Today, More than Ever, Liberal Religion Must Leave Its Closet Behind

The signs are all there.

Liberal church bodies are fighting back. Every so often in the past they did so, but now the open, unholy marriage of extreme right-wing bigotry, its political proponents, and right-wing religionists seems to have put denominations and religious leaders on the alert.

It has taken decades for liberal religion to value itself highly enough to open its closet door and begin to outwardly challenge the monopoly on “Christianity” trumpeted by right-wing churches. Maybe the triumph of radical and shamelessly aggressive right-wingers in these last presidential and congressional races finally made it sink in. 

Liberal religion realized that it had better speak up or forever be shut out of national debate – even its very existence is threatened by politics ending church-state separation.

Liberal religion has always been there. Even before the beginnings of “Fundamentalism” in the early twentieth century, religious liberalism promoted progressive social change – fighting for abolition, women’s suffrage, worker’s welfare, and equal rights. Until the fundamentalist backlash, it was even on the ascendancy.

The Christian right, however, jumped in to dominate radio and television from their infancy with radio evangelists, and TV preachers. Somehow religious liberalism was left behind politically as formerly other-worldly conservatives decided to form a Christian Coalition that moved the US toward a theocracy with religious “conservatives” in charge.

There was hesitancy on the liberal side of the Christian Church. Maybe it was liberal guilt. Maybe it was the misguided belief that modern life would automatically leave traditional beliefs behind so little needed to be done. Maybe it was the impression that spreading the word was somehow low-class.

Whatever it was, the rise of the religious right politically enforced the broad-based impression that radical fundamentalism is Christianity.

The popularity of fundamentalist beliefs in the US tells us much about the society we live in. The idea that most people would believe that they were born totally depraved, in original sin, or flawed beyond the capacity to change things by themselves, is a glaring example.

What’s amazing is that such a horrendous doctrine would even appeal to people. It must strike a familiar cord, or they’d reject it as perverse, insulting, and grotesque. It must fit with the way the majority of children are brought up in our culture that so many would come to believe that in themselves they’re hopelessly doomed and fully deserving of unending and unspeakably horrible punishment.

Then such religion takes over their lives by providing the “salvation” from their evil selves. Someone else, it says, must prove we’re good, since we can’t. And, that someone else has no idea what it’s like to be as rotten as we are. Fortunately, that someone is inclined to like us in spite of our worthlessness.

That’s the core of right-wing Christian theology. It’s built not on the idea that its god loves us because we are valuable but that we would have no value if its god did not love us. We’d deserve unbearable suffering.

What kind of country must ours be when the majority of us feel so negative about ourselves that such claims are popularly welcomed? How hurt we must be deep within our psyches that even the so-called “saved” among us still devalue themselves as essentially worthy only of the endless torture they call hell.

The doctrine of hell strikes an emotional cord. It’s a familiar idea because we’ve experienced our hells on earth.

The doctrine of a god as a punishing father who also believes we all deserve unending physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, sounds like the nightmare of an abused child who’s been told they deserve the violent punishment an abusive parent dishes out. 

Such religious and spiritual abuse appeals because it’s familiar. So much parenting in our culture fits the definition of “poisonous pedagogy” about which child-abuse expert Alice Miller documented in books such as For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.

It’s not that every child was physically abused. Yet so many grown adults would rather not face the fact that their parents, who were taught to do so by their parents, used parenting methods that internalized in our citizens their limited value, their worthlessness outside of adult acceptance, the fact that they should “Honor their father and mother” no matter what, or that they’re unworthy of respect or being taken seriously.

Note how the right-wing fears changing these patterns. That’s why it criticizes “over-indulgence” of children, liberal affirmations of humanity’s innate goodness, or anyone who suggests children have something to teach an adult world that’s run by leaders who sound like punishing parents. Even some liberals among us get caught sounding like our punishing parents.

Miller is blunt: “For some years now, there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable toll on society – a fact that we are still forbidden to recognize.”

Too much would have to be admitted should we consider this too seriously. Too much personal pain would need to be felt. It’s easier to just believe we all deserve hell.

But liberal religion says none of this has to be, there is another way. It sees the problem as systemic, rooted in the teachings of the cultural institutions that we worship. It doesn’t see it rooted in the Divine or the Universe.

Liberal religion sees that things can change and that we’re capable of changing things. We don’t have to wait for some inhuman cataclysm. We don’t have to believe that war, poverty, and crime are inevitable and will always be with us.

It’s a radically different way of looking at things. It’s just that liberal religion hasn’t often acted as if it really believed what it does. It’s too often been hesitant to stand firmly, publicly, and boldly on the alternative vision it offers. It’s been too hesitant to speak up and proudly claim that right-wing theology is plain wrong.

Maybe so much liberal religion hasn’t felt worthy enough to do so -- but in these times it better because if not now, when?