The Pope, Easter, and the Kingdom: A Note on the Eclipse of Progressive Christianity

“Pope Francis leaves behind a Church that is moving away from the faith he championed,” writes Elizabeth Breunig in The Atlantic today. As many have pointed out, when Francis became pope in March 2013, the liberal, postwar consensus was still ascendant. Barack Obama was president of the United States, early in his second term. Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany and a much-admired defender of international institutions, was on the verge of opening her nation to more than a million refugees. The populist far-right was a marginal force in most countries, with a vote share on par with the impotent remnants of once-powerful Communist parties. When Francis became pope, Donald Trump still had two more seasons to go as host of The Apprentice. His rise to the White House was unthinkable.

In March 2013, I had a few weeks remaining as a college instructor, earnestly preaching a gospel of radical autonomy, sexual freedom, and individual liberty. I believed what I was saying, and I had a popular following for saying it. A few months into Francis’ pontificate, I lost that career (and many other things) in spectacular fashion. Over the next few years, others like me would also be cancelled. Slightly less swiftly -- but far more significantly -- the global liberal consensus, entrenched as could be in 2013, began to crumble.

Francis became pope in a world filled with sympathetic allies. He left the papacy very much admired, but also, in many ways, very much alone.

This repudiation of progressivism is not just true on the geopolitical stage. It is also true in the church. Breunig cites the sociologist Ryan Burge, whose research shows that “although 42 percent of very liberal survey respondents identified as nonreligious in 2008, by 2024 the number had skyrocketed to 62 percent, meaning that progressives have left religion in droves.” The major progressive denominations in the United States – the Episcopalians, mainline Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, etc — have generally experienced an ongoing drop in membership. The very liberal Episcopal Church at which I once served as a youth minister? That youth program has fewer than half the teens it did twenty years ago. Breunig observes, perhaps somberly:

It's possible that the much-discussed departure of young, progressive people from the faith is almost complete: Virtually everyone who was going to leave has left. And now that the young progressives are nearly all gone, the overall decline has ceased, leaving behind a more solid—and conservative—core of believers. Meanwhile, it also seems that new conservative converts are joining the faith, and bringing their politics with them. The result will be a much more conservative American Christianity.

The stalwarts of that progressive church do little to reverse that decline. To be fair to Francis, he never denied the essentials of the faith: the nature of the Trinity, the virgin birth, or the reality of resurrection. Many American progressive Christians would demur or even outright deny, if you were to press them on whether they really believed that Jesus was born of a virgin and later rose from the dead. In particular, progressives in this country and elsewhere like to think of Jesus of Nazareth chiefly as a brave social justice crusader. They see claims of His divinity, and of the necessity of His atoning death on the cross, as later additions to a straightforward story of a bold, generous, remarkable (but entirely and only human) man.

I have a teenage daughter who has started going to church and brought the rest of the family with her. We attend an evangelical non-denominational outfit, one that is loosely associated with the Pentecostal tradition. There is a lot of praise music, a great many tears, and a great deal of enthusiasm. There is also theological orthodoxy, so on Easter Sunday, the church preaches that Jesus really did rise from the dead. And they preach that the Great Fact of His resurrection changes everything for our lives. Progressive churches may read the same Bible verses on Easter Sunday, but they tend to offer blander, anodyne observations about spring, about new hope, and about renewed purpose.

To speak of being saved is vulgar and narcissistic, the progressive church tends to believe. The only salvation that matters is collective, corporate, and communal.

If pressed, I suspect that many in those churches think Jesus of Nazareth got nailed to a cross, died, and remained deceased. It is not overly glib to point out that these progressive congregations are dying because they think Jesus stayed dead. Pieties about social justice and a preference for the poor may create a sense of communal obligation, but they alone do not create a vibrant community. They do not address existential despair and loneliness. (It is no accident that progressive Christianity and Judaism flourish best in affluent areas. Those whose material lives are filled with comforts and certainties tend to place their deepest trust in doctors of medicine and philosophy. For the big questions, they turn to science, to reason, to therapy, to ayahuasca, triathlons, polyamory. Many of them still go to church because it seems like the nice thing to do, but as Ryan Burge’s research shows, without a compelling, urgent, life-transforming message, they fall away.)

Those who do remain in the progressive church spend a great deal of time angrily calling out conservative, orthodox (small o) Christians. Just as in his final years, Pope Francis grew increasingly anguished at the eclipse of the liberal consensus, progressive American Christians now issue regular jeremiads about what they regard as the scandalous and indefensible support that many American evangelicals (and faithful Catholics) show for President Trump. Writing on Facebook last week, the celebrated author and illustrator Matthew Paul Turner declares in an open “letter to Jesus,”

Can I be frank? Much of your church is a clusterfuck here, Jesus. And it’s getting worse every single day.

A vast number of your American followers showcase an apathy toward almost everything you preached about.

They elevate rich people. They follow and affirm powerful people. They relish in people’s hatred. They celebrate other people’s pain. They seem to wake up every day and seek out ways to make the lives of people who don’t look like them or believe like them miserable.

They tell horrible lies in order to support their own ideologies. They rally around misogynistic messages in order to pump up their own fragile egos. They rage against programs that promote equality and diversity in spaces where maleness and whiteness have long reigned supreme. They have even started a war against empathy in hopes that it will sooth their own consciences.

They protect rapists while blazing wars against Trans people. They celebrate Nazis and Nazi-adjacent ideals while seeking to silence protesters and imprison distractors. They turn the other cheek to Israel’s acts of genocide while also turning the other cheek to the mass murdering of Palestinians. They worship men like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Elon Musk while belittling people who are immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, Black people, Brown people, and Disabled people.

And many of them do all of these things (and more) in YOUR name... for a lot of Christians in the U.S., the resurrection they celebrate on Sunday will have nothing to do with you. It will be all about them, their power, their dangerous ideologies, their hunger and thirst for supremacy, and their pursuit to kill everything you ever stood for.

I quote in full because I think Matthew speaks for more than himself. I think this anguish and bitterness is fairly widespread on the Christian left. And it betrays nothing so much as a vision of a small Jesus, a man reduced to being nothing more than a fierce advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. It betrays the left’s sense that the worst sins are not personal but systemic: capitalism, racism, sexism, transphobia. Sin is not about the darkness of our hearts, but only about the systems in which we are forced to operate. Both progressive and traditional Christians agree that Jesus wants to transform our hearts and minds. For the progressive though, that transformation should lead to a desire to dismantle those systems in this world. Too much talk of salvation, or heaven, becomes a dangerous distraction, an opiate of the masses. And a focus on personal sin, particularly sexual sin? A real perversion of God’s message of radically inclusive, tolerant, accepting, generous love!

“My kingdom is not of this world,” said Jesus (John 18:36). The progressive impulse – be it secular Marxist or progressive Christian – replies, “With respect, Jesus, this is the world we have right now, and most of think it’s the only one that matters, so we’re going to try to build your kingdom right here anyway. We’re sure it’s what you meant!”

For progressive Christians, in recent decades that work of kingdom-building has often meant enthusiastically aligning the church with the left-wing of the Democratic Party. To be a progressive is, in the end, to believe that our primary calling is to transform this world, to make it better, fairer, healthier, and (maybe) kinder. Progressives see governments as the primary actors in creating this better, fairer, nicer world – and therefore, the work of electing ever more progressive leaders is the central task that none of us may shirk. Over the course of the twelve years, one month, and eight days of Francis’ papacy, the failures of that thesis became manifestly apparent. And in plebiscite and referendum after election, voters from El Salvador to Hungary, Argentina to Russia, India to Turkey, Austria to the United States, declared they no longer have faith in the progressive promise.

Many on the American Christian left loved Francis. They loved that he spoke of the poor, and they were often angry that he didn’t go even further on issues of women’s rights or LGBTQ+ inclusion. That for all his vaunted progressivism, the late pope was theologically orthodox, committed to the Trinity and the Resurrection, was a source of mild irritation to the left. Whenever Francis spoke of the resurrection or atonement, progressives lowered their heads, waiting impatiently for a stirring pull-quote about “fighting poverty” or “welcoming the refugee.” They wanted endless riffs on the Beatitudes, not the Passion.

The late pontiff, to his credit, understood that the reality of the resurrection is what animates the fight against injustice. Francis preached both the “social gospel” and the cross. The progressive church is dying in this country because it sees the social gospel as the central aspect of the Christian story, with the cross functioning only to illustrate the lengths to which those danged sinful systems will go to hold on to power. The dying churches reduce the death of Jesus to a morality play about what befalls brave revolutionaries. They reduce the resurrection to the idea that the Jesus movement lived on after its founder’s martyrdom. And having made God so small, and politics so big, they have the audacity to wonder why the pews are empty, and why so many of their fellow Christians have proved so terribly, disgracefully disappointing.