We're All Liberal Protestants. . .

As I have said repeatedly, it seems that the term conservative stands less for ideology than timing.  There are few viable conservative choices who advocate changing the direction of America but there are many who seem to insist that the pace of change slow even if its direction is unchanged.  Certainly Donald Trump is not a conservative but more a moderate.  His change in tone and position on abortion indicates that he is less driven by a moral principle in this debate than political expediency and by the desire to let the people decide.  It is also a libertarian view.  Get rid of the rules and leave people to do what they will and reduce government to a minimum of essential responsibilities and duties.  Kamala Harris represents an equally politically driven view of the issues even though her instincts are to make government more a force for nearly everything in life.  In the end, the choice is less about clear differences than the pace of change and who drives it -- Trump slows it down and lets the people decide and Harris wants the government out front and gas pedal down.  The same is true with respect to religion.

The other day I read a Roman Catholic commentator who said, "Many of us [Roman] Catholics in the United States are actually liberal Protestants with rosary beads."  I wonder how people took those words.  Of course, he is correct.  We have, as have all Americans, consumed liberal Protestantism "with our mother’s milk"  It has become part of the fabric of our moral, social and political soul.  The very air that we breathe is tinged with it.  This is no less true for conservative Lutherans than it is for Roman Catholics.  Conservative has become a term to describe the pace of change rather than its direction.  I get it.  We all are dizzied by the very pace of change in nearly every aspect of our mortal lives.  Nothing is the same -- not even the price of a gallon of milk!  We welcome a slow and more deliberate pace to all that is changing and with it a moment to catch our breath.  But that is not what it means to be a conservative in any aspect of things.  Conservatives conserve.  So far we saw a Supreme Court knock down a federal right to abortion that became the fuel for more abortions than ever.  But some folks are happy simply because the federal rule was broken.  Is that really conservation?

The sad reality is that in nearly every denomination there is a majority of folk who are not as upset with the direction of change as they are is tenor or speed.  They want a kinder and gentler church which will not die on every hill and leave somethings to pass.  They want simply to remove from the national stage the focus on how you have sex with those to whom you are attracted and what identity you wear today as the gender identity you want the world to know.  But those same Christians seem unwilling to talk about marriage in terms that Scripture uses or to admit that there is an order to God's creation even of male and female.  Those same Christians want peace in their families even if that means remaining quiet in the face of cohabitation, sexual experimentation, children outside of marriage, and the like.  We are all liberal Protestants underneath but differ primarily in how fast and how far the social changes around us should proceed.

This is even true of Biblical theology.  We all say that the Scriptures are God's Word in some form or another and that the Bible proclaims the true pathway to salvation.  But we are not at all sure we want to pay attention to the Word of God in its fullness or to get much deeper than the shallow Gospel of love, forgiveness, and why can't everyone just get along.  We believe that the Bible tells of Him who is the Way but we see parallel ways in other religions and in none.  It is not so much that we are works righteous people as we simply are not sure that sins matter all that much anymore and neither does God care much about them.

Underneath liberal Protestantism are the essential values of radical personal autonomy and an absolute  individualism as the core and foundation of all moral values.  These things are not the essential values of orthodox and catholic Christianity.  That is the problem.  In addition to this is the whole idea that the church is nothing more than a voluntary association, created and defined by the will of those who choose to belong.  The same penchant for government by poll has given way to doctrine and practice by poll.  The Scriptures are merely advisory in this understanding.  Doctrine is subordinate and accountable to our autonomous individual consciences.  The reality is that most of us subscribe to and practice in our daily lives the very moral and political language of liberalism and our agreement in doctrine and truth is more a felicitous inconsistency we celebrate than an essential foundation of or identity to our religious beliefs and identity.

Until we address the elephant in every room -- individual rights, voluntarism, and privatized morality -- we differ more in degree than in essence with liberal Protestantism even though we call ourselves conservatives or catholics.  I suspect there might be some disagreement here but I welcome the conversation.