I grew up in a church environment that shunned people who didn’t believe exactly the same things about God and culture that I believed in. Our community wasn’t built on love, peace, and understanding; its foundation was agreement. Disagreements often caused huge conflicts, many of which ended with somebody being asked to leave or leaving angrily on their own. Those people became like ghosts to those of us who remained. We didn’t talk to them, look at them, and went to great lengths to avoid them whenever we saw them around town.
I left that kind of religiosity on purpose, because it was emotionally and spiritually suffocating.
A gathering of any kind can certainly fall prey to the behavior of fundamentalism, though it seems to favor groups of people who commune together because of a belief or conviction. Belief and conviction are the two ingredients that make fundamentalism so prevalent among conservative Christians, evangelicals, charismatics, and the like.
But lately, I’ve encountered the spirit of fundamentalism among those who consider themselves progressive. This isn’t new trend, of course, but among progressive Christians, fundamentalisms are difficult to pinpoint because there’s a good bit of belief diversity among progressive believers. Assuming what most evangelicals believe isn’t a perfect art, but it’s certainly much easier to do than trying to assume what progressive believe. Our assumptions about progressives becomes much more accurate when considering the numbers of ways and reasons they challenge conservative and moderate Christians. So while fundamentalist tendencies have always existed among progressives, they tend to remain at a much lower volume than those from our more conservative sects.
But lately, perhaps because progressive Christianity is gaining in popularity or because it’s becoming more visible online, the mean spirited, anger-ridden, must-agree-on-everything spirituality that I grew up in has been boiling up among those who identify as progressive Christians, open-minded believers seemingly enraged with self-righteousness and intoxicated by the assumption that they have it right.
While progressive fundamentalism isn’t as common as the conservative evangelical variety that we’ve all encountered, it’s happening often enough that we need to start talking about it. Because it’s getting louder and more and more laced with God-and-self-inspired hatred. And because many of us progressive types have fought the good fight against American Christianity’s better known fundy culture for so long that it would be very easy for us to become tacky, mean-spirited believers without even realizing it, the kind of people who rally, complain, and shun each other just like those we have called out.
Last week, Benjamin L. Corey and I chatted about progressive fundamentalism on That God Show. I hope you’ll give it a listen.
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