The idea, of course, is that everyone should live this way—and if they did, the result would be … freedom! Freedom from violence, domination, intolerance, vengeance, hatred, illness, poverty, and helplessness. If everyone turned the other cheek, we would all be free from violence. If no one tried to dominate others, we would all be free of domination. If no one was judgmental, we would be free of intolerance. And so on. Jesus preached progressive freedom, freedom from oppression, what today is called social justice.
But progressive Christianity is not just about freedom from. It is also about freedom to—being free to flourish. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Show empathy and act on it, take responsibility: do what you can to help your neighbor flourish. And if everyone does that, your neighbors will help you flourish. Progressive Christianity is about members of a community—and citizens of a nation—maximizing the freedom for everyone to become his or her best self. “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Why? If everyone were to stop trying to dominate others, if everyone became “meek,” people would not impose on the freedom of others and so would maximize the freedom of everyone to prosper. It is the logic of Jesus and the logic of progressives.
Progressive Christianity is a religion of progressive freedom—American freedom. Its God is a nurturant God. Its morality is nurturant morality. It has the goal of creating a good society, one that helps people fulfill their potential and flourish. Its politics is progressive politics: The state’s responsibility is to secure citizens’ freedom through doing everything it can to assure the right care, build the right institutions, and create the right experiences—nurturant child rearing, progressive schools, good health care, caring communities, good jobs—while avoiding all the wrong ones—being raised in poverty, ignorance, violence, and joblessness.
Realizing the values of Jesus in the world requires not just personal action but also political action—action through the state. The politics of progressive religion is not narrowly about matters of the church; it is about the broadest range of issues that have an effect on human flourishing. Today, following in the footsteps of Jesus means being a political activist as well as a virtuous individual. Unfortunately, most progressive Christians do not understand the political implications of their theology.
CHURCH AND STATE
The morality of progressive Christianity says a great deal about the relationship between the state and religion. A state religion would impose force and control on religious values and practice, and impinge on matters of individual conscience. State recognition would introduce political control and political advantage, either advantaging one religion over another or making religion something other than purely a matter of conscience. Favoring religion over nonreligion again introduces matters of force, control, or advantage, where only matters of conscience—your relationship to God—should enter. From these considerations, it appears that progressive Christianity is committed to the following views.
There should be no state religion and no state recognition of any version of any religion.
The separation of church and state should be maintained; the government should not favor any religion over any other, nor favor religion over nonreligion.
The government should not interfere in the practice of any religion, except if that practice criminally harms people, interferes with the freedoms of others, or endangers public safety.
The practice of religion should remain separate from public life.
No religion should impose itself on anyone or engage in any coercive practice.
No religion’s views should be made part of the curriculum in any public school.
No pressure from superiors or peers to join a religion or join in the practice of any religion should occur in any public institution.
There should be no favoritism based on religion in employment, in promotions, or in evaluations in any institution receiving public funds or using public facilities.
Progressive Christians read the Bible to obtain moral lessons for everyday life, and they understand that it teaches via metaphor and parable. And what it teaches are the traditional values of progressive American freedom.
Life is a progressive issue, since progressive Christians are committed to promoting freedom, freedom from oppression and pain and freedom to realize one’s dreams. Progressive Christians promote an inherent, though undeclared, “culture of life.” They tend to favor minimizing infant mortality by having the state pay for pre-and postnatal care for indigent women; universal health care; care for the elderly; cleaning up, and stopping, pollution to advance health and life; ending the death penalty; and most important, diplomacy over war.
Progressive Christians recognize and respect the difficulty of the decision faced by women with unwanted pregnancies. They do not favor the government intruding on its citizens’ freedom to make their own, and their families’, medical decisions for them. Remember why freedom is visceral. Freedom is about the body and one’s own control of it. For most women, abortion is a freedom issue, since it is about control over their own bodies.
There are two possible constitutional issues here. First, is the freedom to control your own body and make your own medical decisions protected by the Constitution? Second, should advocates of conservative Christianity be able to restrict such a freedom on the part of those of another religious persuasion?
Nobody wants unwanted pregnancies. Progressive Christians, like women everywhere, would like to minimize unwanted pregnancies—not by force but by addressing many of the reasons for unwanted pregnancies, that is, by having government fund sex education, contraception in schools, and family planning; increasing funding for adoption and foster care; and funding child-rearing expenses for the indigent. These pro-life policies are all opposed by the radical right and fundamentalist Christians.
Progressive Christians also tend to want to protect women who are raped and get pregnant as a result. At present, the number of such cases is roughly twenty-five thousand per year! This is an astonishingly large number and should make us pause to ask whether the state, by banning abortions or making them hard to obtain, should force tens of thousands of women a year to bear the children of their rapists—or have to try to find and finance unsafe and often deadly back-alley abortions. Progressive Christians tend not to want the state to force women into such horrible predicaments. The consequence of that is requiring that there be safe, cheap, and readily available facilities for terminating such pregnancies all over the country, as well as morning-after pills at rape crisis centers.
The point is simple: Progressive Christians care about life and health, and in the case of abortion tend to prefer prevention whenever possible and safe, inexpensive facilities whenever necessary.
Jimmy Carter, in Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis, offers a clear and powerful description of progressive Christian values. A progressive evangelical Christian, Carter delivers a spirited defense of progressive Christianity and an attack on the dangers of fundamentalism and its political role. Carter argues forcefully that being a Christian has led him to the conclusion that government should work to keep a strong wall between church and state, to respect science and religion as separate domains and to support science, to promote tolerance, to advance the cause of women, to help the poor, to preserve the environment, to avoid preemptive war and abide by just war principles, to avoid torture, to abolish the death penalty, to stop testing nuclear weapons, to ban the sale of assault weapons, to promote sex education and family planning, and to support stem-cell research.
This is the Christianity of the America that people around the world, of all religions, came to love and respect—until recently. It is the Christianity that stands for peace and hope and prosperity for all. It is the Christianity that cares about people everywhere, that respects human dignity, that deplores human oppression. It is the Christianity that goes beyond mere tolerance to embrace people of goodwill of all religions, or of none. As Carter explains, Christian values are currently under at
tack in the name of Christianity.
Throughout American history, progressive Christians have championed the expansion of American freedoms. America needs progressive Christians to return to their great political heritage, to stem the fundamentalist tide, and to make freedom mean freedom again.
FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANITY
Fundamentalist Christians are politically conservative. Why? Why couldn’t they have their religious views but be politically progressive, or independent? How do their religious views relate to their politics? How are they distinct from progressive Christians? What do fundamentalist Christians mean by “freedom” and “liberty,” and how does that meaning fit with what these terms mean to right-wing political leaders?
There is a single answer to all these questions: strict father religion.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have both strict and nurturant versions, which differ as to whether God is a strict father or a nurturant parent. In fundamentalist Christianity, God is a strict father. There is a strict good-evil divide in the world, where God is good and Satan is evil. God is the ultimate and absolute moral authority who issues commandments specifying what is right and wrong, and morality is obedience to these commandments. Going to heaven is the reward for obedience; going to hell is the punishment for disobedience.
The Bible, the word of God, is literally true and provides instruction for how to live. Everyone is born a sinner and would go to hell, except for Jesus’ offer of redemption. Those who take him as savior are redeemed—Jesus pays off the moral debt for their sins and they are as if they were “born again.” Now, if they obey, they go to heaven and achieve eternal happiness in God’s presence; otherwise, they go to hell and undergo eternal suffering in alienation from God. In short, this is a religion based around the idea of individual responsibility, where each person is responsible for his or her own ultimate salvation. Obedience to the word of God takes discipline, and those without that discipline will perish in hell, and deserve to. Remember that “character” in this view is the capacity to be obedient to the moral law, to measure the effects of one’s actions against what is prescribed by the strict father.
STRICTNESS AND ESSENCE
Strict father morality assumes that there is a clear division between right and wrong actions, and that there are rules (or laws or commandments) that determine which actions are right and which are wrong. Such rules mention kinds of agents and objects. The categories of agents and objects must have clear divisions as well, so that the commandments will either apply to them or not. If you have a rule that says women must wear dresses, you have to have criteria for what is a woman and what is a dress. Those criteria are essences—properties that make something the kind of thing it is. Strict father morality requires some version of the folk theory of essences.
Since fundamentalism takes God as a strict father, it too must assume a folk theory of essences. The right actions fit God’s commandments; the wrong ones violate them. It is God who determines what is good. God is therefore the essence of goodness itself, and what He does must be good. Since God is all-powerful, His purpose in the world is God’s plan. The world is thus given a teleology.
Here is some of the reasoning that comes out of the folk theories of essence and teleology when God is brought into this picture.
Women can have children and men cannot. It is therefore part of the essence of women to have children. Since God made men and women, it must have been part of God’s plan for women to have children. Therefore, a woman who chooses to have an abortion is acting against her essence and in violation of God’s plan.
Moreover, in fundamentalist Christianity, the soul—not the body—is the essence of a person. Thus, a person whose body dies can live on through eternity, because the soul can be separated from the body. Thus, the soul is not material. Absolute categories of right and wrong behavior make possible a clear distinction between heaven and hell.
These ideas, taken as absolute truth, explain part of the fervor over abortion and stem-cell research. Suppose you believe in the soul, and you believe that the soul is within, and animates, that is, gives life to, the person. Since a fetus is animated in the woman’s womb, by this reasoning, it must have a soul. Since categories defined by essences are absolute and don’t change, it follows, if you believe in essences, that the baby as born must have been a baby with a soul—not a mere fetus—all the way back to conception. The same must apply to a blastocyst, the hollow sphere containing only stem cells that stem-cell research is performed on. It too must be a baby—even though it has only stem cells and no bone cells, skin cells, nerve cells, organ cells, brain cells, or any other kind of cell. If God creates each person and places a unique soul within each fertilized egg at conception—for His purpose, which we cannot know—then abortion and stem-cell research are not only baby killing, but they also thwart God’s plan in creating each of those souls. People who are trying to end abortion and stem-cell research therefore see themselves as serving God’s plan.
Serving God’s plan is not a light matter if you believe that only those who serve God’s plan get to go to heaven and experience eternal bliss; all others go to hell and experience eternal pain and torture.
We can now see what the fuss over evolution is about. It is not just about some scientific subject matter or other for schools that happens to contradict fundamentalist religion. It is rather about who we are, given that we are largely defined by our deepest assumptions about the world: what we understand God to be (if there is one), what is God’s plan for you (if He has one), and whether you will go to heaven or hell (if they exist) for all eternity.
Evolution says that we evolved through stages from lower animals, and that the process was not governed by any purpose at all. It denies that who we are as human beings had anything to do with God’s plan. It denies teleology—that God even had a plan. Because evolution says that species can develop into other species, it denies essence, which is unchanging. Evolution also denies absolute categorization, which is necessary not only for fundamentalist religion but also for strict father morality, which determines cultural values. If you identify yourself essentially as a fundamentalist Christian, then evolution denies your very identity!
ESSENCE, TELEOLOGY, AND FREEDOM
What does all this have to do with Freedom? Everything.
In fundamentalist religion, heaven is the ultimate freedom—from pain, suffering, and privation. “Free at last, free at last! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last.” You get there by acting according to your essence and in accord with God’s plan.
Pope Benedict XVI has written extensively about religion and freedom from the perspective of Catholic fundamentalism. Essence and teleology, he notes, have causal force. When you act against what you most essentially are, when you act against what you were meant to do, it is like swimming upstream or walking uphill. You are going against the natural force of existence, you are taking on a burden that restricts your freedom. So a woman who has an abortion is acting against her essence and has given up her freedom. She has also taken away the fetus’s freedom to live. So, the pope would argue, she has acted against freedom in two ways.
In addition, he links freedom and truth. Since God’s word is truth, when you act against God’s word you are acting against truth and the force of reality—again imposing upon yourself the burden of running up against reality, which limits your freedom.
Benedict XVI, like many fundamentalists, likes to rail against the classical Enlightenment view of freedom as the autonomy that comes from reason. Reason, in the Enlightenment view, is our essence, what makes us human beings. Because we all have reason, which is universal, we do not need to follow the dictates of external authorities like the king or the church. Morality, it is argued, follows from universal reason. In this view, reason alone gives us morality and hence makes us moral and autonomous—not in need of religion.
Benedict XVI, like most Protestant fundamentalists, assumes that morality and moral norms can come on
ly from religion. Freedom cannot come from reason alone but requires religious morality. Here are some typical quotations:
An understanding of freedom which tends to regard liberation exclusively as the ever more sweeping annulment of norms and the constant extension of individual liberties to the point of complete emancipation from all order is false. Freedom, if it is not to lead to deceit and self-destruction, must orient itself by the truth, that is, by what we really are, and must correspond to our being … Right is therefore not antithetical to freedom, but is a condition, indeed, a constitutive element of freedom itself …
We must also lay to rest once and for all the dream of the absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency of reason. Human reason needs the support of the great religious traditions of humanity … Where God is denied, freedom is not built up, but robbed of its foundation and thus distorted … Where the purest and deepest religious traditions are entirely discarded, man severs himself from his truth, he lives contrary to it and becomes unfree … Even philosophical ethics cannot be unqualifiedly autonomous. It cannot renounce the idea of God or the idea of a truth of being having an ethical character. If there is no truth about man, man also has no freedom. Only the truth makes us free.
Truth here is God’s truth, the truth set forth by religion. Freedom here is strict father freedom, requiring obedience to a moral authority—God. Since the church is the true interpreter of God’s word, one of Benedict XVI’s basic claims follows: You are most free when you are following the dogma of the church.
Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea Page 17