Part of Shared Belief, a series responding to Alisa Childers’ article on progressive Christianity and atheism.
As we’ve seen throughout this series, Alisa Childers’ presentation of progressive Christianity falls short in numerous ways.
- She claims that progressives dismiss biblical authority.
- She claims that progressive Christians don’t have an answer to the problem of pain.
- She claims that progressive Christians reject traditional Christian ethics — by which she means a handful of particular sexual norms.
In each of these claims, Childers cherry-picks her evidence, bases her position on one narrow understanding of Calvinism, and ignores the wider Christian tradition. But her arguments are flawed at a deeper level. In each of her three theses, Childers hedges her language to paint all progressives with a broad brush and to find them guilty by association.
Hedging (or as snarky Wikipedia editors call it, using “weasel words”) is a way to soften a statement while also using it to mislead. Continue reading “Shared Belief: The Need for Nuance”