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Progressive Liberationism: The Eschatalogical Doppleganger

• The narrative of progressive liberationism has become the dominant moral definer in the West. Churches that used to imagine themselves as the deciders of morality are now commonly judged as being immoral.
• It defines how the West morally categorize history. Even if you switched in 2013, like Hillary Clinton, you still have moral high ground sufficient to decide who was naughty and nice all the way back to the dawn of human civilization.
• It is the reason the LGBTQ movement has changed the fundamental assumptions of morality with respect to the Christian religion and every other historical religion.
• It is so powerful partly because it has been able to mimic and replace liberal postmodern eschatology for a secular context. (You don’t need a second coming of Jesus to bring in the eschaton.)
• It is thoroughly at home with secularism and needs no supernatural divinity at all
• It is a stealth religion, allowing even atheists to act religiously while maintaining plausible deniability about their meta-narrative.
• It can supplant Christian theology, pass for the work of the Holy Spirit and make Jesus unnecessary to those whose socioeconomic and situational fortunes don’t drive them to seek too much supernatural assistance.
• It is vying to become the civil religion for a majority of Americans and is defining the politics of corporate America and emergent demographic groups
• It is so stealthy it impacts us unaware.

My History with Liberation Movements

I grew up on the front lines of the racial reconciliation struggle in the Christian Reformed Church. My father Stan Vander Klay and my mother Barb were pioneers in trying to figure out how the immigrant CRC community should practically engage the challenges of American racism and the gospel call to racial reconciliation. The African American civil rights movement became for American culture the template for moral definition for generations to follow even as they borrowed from movements, such as the older progressive suffrage and temperance movements as well as form Gandhi’s non-violence movement in India.

In the late 70s and 80s the CRC Women-in-Office (WICO) movement came along side the racial reconciliation movement as a focus of attention. It dominated CRC conversations in the 80s. When I was in Calvin Seminary in the 80s I remember writing a paper for my Systematics class on the question of women in church office and one of the things I had to work through in that paper was the question: is women’s inclusion in church office a Biblically permissible or is it simply a product of what was called at that time the Women’s Liberation movement? If you are a CRC minister to be this obviously was an important question to wrestle with. In that paper (I might still have it, I should look for it) I distinguished between the historical occasion for a question and the biblical justification for its legitimacy. My thesis was that even though the CRC together with the broader church were wrestling with this matter occasioned by the broader cultural movement we must separate the church conversation from this and evaluate the question at hand (WICO at that time) on its Biblical merits. I still believe this to be true.

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