Can the Left Moderate? Progressive Churches Hold the Clue.

If progressive churches are any indication, the left seems unwilling and unable to self-reflect, moderate, and learn the delicate art of appealing to mainstream voters.

Election Day was a repudiation of the identity, grievance, and victim politics that have dominated the political and cultural left for decades. Trump and his supporters were warned that a vote for Republicans was a vote for bigots, Nazis, fascists, and “phobes” of all stripes. And on Tuesday, they showed that they just didn’t care. Tired of the name-calling, they just wanted some common-sense solutions and old-fashioned American pride.

In the aftermath of the election, each side now has to develop a revised action plan. The right will be prioritizing agenda items and putting personnel in place to carry out its campaign promises. Conversely, the left should be regrouping to figure out how it lost voters and alienated persons from almost every county in America.

But if progressive churches are any indication, the left seems unwilling and unable to self-reflect, moderate, and learn the delicate art of appealing to mainstream voters. It is true that almost every mainline Protestant denomination in America has tilted left in the past two decades. Many made fighting climate change a Christian imperative, approved the entire LGBTQ agenda, called for government redistribution of wealth, declared a hatred for guns, facilitated the migrant crisis, and made their white parishioners feel bad simply for being white. These questionable teachings led to inevitable splits in the Episcopal, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches. There are also many notable conflicts in Baptist and Catholic circles as well.

While the number of conservative churches forging out on their own is relatively small, they are on the upswing. Progressive churches, meanwhile, are dying. They have little influence, few members, and less cash coming in than ever before. Yes, the smaller number of people going to church affect both liberal and conservative churches alike, but the liberal message simply is not resonating with the masses. In fact, it’s a dead end. None of the progressive church bodies have seen an uptick in attendance in the past decade. They are all in decline.

So the question in the face of obvious failure is, what are the liberal churches doing to stem this tide of failure? Are they calling into question their orthodoxies? Are they rethinking their positions? Are they taking the rainbow flags out of the sanctuary? Are they going back to believing that the Bible is God‘s word and is authoritative? Or, instead, are they doubling down?

Of course, these questions are all rhetorical. The progressive churches are not taking one step back from their liberal orthodoxies. They are going to go down with the ship and they are likely to pat themselves on the back for their failure. After having assumed what they believe to be the moral high ground they are not going to retreat now, even when repudiated by the people they claim to serve. “Walking it back” is impossible because they have made grievance, identity, and victim politics (and not God) their main reason for existing.

Will the political left do the same? Probably. There is no reason to believe that they will change, even while they are in the process of losing the thing that matters most to them: political power. The leftists, if the churches are any indication, do not seem capable of inflection or reactive change. There is simply no significant desire on their part for any meaningful self-reflection. Instead, we expect that the vitriol will increase; the commitment to identity will increase; the animus towards what they consider to be flyover-state “garbage” will increase. Even when they must change in order to survive, they seemingly cannot.

The same has not been true for the right. In the wake of two Obama blowouts, at first the right seemed content to be perpetual losers (we know that change is hard). Trump changed all that. Agree or disagree, the right won by overthrowing the cargo of forever wars, open borders, and (hopefully) endless spending. Somewhere in the conservative mind, there exists the will, humility, and ability to admit defeat and change course. I question whether the same is possible in the current iteration of the leftist mind.

Future debates will likely take place amongst the members of the right, because the left will probably not want to participate. Thankfully, America’s youth are shifting to the right and they are looking for inspiration, not condemnation. If the left wants to have any cultural sway in years to come, it had better adapt soon and join in the discussions. But, the radical left animates the entirety of the left, and it seems that they would rather die as martyrs, than compromise their activism.

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