believe with all my heart that the Church of Jesus Christ should be a Church of blurred edges.

We went to a very liberal Episcopalian church. It didn't take for me.

What some now call 'emerging Christianity' or 'the emerging church' is not something you join, establish, or invent. You just name it and then you see it everywhere- already in place! Such nongroup groups, the 'two or three' gathered in deep truth, create a whole new level of affiliation, dialogue, and friendship.

My view of Christianity is that the hallmark of being a Christian is to reach out to people who have been left behind. So I think there was a religious aspect to my decision to support civil unions.

The time has come for a new kind of conversation, a new kind of Christianity, a new kind of revolution.

Liberal Christians are distinguished by how much moral and intellectual ground they can concede to the adversaries of Christianity.

Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.

Most mainline Protestant churches are, to one degree or another, post-Christian. If they no longer seem disposed to converting the unbelieving to Christ, they can at least convert them to the boggiest of soft-left clichés, on the grounds that if Jesus were alive today he’d most likely be a gay Anglican bishop in a committed relationship driving around in an environmentally friendly car with an “Arms are for Hugging” sticker on the way to an interfaith dialogue with a Wiccan and a couple of Wahhabi imams.

The Episcopalians don't demand much in the way of actual religious belief. They have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages? it's much like the New York Times editorial board. They acknowledge the Ten Commandments? or "Moses' talking points"? but hasten to add that they're not exactly "carved in stone."

I think there's an awful lot of noise about the Church being persecuted but there is a more real issue that the conventional churches face - that the people who are really driving their revival and success believe in an old-time religion which, in my view, is incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity is not conservative, but revolutionary.

We're not a typical Christian band. We've got dreadlocks and tattoos.

I would love to see the Church on the right side of history.