Gotta Love That Full-Blown Atheism

Fruit growing on a tree. Image source.

All right, I want to talk about this bad article from The Gospel Coalition: 3 Beliefs Some Progressive Christians and Atheists Share. The writer, Alisa Childers, says that it's common for ex-evangelicals to go through a progressive Christian phase and eventually become atheists, and therefore progressive Christianity is verrrrry suspicious and bad.

All right, I'm a progressive Christian. (I don't typically use that label for myself, but okay, sure. I actually prefer "Christian feminist.") I'm not an atheist. Let's take a look at Childers's 3 beliefs here, and see if I have them:

1. They May Adopt a Belief That the Bible Is Unreliable
2. They May Have an Unresolved Answer to the Problem of Evil
3. They May Affirm a Culture-Adapting Morality

Well for #1, yes there is stuff in the bible that's just not true. For #2, umm well I think Christians who have a resolved answer to the problem of evil are SHADY AS HELL. Because I used to be like that, and my answer was "we all deserve to die and go to hell and suffer torture forever and never experience anything good, so when bad things happen on earth, well we deserve worse anyway" which is heartless and terrible. Like if you think it's 100% fine and dandy that God is all-powerful and all-loving but horrible tragedies happen in the world... ewwwww not really okay with that. For #3, umm sure I have what they call a "culture-adapting morality" but I very much DO NOT call it that. That's sort of a straw man. And I think it's quite hypocritical that Childers claims her brand of Christianity is just plainly following what the bible says rather than "picking and choosing." LOLOLOL yeah right.

But that's not really what I want to talk about in this post. I want to talk about how she seems to think atheism is some horrific thing we should all be scared of. She uses the phrase "full-blown atheism." Ohhhhhhhhkayyyyyyyy. (Ahem, this is Christian supremacy.)

Like... atheism is fine. Like I really don't care what people believe; I care about their actions. By their fruit you will know them. If there's good fruit, then I'm cool with whatever their underlying beliefs are.

I would say that's an important part of progressive Christianity: the concept that IT'S FINE for people to not be Christians. So this "oh noes, what if people become ... *GASP* ... atheists!!!!" fearmongering is a bit lost on me.

Whatever. I'm over it. Yep, TGC is over here claiming they are doing Christianity the correct way and they're the ones who are *really* following the bible, and us progressive Christians are just following morally-suspect ideas from "the culture." It's not true, but that's old news. Evangelicalism is all about bearing false witness against one's neighbor, misrepresenting and demonizing other people's beliefs. I'm over it.

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Longtime readers of my blog may know that God has laid a burden on my heart to respond to bad theology from The Gospel Coalition. You can find all my posts about them here.