My Attempt to Get into the Mind of the Liberal Christian

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I must give a disclaimer up front: The following post is an honest attempt to analyze why my beliefs are different than others. I've tried not to be explosive, but the topic itself may end up stirring up very strong reactions. I welcome your comments and e-mails on this. Please point out where I've made errors. I'm honestly just trying to understand.

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I've had a really interesting experience these last few weeks.

As I've become more active and outspoken in my political stances, I've run into and had several conversations with people who hold a different opinion than me on politics. The interesting thing is, is that most of those people were also committed Christians. Some I know personally, some I do not know personally. But I'm pretty sure that most of them are sincere, committed Christians who love the Lord and really want to live a good life.

On the surface, you might think that our opinions of politics would be similar. Politics touches on many things moral, so wouldn't you expect that people of the same faith would also hold similar stances politically? And yet, in debating politics with other Christians, I'm finding some of us at totally different ends of the spectrum and very passionate about our stances. Why is that?

As I mentioned earlier, I don't believe that politics is morally neutral. It's not like Christians who disagree on the color of lenoleum tile or something. To my way of thinking, there must be something deeper going on that's different. We're seeing the same news stories, the same debates, the same events and yet coming to completely different conclusions. It's like we have different colored glasses that we're looking through and everything we see is through those glasses. And of course, I believe that my viewpoint is the correct way to see things and they believe there's is correct also.

What is that lense that we're looking through? What kind of assumptions, presuppositions, and foundational beliefs do we hold that are different that cause us to lean one way or another?

It seems to me that until we can see that there are radical differences, even among the body of Christ, on these foundational issues, we will continue to see the increasing divide in our country that we are witnessing. And arguing the issues doesn't seem to do anything to bridge that divide.

I submit to you that one group of people are falling prey to some very unbiblical lies and those lies are informing their political beliefs and decisions.

One such lie is liberalism.

I'm not an expert, but let me see if I can trace this out. From what I've read, liberalism began back in the nineteenth century. It was then that the influences of humanism in the form of the Enlightenment and rationalistic thinking really began to influence the church.

Francis Schaeffer says this in How Should We Then Live?: "As the Renaissance had tried to synthesize Aristotle and Christianity and then Plato and Christianity these men [theologians] were attempting to synthesize the rationalism of the Enlightenment and Christianity. This attempt has often been called religious liberalism. The rationalistic theological liberalism of the nineteeth century was embarrassed by and denied the supernatural."

R.C. Sproul Jr, in Dollar Signs of the Times picks up the theme. He says that "nineteeth-century liberalism provoked a crisis by opting for materialism. If, as the liberals supposed, there was no historical resurrection, no virgin birth, no atoning death, no miracles, then what was the abiding significance of Christianity in a modern world? What was the church's mission?" He goes on to describe two options for the liberal church. One was the total rejection of Christianity altogether. Or, "the liberal church's second option was to focus attention on the relevant, abiding virture of Christianity - it's ethical system. After all, the church was a powerful human institution in a position to influence millions of people in the area of social concern....What emerged was a social gospel reducing Christianity to a concern for man's present suffering in this space/time world. Now the agenda was to carry out Jesus' mandate of feeding the hungry, giving shelter to the homeless and clothes to the naked, and caring for the prisoner, the widow, the orphan, and all who were poor and oppressed. Christianity was now seen as an ethical force with a social action agenda."

I'm not saying that liberal Christians today would deny the supernatural or miracles. However, I believe that they have been influenced by the thinking that produced an over-emphasis on a social agenda.

I'm not exactly sure how this works it's way in, but I believe that another outgrowth of humanism in the church is the idea that man, not God, is the ultimate answer to problems. Somehow, government became a substitute for the Church in implementing this social agenda. I'm sure there's dynamics here I'm not aware of, but what I'm now seeing are liberal Christians with a strong emphasis on social concerns believing that the government is ultimately the source and vehicle to solve these problems.

Naturally then, which party and which system of thought would these liberal Christians believe to be the best? The party that has the most aggressive programs to fight the "war on poverty", the party that purports to look out for the little guy: the Democrat Party.

And what about conservatives and Republicans? With the class warfare line of thinking constantly touted, Republicans and conservatives are seen as people who really do hate the poor, the down-trodden and just want to give tax breaks to the rich. They just want to pollute the Earth, surpress the poor, discriminate. They are the ultimate enemies of the compassionate liberals and their social agenda.

But it's all predicated on very unbiblical thinking. The tricky thing is that this thinking is perpetuated over generations so that those today are merely influenced vaguely by those ideas without the ideas ever really being expressed out in the open. I don't doubt that many sincere, ardent liberal Christians would of course give ascent to miracles, the supernatural, etc. They would undoubtedly say that humanism in its purest form is wrong and unbiblical. But the very beliefs of humanism and materialism is what has influenced the modern liberal thinking. It's just that these things are buried too deeply to be noticed and all that is left is a compassion for the poor and social justice.

To me, conservatism is a return to the way things ought to be. When you reject materialism, you believe in miracles. When you reject humanism, you believe that God, not man, is the center of the universe. What you have, then, is a belief that God is the ultimate source of all our solutions and that He is able to work miraculously to accomplish that.

How do those beliefs translate into politics? For one, you don't believe the government to be the one responsible for or able to solve our problems. God, through His church, becomes the primary vehicle by which our society's problems are solved. Second, you have a healthy balance of spiritual and material emphasis. Our highest aim is NOT, in fact, to end poverty in the world. Our aim is to reflect God's Kingdom here. That is done through an emphasis on human dignity, freedom, and life. To conservatives, welfare strips man of his dignity, government impositions strips man of his freedoms, and tyranny strips man of his very life. To conservatives, government has a necessary, but limited role to play. And that role is NOT to end poverty or clean up the environment. The government is to provide order and protection to society and then get out of the way to let society proceed to work on solving these problems.

Why are liberals so threatened by conservatives? Because conservatives want to limit and shrink the influence of the ultimate source of salvation for liberals: the government.

Liberalism basically denies God and liberal Christians are influenced by that denial. It follows, then, that liberal Christians, if they are sincere in their faith in God, must seriously and soberly consider their fundamental beliefs and see if there is that denial of God in their pattern of thinking.
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