Let’s start today remembering most people are rarely if ever actually at church. Most of us are at home or work or school or… As a pastor, I’m under no illusion that church as hub-of-all-things-social is still the paradigm. That’s kind of an “America of the 1950s” thing. Yes, some people really did used to do almost all all their social gathering at church, and some small sub-cultures still do. But in the spring of 2022 27% of Americans reported they attended a worship service in the last month, with approximately similar numbers viewing religious services online.
So one-fourth of Americans attend in-person worship about one-fourth of the Sundays of a month, and even some of those Sundays are viewed via streaming online. So one-fourth of one-fourth of Americans are in church on a Sunday morning. Anecdotally I’d estimate only about 10 percent of those visit the church during the rest of the week for some reason.
Statistically this means if you’re affiliated with a progressive church and value it highly and contribute to it generously, you’re still not there in the building all that much. For this post, I’m going to take that as a given, and ponder a vision for how to do progressive church life beyond the church walls.
Here’s an example:
For the past few years, our congregation has deepened its participation in International Trans Day of Visibility. This spring was the first opportunity organizers had had in a couple of years to host the event in person. A local community center generously offered space and so for a Saturday in March the trans community had a lecture hall, meeting rooms, and even the swimming pool all for their use.
When I arrived at the event and scanned the lecture hall where the first plenary would take place, I started ticking off on my hand the number of people in the room who were affiliated with our congregation. It was a not insignificant percentage. Two of the panelists were members. A third panelist, though not a member, was a volunteer at our Queer Camp the summer prior. And in the audience were many attendees, trans and allies. Our people hadn’t arrived en bloc, and there was not a concerted push within the congregation to attend the day of visibility together. It just happened naturally (as a byproduct of who we are as a church) that support of the trans community is integral to our congregational commitments. As a social justice organizing church some of our people follow the spiritual practice of showing up.
When I’m at events like this, and see our church community there, I’m reminded of all the little parables Jesus taught concerning the impact of small things. One of the shortest is the parable of the leaven:
And again he said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, until it was all leavened.” (Luke 13:20-21)
This is one reason progressive Christianity rarely makes the headlines and seldom sits in seats of power. It hides and leavens. A basic commitment of progressivism is solidarity with the subaltern (see post-colonial theory and Spivak in particular), social groups displaced to the margins of society. Because progressive Christianity often empties itself in such solidarity, it typically fails to consolidate power at the center of society.
Yet Jesus envisions in his parable of the kin-dom of God that such self-emptying and hiding leavens everything. Going small and weak is movement closer to the ways of God in Christ.
You might rightly ask yourself now how you as an everyday progressive Christian, busy with the commitments of daily life, like work and family, can most faithfully hide as leaven. And here I have two basic suggestions:
Look for the opportunities right where you are.
If you’re looking for a more significant opportunity, choose the one that is divestment for you and presence with the subaltern.
Opportunities Right Where You Are
Sometimes we are enamored of the grand action. We become convinced it is only the truly committed, or those with high ideals and radical practice, who can truly exemplify progressive Christian values. But really the shifts that can occur in our society that move us in progressive directions happen through a blend of small individual actions and steady community organizing.
A small individual action: cancel one streaming service and commit that much monthly to your local progressive church instead.
Another small individual action: bike or carpool to church.
Yet another small individual action: take one hour you’d otherwise spend doom-scrolling and instead draft one letter to the editor for your local newspaper.
A family action: team up with another family and practice the art of showing up. March in a pride parade, meet an ethnic or interfaith community in your neighborhood, or sign up to co-sponsor a refugee family.
Divest and Practice Solidarity
Progressive Christianity offers a vision for the future that is joyous and just. Along the way, those committed to living into that vision will have to make some sacrifices. One of the biggest sacrifices will likely be guilt by affiliation. Inevitably your co-workers and friends will relate to you differently or even distance themselves from you if you practice real solidarity with the subaltern.
Divestment and solidarity begins with really listening to the subaltern and then taking their lead. A frequent liberal mistake (I have made this mistake often) is to identify for the subaltern what they really need from me in terms of solidarity. In this liberal model, I put myself in the position of patron who can help a poor client with their needs.
I’ve come to appreciate and value the concept of mutual aid. In mutual aid, we recognize that we all need help, and have gifts to share with each other. As just one example, take The Little Free Pantry, a movement founded on our church driveway. A Little Free Pantry is just a box. You can put stuff in it, You can take stuff from it. You can meet your need to give. Someone else can meet their need by taking what you have given.
If you are lending your voice and advocacy to an issue, it’s good to keep in mind the basic mantra, “Nothing about us without us.” If you do write that letter to the editor, or post an opinion on social media, or stand outside with a sign, make sure you’ve listened long enough to know you are aligning with the voices of the impacted communities. Listening in solidarity with the subaltern before acting is a form of divestment, because it means, particularly for those of us with voice and resources, that we have to begin from a position of vulnerability and not-knowing. We may discover while listening that the needs of the community are quite different from the ones we had supposed, and the strategies for change desired by the community uncomfortable to our own sensibilities.
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I really do believe, finally, that progressive Christianity is on some levels harder to perceive in our world and culture because it functions synthetically in consonance with culture rather than opposite to it. This is particularly true in relationship to humanist values. There is quite a bit of alignment between the humanism that has shaped some of our greatest civic institutions and the progressive understanding of Christianity.
Nikolai Grundtvig, a leading Lutheran theologian and early developer of public education, spoke of this as a commitment to “human first, then Christian.”
Where progressives part ways with culture is particularly those aspects of culture that more conservative modes of Christianity attempt to align with. Progressives are more “Christ against culture” when it comes to nationalism, the dominance of capitalism, paternalism, etc.
This is to say that in the every day world progressive Christianity is synthesized most naturally with aspects of culture that are perceived as secularizing (socialism in particular) but then opposed to or against aspects of culture that are widely tacitly accepted as natural by modern Christianity.
This puts progressive Christians in some very odd spaces when it comes to every day life, not least of which is their posture toward participation in the life of the church itself. Returning to the example of the Trans Day of Visibility, I think the average progressive Christian attending that event may not think of themselves as attending as a Christian. They’re just participating as a good neighbor, as a good human.
I don’t know if you call this way of being sublimation, or something else, but I do think it goes a long way toward helping all of us understand what it means for a progressive Christian to live in the every day, which is not generally at war with the wider culture or carrying the understanding of being oppressed by it, but rather feeling at war with specifically the very parts of the culture most wedded to the dominant forms of Christianity—the market and the state.
That’s quite a conundrum, and it’s both odd and illustrative that I have to end up writing about that when talking about progressive Christians in every day life.