Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 58 | The Religion of Progressivism

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

As religious "nones" are on the rise, the country is simultaneously moving further to the Left. I don't think this is a coincidence. But maybe liberals aren't to blame — maybe we Christians are. I'll delve into all the details on today's episode. Copyright CRTV. All rights reserved.

Hey guys, welcome back to Relatable. My name is Allie. This is a podcast by CRTV. As always, you can go to CRTV.com slash Ali, subscribe to CRTV. You can watch this podcast rather than just listening as you are probably doing right now. Today, we are going to talk about something that I've touched on in the past very briefly, and we're going to expound on it. This idea that progressivism has really become a religion and has taken the place of Christianity. and really just religion in general in America and why that is. And the reason why it is might surprise you just a little bit, but I'm also going to give us as Christians some practical advice in how to kind of deal with this moral and religious shift that we are experiencing in this country. Before I get into that, I, of course, I can't start the show without

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use promo code alley, you'll get 10% off. It's just not something that you want to miss out on. So make sure that you do that. Okay. So we are going to talk. talk about progressivism and how it has become a religion. Now, this is just a theory of mine. I'm going to talk about two different studies and how I think that they come together. Now, I understand that correlation doesn't prove causation. So just because two things happened at the same time doesn't mean that they, doesn't mean, or even if they're correlated, it doesn't actually mean that one caused the other. I realize that. So this is my theory that I am putting forth, you are welcome to contend with it. If you want to send me an email,

Ali at the conservative millennial blog.com, you're welcome to do that. I would love to hear your feedback. This is something I've been thinking about for a long time and I've just kind of had a hunch that, okay, the reason why so many Americans are going away from Christianity or leaving the church or leaving religion in general is because we have allowed the government to become our God. We have allowed progressivism, this whole social justice movement, to satisfy our need for righteousness, our need for generosity, our need to even worship something. It's something that I've always felt and thought about, but I didn't really have any data to back it up. And then I saw this interesting survey or this interesting study that's actually not a new study, but it was

talked about recently. And so I went back and I looked at it. Just the rapid growth of the religiously unaffiliated, what Pew Research calls the religious nuns, not like NU-N, but N-O-N-E-S, their religious nines. It's actually, in 2014, the majority of Americans considered themselves religiously unaffiliated. So in 2007, only 36.6% of Americans considered themselves not affiliated with their religion by 2014. So just seven years later, 55.8% considered themselves religiously unaffiliated. Maybe I'm missing the data from then until now. I would guess that that has only increased. Now, I have seen some data actually recently that it looks like maybe in the past year or so,

there is an uptick in people who consider themselves believers in God. That doesn't necessarily mean they're associated with a religion. But maybe that faith somehow is inching its way back into America. But for the sake of this conversation and for the sake of what I think is a very accurate way to describe the state of America, Americans are really going away from religious institutions. We're going away, particularly from Christianity. Another part of the study says that Christianity, the association or the affiliation with it has gone down, but the association with atheism and agnosticism has really skyrocketed.

And this is most concentrated in my generation millennials. 35% more than a third of millennials consider themselves religiously unaffiliated. I don't know about you. That actually doesn't surprise me at all, except that I thought that it might even be a little bit higher. And maybe it is a little bit higher now. We've also talked a lot about over the past eight years, particularly, or 10 years, particularly when Barack Obama was in office, just how progressive America has gotten. And here's my theory. I do not think it is a coincidence. I don't think it's a coincidence that America has drastically shifted religiously, while we have also drastically shifted politically. I would say that those things go hand in hand. Maybe it's a little bit

of the chicken or the egg, which happened first. Did we start adopting progressivism? And that kind of led us into this more secular mindset? Or was it that we were already abandoning religion? And then progressivism kind of came and filled in that gap or that void that religion had left. I'm not sure. All I'm saying is that I don't think that it's a coincidence. We have talked. We have talked about the study by Pew Research, Polarization, and Politics that looked over the past 10 years and saw that America had gotten drastically more progressive, that we have shifted to the left on everything. From 1990 to 2017, the shift was huge. Most of Americans moved to the left, but more troubling than that, there were fewer people in the middle, fewer people that said,

I have some conservative views and some liberal views. More people were on the left, and the people that were on the left got further to the left than ever before, much more so than people on the right got further to the right. They have shifted on everything, people on the left, on abortion, on immigration, on race, on welfare. And we can hear that in the conversations. Abortion used to be considered, you know, a necessary evil, something that was legal, safe, and hopefully rare. Now it is the sacrament of the Democratic Party. Just a few years ago, even Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, they were saying that illegal immigration is a bad thing. Well, now it's a good thing. Open borders should be celebrated. Even a few years ago, socialism was a bad word. No one considered themselves a socialist. But now socialism is really a badge of honor rather than a scarlet letter in today's democratic politics. So the left has shifted dramatically. Progressivism has gotten radically more progressive over the past 10 years. There was actually this interesting tweet that I saw by Eric Weinstein. He is a mathematician. He's an economist.

He tweeted out a picture of a Google search. And so you can go on Google. I'm not really familiar with this. So sorry if I'm saying this wrong. So there's something called Google in Graham viewer. I think that I'm saying that, right? That if you type in a term like transgenderism, for example, it will tell you the frequency with which that term was used,

has been used in any printed source as far back as like, I think, 1500 to 2008. 2008 is the most recent date that it can actually see. So Weinstein typed in LGBT hate speech, white privilege, transphobia, other leftist buzzwords. And you know what he found? He found that none of these words, none of these words were ever printed before about the late 1980s, ever. So that means, and a lot of these things, a lot of the frequency of these terms and printed sources increased dramatically in the 21st century. it'd be really interesting to see what it's been like in the past 10 years after 2008. But what that shows us is that all these conversations that we're having are very new.

This is not something that people have been thinking about forever. I know we talk about that, you know, nothing really is new under the sun. And while, yes, biblically, that's technically true. These conversations that we're having are very different than the conversations that we were having even 10 years ago, especially 20 years ago. These conversations that were having about white privilege, about racism being rampant, about the gender wage gap, all of these things are new. These are concerns that have been born really over, mostly over the past decade.

And not because there's actually been an increase in racism, not because there's actually been an increase in sexism or misogyny or all of these buzzwords homophobia, transphobia, but because of the new wave of postmodern progressivism that Barack Obama helped to very strongly usher in. This is really his legacy, the dividing of the American nation based on perceived oppression. This is the Marxist idea

pitting the perceived oppressed against the perceived oppressor in an effort to, I don't know, to, well, they say to bring people together, to unify people, to make sure that America is a more just nation. But all it does is divide people.

because when you pit the perceived oppressed against the perceived oppressor, people start seeing others not as fellow Americans, not as fellow humans, not as their friends, but as someone who is against them as an enemy. And that's certainly what has happened over the past few years. I'm not saying that Donald Trump has necessarily helped that. He has scraped the wound a little bit because he's so different than Barack Obama. But that's really what happened over the past 10 years. We got so much more progressive. And during that time, we also got lesser. religious. And the reason I think that is, and maybe I'm getting rid of my chicken or the egg theory. So I'm kind of now saying that progressivism came first and then we left Christianity. And I'm

not totally sure if that's true. But here's kind of where my mind is currently. That because progressivism demands everything, far left progressivism, I'm not just talking about believing in welfare or believing in bigger government or having some progressive value. but I'm talking about all in far left progressivism, social justice, political correct, all that. Political correctness. That demands everything of you. It demands your mind. It demands your soul. It demands your full commitment or else you're excluded or else you're a bigot or else you're an immoral person. You're a heretic. You're a blasphemer. Unless you sacrifice your entire self at the altar of progressivism, you are excluded from the movement. You're a bad person. Well, Christianity

also demands everything of you. It demands that you lay your life down. It demands that you take up your cross and follow Christ. That's why far left progressivism and Christianity do not go hand in hand. Not only because their values and their principles are so different, everything that far left progressives believe is so antithetical to the Bible, but also because they both demand everything of you. So you can't be a far left progressive and a Christian at the same time. It's impossible. It's impossible because they both demand everything that you have. So what people have done is opted for that far left progressive religion. Why?

Because while it demands everything of you, it actually doesn't ask for you to have any personal responsibility whatsoever. It's really the perfect religion for people who don't want to contend with the idea of absolute truth, who don't want to take personal responsibility, who just want to be comfortable, not judge, just, everyone make their own decisions because that's what it does. It pushes moral relativism, that no choice that anyone makes is wrong unless it's being a conservative Christian, that there's really no obligation that someone has to take responsibility for their own actions,

that the government will just take care of us and we just all call each other comrade. That's a very easy religion to have when you are averse to inconvenience, when you are averse to sacrifice, when you are averse to taking responsibility yourself, which most millennials are. So it's really not that millennials and Americans in general have completely moved away from Christianity and moved away from religion. It's just a political religion now.

Why do you think they're so angry when people disagree with them? Why do you think they get so worked up and so violent when people don't align with their agenda? Because this is not political for them. This is religious. This is spiritual. This is a part of who they are. This is their identity.

And so when we fight against them, it's not simply that we are disagreeing with them. It's not simply that we have different ideas. It's that we are blasphemy. We are apostates. We are heretics to the Church of Progressivism. And here's why I think this is interesting. I was listening to a podcast the other day and they were talking about the Israelites. after they had left Egypt, they were in the wilderness with Moses, and they asked Aaron to make

them a god. So Exodus 32 says, when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. So Moses was gone for what they felt like was so long because they couldn't wait for him to come back down. They had already forgotten about the guys. who split the Red Sea for them, who exited them out of Egypt and out of slavery, who liberated them, took care of them. And they said, make us something else. Fashion us an idol. Fashion us a golden image for us to worship. What this tells us about human nature, what has been true about

human nature since the biblical era, is that humans want something to worship. There's really no such thing as a completely irreligious person. There's no such thing as someone who doesn't have faith. Everyone has faith in something. Right now, the popular religion is progressivism. This social justice idea that as long as you are advocating for government programs that take care of people and put people on welfare, as long as you are for open borders, as long as you are for government mandated equality, as long as you are for making, for example, the cake baker bake a cake for gay people, then you're fine. You're good. you're on the right side of history as long as you are for reproductive rights. You're good. Now, none of this actually requires you to take responsibility for yourself. None of this actually requires you to give your own money, your own time, your own sacrifice. That's why this is so appealing. You can feel like this righteous, good, virtuous person, even though you're not

doing anything yourself except for protesting and tweeting. That is the religion of this age. Feel good about yourself. Feel righteous. Feel moral without actually managing your behavior at all without actually following any guidebook whatsoever except that says nothing's wrong except the people who say that there's something wrong. Those people are bigots. That's basically the tenet of this progressive religion. So what Exodus shows us is that people are always looking for a God. They're always looking for something to worship. They were without leadership. They were without a reminder of the God of Abraham and they longed for something to look to. People are not satisfied with nothing. Even atheists have faith in something. They believe in some kind of higher

moral order. They believe that they have some kind of purpose that they are pursuing. Agnostics believe in something. People are not satisfied with nothing. There is some, some kind of longing for eternality in the human spirit and in the human heart. There is some longing for transcendence. There's some longing for something supreme, something bigger than us, that atheists and agnostics, people and people, quite frankly, who aren't Christians, can't really define. They don't really know what that is. And so they spend their whole lives searching after things that are fleeting that don't satisfy. Well, progressivism gives a certain promise of purpose. It gives a certain promise, too, of righteousness that if you're fighting for climate change,

if you're fighting for reproductive rights, or fighting against climate change, I should say, fighting for reproductive rights, then you are attaching yourself to something bigger than yourself and you're doing something good for humanity. And it's easy to believe that because everyone in the mainstream is telling you that these things are righteous and good. The main reason is because we Christians have completely failed. We have totally failed. We have totally failed in sharing the gospel. We have totally failed in speaking truth. We have completely backed down when it comes to standing up for what is morally and biblically rights. We are too scared to be called bigots. We're too scared to be called intolerant. We're too scared to be told that we're not inclusive and

loving enough. So when it comes to things like gay marriage, when it comes to things like transgenderism, when it comes to things like abortion, where you say, oh, yeah, I just love, I don't talk about that stuff. No, we don't talk about sin. We don't talk about biblical order. We don't talk about any of that stuff. No, let's just talk about the feel good stuff. We don't need to fight this fight. We don't need to talk about biblical truth. No, that's too divisive. Let's not talk about any of that stuff. Let's just sit back and pretend like Jesus didn't care about sin that much. And I think the reason why we are so content with doing that, and consequently, the reason why all of these people have left biblical truth in order to go for this social justice

progressivism nonsense is because we Christians don't know our theology. we actually don't know the truth. The reason why it's so easy for us to fall into this malaise, fall into this just kind of apathetic, laxadaisical Christianity in which Jesus is some hipster that doesn't care about right and wrong is because we don't actually know the truth ourselves. So remember that Ligonier study that we talked about a couple weeks ago

that showed the state of theology in Christianity or in evangelical America? You remember that all of the confusion that American evangelicals have? Yeah, we don't know our Bible. We don't know our theology. That is why so many people have left the church. That is why millennials have left the church and have sought after satisfaction and truth elsewhere and have found it in progressivism, have found it specifically in the Democratic Party. Because we don't know the truth ourselves.

We don't know our Bibles. And so we don't know how to spread that message. And the only option that we have when we don't actually know the truth ourselves, when we're not grounded in it, is just sit back and say, okay, sounds good. Let's just ride this wave of the moral revolution, this abandoning of any sort of biblical order whatsoever. All right. We don't know our Bibles. If you remember the study, it says that American evangelicals, these are people who identify as Christians in America, that they believe that Jesus was a created being. even though he is not, they believe that everyone, that most people are good, even though we all sin.

They also believe that God accepts the religion or accepts the worship of all different religions. That shows us that Christians do not know the truth on which our own religion is found. So why do we expect the rest of the world or questioning people, particularly questioning millennials? why do we expect them to be, I don't want to say attracted to, like we're supposed to be making Christianity attractive, but why do we expect them to be anchored in a truth that we do not know? We do not teach theology at our churches. We just don't. We don't teach what is true about Christology, for example.

We don't teach about what is true about salvation. We simplify and dumb down our messages so much. much. We're just like the rest of the world. We go for the least common denominator in every single sermon to make sure that the least learned person understands. It's not true of every single pastor out there, but it's definitely true in general. We give the most feel-good message that we can. We make sure that it is as simplified as possible, that it's not divisive at all, that it's not going to make anyone uncomfortable, that we just make Jesus seem so unassuming, not off-putting at all, make sure that everyone just feels good in their own skin

when they're in our churches, when that is not what we're called to do. Truth is divisive. The gospel is divisive. Jesus was divisive. Christians are divisive. But what Christians are trying to do right now, well, one, we are glorifying ignorance, and we're glorifying apathy, and we're glorifying not knowing. not knowing now, even within Christianity, has become a virtue of, and it's one thing to be humble

and say, I don't know everything. It's another thing to be apathetic and say, I'm not even searching to know everything. Theology and studying theology and actually knowing your Bible and knowing what scripture says, knowing what it means, not just what it means to you, has become this thing where Christians say, eh, that's not that important. What matters is my personal relationship with God. And whatever, whatever that is, that's more important than me knowing stuffy theology. I'm sorry, you don't know God personally if you don't know him accurately. Okay? You don't know God personally unless you know God accurately. And the only way you know God accurately is by reading the word. That's what it comes down to. We are theologically illiterate in the American church. And what we do is we sit around and we point

fingers at the outside world. We point fingers at secularists and we say, you're lost. You don't know anything. Do we? Do you know the Bible that says that everyone needs to adhere to? So you say, do you know the truth that you think that other people haven't found yet? Do you know your Bible? That's where I think we have failed. Churches don't preach theology. We don't learn theology in our Bible studies. Don't even get me started on women's Bible studies. There are some good teachers out there. There are some that I really, really like. But for the most part, women's Bible studies is all about how you feel. How do you feel about God? How does he feel about you? How can this women's Bible study make you feel better about your insecurities? You know what makes you feel better about your

insecurities? Knowing that the God of the universe made you. Knowing that the God of the universe exists. what we need is not to learn more about ourselves through the Bible, but to learn more about God in the Bible. Someone recently said, which I think is really good. The Bible is not about, when you read the Bible, you're not looking for what this means to you. You're looking for what this means, period. That's what we need to do. Until we take theology seriously, until we are reading our Bibles on a consistent basis, until we are digging in to the Bible. understanding what it means, understanding the context, understanding what scripture means about God, we are going to be completely ineffective in our impact and our evangelicalism. Of course, we're going to be

weak and standing up in the face of persecution. Of course, we're going to back down when people call us bigots. Of course, we're not going to stand up for things like biblical marriage and gender roles. Of course, we're not going to stand up for things like being pro-life. Of course not, because we don't even know why we have those positions. So what I recommend to you, I personally, not everyone loves to read the Bible, and I understand that. If that's you and you are like, I don't even know where to start. I don't even know where to start. Every time I open on my Bible, I'm really confused and it's really boring and I'm overwhelmed. I got it. I understand. I have been that way too. Everyone starts there. Okay. So first of all, I don't want you to be intimidated and I

don't want you to feel like you are crazy for feeling that way. What I recommend to you, is to start in the Gospels, to start in Matthew, and I just want you to read one to two verses a day. I don't want you to drink the whole chapter. I want you to chew on one-to-two verses a day. And what I want you to do is I want you to write out those two verses, and I want you to break them down word for word. So start in Matthew 1. A lot of people start in John. I think that's fine. The Gospels are different renderings of the same story. But if you want to start in the New Testament, I think start in Matthew 1. Get yourself a study Bible. I love the ESV study Bible. That way, if I don't know a word, don't know what something means,

don't know the context of something which happens every single day that I read the Bible, by the way, I can go down to the little footnote and say, oh, okay, that makes more sense. Now, you don't have to agree with everything that the footnotes say. You should still be thinking for yourself, by the way. But it's just a good way to supplement the knowledge that you have and to fill in any gaps. So start in Matthew 1, start in John 1. Either one of those is fine.

Go through verse by verse and actually break it down. I like to do is I like to take two verses. I like to, I like to take out the significant words, and I like to write synonyms for those words. And what that actually means. That helps me so much in understanding what the verse actually means. Now, a lot of people study Greek. They study Hebrew, of course, when they're reading the Old Testament. I can't say that I'm a Greek or Hebrew scholar. I do think that's important. A lot of times study Bibles will tell you what the Greek is or what the Hebrew is in a certain word. And I do think that that's very helpful again. That helps with context. But you don't have to be a Greek or a Hebrew scholar when you're just starting out.

Start with the Gospels. Go through verse by verse. Take out the significant words. Write what those words mean. Pray about those words. Ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom before you actually open up your Bible journal about these. And what I encourage you to do is to not look for what this verse means to you and how you can apply it to your life, but what this verse means about God. Because the more you learn about God, the better off he'll be. We don't need more self-love. We don't need more self-focused. We need more God-love and God focus. That's going to help you a lot more than you using the Bible as some kind of self-help book because that's not what it is. So that's where I encourage you to go. And I also encourage you, I really like the book systematic theology by Wayne Grudum. It's just a

really good supplement. Again, it's not infallible. It is by a human author. It's not God breathe so it might not be perfect. You might have another supplement that you like better. I do encourage you to get some kind of systematic theology book. It's just the methodology is the correct methodology. It's going to interpret the Bible as it reads and not driven by some kind of agenda. So that's what I encourage you to do. And you might feel like you don't have enough time every single day to read your Bible. You might not feel like you're equipped to be a theologian. I'm not either. And I never feel like I have time. Try to take 20 minutes of your morning or night or afternoon, whatever works for you, and read your Bible. That's where Christians are lacking.

We don't know the truth. We don't know the Bible. And so all of these people are falling away because we don't even know what to tell them. When they fall into progressivism and when Christians are asked to give an answer for what we believe, we don't know what to say. We're a horrible witness because we don't know our own theology. So that's what I encourage you to do. because if we're so concerned if Christians are so concerned about the state of America, if we're so concerned by the direction that people are going and we're so concerned with people embracing progressivism rather than Christianity or rather than religion, that we've got to know our stuff.

We've got to be a good witness. We have to know the Bible and, of course, do what it says. But knowing the truth is essential to our ambassadorship as Christians and to changing the direction of the country if that's possible. And that's not even a political statement. That's really more of a spiritual statement. And that's it. I think that's all I have to say.

I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I think that's it. Okay, well, email me if you have any questions. Allie at the conservative millennial blog.com. You can send me a message on Instagram, Allie B Stucky. You can follow me on Twitter. If you show desire, I think it's also Allie B Stucky. Or you can probably just type in Allie Beth Stuckey and I'll come up.

If I'm not banned off Twitter, you never know. Every day, it's like a ticking time bomb. could get banned from Twitter for saying what I think are very logical and rational things, but you never know. Anyway, I hope that you guys have a great weekend and I'll be back here on Tuesday. Bye.