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Goodbye Jesus

Are You An Ex-Liberal Xtian?


Orbit

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I came from a liberal xian background.  The churches I attended were stodgy and polite and focused on love and forgiveness.  My parents were agnostics so nothing else got drilled in my head, other than being allowed to question xianty.

 

So my deconversion took decades because I had nothing huge to fight against!  It was like fighting against vanilla pudding.

 

I had a very specific question that had been bugging me since childhood and no form of Christianity was able to answer it. They did not even address it. They all wanted me to believe that I was a sinner saved in belief through Christ's death on the cross or his resurrection or whatever. It mattered little. What mattered was how any of this could literally work. I wasn't asking to opt out of faith; I was asking for a hook to hang faith on, a reason to have faith in the first place. There was none, absolutely none whatsoever. It was like being asked to jump off a cliff into space blind with no evidence at all that there was a place to land. And being expected to stake life and eternity on this blind leap. I did not believe in doing that. 

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My church was pretty liberal and not really fundy, though there were fundy people there. I never thought my religion should rule over my fellow citizen. I believed in the 1st amendment and people right to be any religion they want, including not being in one. I didnt like people who thought our religion(when i was still going to church) should be enforced on others.

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Great question. I was a fundy all the way and tried to become liberal to save my faith. (It didn't work.)

 

Someone once said to me that a liberal Xian becoming an atheist is like a man trying to commit suicide by jumping out his basement window. tongue.png

 

Yeah going from fundie to liberal doesn't really work.   

 

I didn't know this before, but Quakers are probably the most liberal Christians in the US.  

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I didn't know this before, but Quakers are probably the most liberal Christians in the US.

 

I've only known a few Quakers, but they definitely weren't liberal. Other than not practicing water baptism, they were pretty much the same as I was. Perhaps other Quakers are more liberal, but not all are.
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Orbit,

I appreciate your candor. I admit, I never thought liberal Xtianity was real either. I did go to a Presbyterian church during high school. But my parents were pretty good at keeping the proverbial "North Korean Bubble" over us about the too liberal veliefs of most of them. Then there was the positive thought stuff which just seemed silly. I would rather read National Geographic and Popular Mechanics than that stuff a lady from their church gave me via a Braille subscription to the Guideposts magazine I think that was. Peale, or something. Anyway I remember thinking the guy was some kind of salesman, and not taking it at all seriously, but I also remember how it gave my mother actual evangelical fits; she apparently took it seriously as an affront rather than just a goofy guy. No harm done by me, sent the book back and I was just as glad of it, returning to the aforementioned National Geographic and Popular Mechanics.

I admit that in my self-examination in the past year I wondered about liberal Christianity. I know first off, I'm not really a liberal. Definitely not a traditional conservative, but don't buy into a lot of fundamentalist thought control from the left any more than I do from the Right. Also, my immediate family wouldn't be convinced of a liberal Christian change, and I had grown up being taught it was some kind of threat. More and more I saw it as impotent, sorry. But certainly no threat to anyone: the traditionalist conservatives own all the publishing houses, access to the military, all the apologetics, etc. By this point I'd become pretty atheistic to experiences at all, and already started taking apart the contradictions in the Bible.

Anyway, you are right that mos of us appear to have not thought liberal Christianity is or was even real. This was backed up by the Wife being raised going to the Methodist church with Her parents. Well, mainly Her mom. I think at least for a time, She doubted the authenticity of Her mom's Christianity. Her dad, from what She says, went along to get along. The Methodists don't push, apparently, and so he's never been backed into the corner that I was and summarily called upon to fish or cut bait.

The gay thing I found I differed from the liberal Christians on: I felt like if the Bible spoke against homosexuals, then it was clearly wrong, a shocking realization on the home front. But I'd been working with gays and trans people over the past couple decades in the software industry, and it's pretty obvious the evangelical rhetoric against them is complete bunk. I saw the liberal Christians trying to make it work, and I also saw the Wife not be convinced: She was in school with the Foursquare Church for a certificate of ministry readiness at the time. So clearly the liberals weren't having a very easy time of it convincing the "other side" of Christianity that their view had merit. I expected them to lay down a rational argument like we engineers do and there would be some kind of debate / concensus, I know that's pretty silly of an expectation now. But the end game was both sides talking past each other.

The same is true with the creation / evolution arguments, I read a lot of Francis Collins and the like in the waning years of my faith. And the same was also true of environmental and feminist concerns.

Probably part of why we saw liberal Christianity as unreal, aside from the straw man arguments built up by tradcons, is the fact you don't see powerhouse debater coming out of Liberal Christendom arguing against the evangelical persuasion, showing evangelicals how their interpretation of the Bible is actually wrong. I hate to say it, but who owns all the guns, the political seats, the entire political takeover of the U.S. since the 60s / Francis Schaeffer era, the arguments about science in the classrooms, etc? It's shallow, and I know it: but the libs just don't get noticed. And the only time they're spoken of in evangelical circles are with this way over the top delusional conspiracy theory mind set, so it's easy to dismiss liberal Christianity, just as one would dismiss Bigfoot or ancient aliens.

But clearly, we were wrong about that. I guess I hope you don't get to feeling like your concerns get overrun by a bunch of ex-evangelicals. Because as you said, leaving a faith is leaving a faith, and your concerns are as valid as ours, regardless of the straw man and other foolishness we believed, or dismissed, about you guys beforehand.

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I think the term "liberal xianity" means something different in the US compared to the rest of the English speaking world.  

 

In my experience, in Europe and NZ, liberal xianity means progressive/postmodern/postevangelical softening of doctrine, and ecumenicalism.  Non-US liberal xians believe they are saved, and they focus on the teachings of (the fictional character) Jesus and the rest of the NT and ignore the unpleasant parts of the bible.  Liberal xianity is based around not taking the bible literally.

 

They typically denounce fundamentalism and social conversativism, but they are not necessary politically liberal, like the US liberal xians seem to be.  In fact, in these countries, to be politically liberal is to be semi-libertarian and allied with economic/social conservatives.  The left are instead referred to as progressives, or social democrats.  

 

In the years that I spent as a liberal xian, I had no doubt that I was a xian, and if I had been aware that some fundies thought I wasn't, I would have thought they were even more nutty than just being a fundy.  My fundy relatives do not think that liberal xians are not xians.  Being an ex-liberal is different to being an ex-fundy, but we may still have difficult issues to work through.

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Thanks for your insight, FTNZ. We in the U.S. have got such barrage of noise RE: Xianity and other religions, I think we don't really realize just how different it is for others outside the States.

Hopefully we can all take away from this we really do need to understand the liberal Xians more, because ex-Xians coming from that background probably have their own set of challenges the rest of us don't have. I wish Directionless would weigh in on this, he was Episcopalian, even told some of us about the writing of Bishop Spong. That's a total unknown to most the evangelicals who have a lot of goofball conspiracy theory rhetoric about liberal Xians.

An important distinction you made was, your fundie relatives don't think liberal Xians aren't Xians. In America some evangelicals might pay lip service to that sentiment, but for all practical purposes they think liberals Xians aren't Xian at all.

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I think the term "liberal xianity" means something different in the US compared to the rest of the English speaking world.  

 

In my experience, in Europe and NZ, liberal xianity means progressive/postmodern/postevangelical softening of doctrine, and ecumenicalism.  Non-US liberal xians believe they are saved, and they focus on the teachings of (the fictional character) Jesus and the rest of the NT and ignore the unpleasant parts of the bible.  Liberal xianity is based around not taking the bible literally.

 

I'm American, and that's pretty much how I've always seen liberal Christians.... not as a matter of politics, but as a matter of how they approach religion and how they take the Bible.

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