It’s the most radical place to be in America today.
If you are a person trying to weave together a life of faith with a mind disposed to critical thinking, you probably have the basic idea that the place you belong is someplace called the “progressive church.” There, after all, is where you don’t have to hang your brain on the hook by the door as you enter; there you can find like-minded (no accident, that word) people who will probably agree with your views on a whole host of issues.
The problem is, the more we move in this direction, the more the middle is getting emptied out of spiritual sustenance and support. And it’s not just spiritually; the middle class itself is shrinking, with implications for both the major political parties. As the country becomes increasingly polarized between rich and poor, right and left, liberal and conservative, we lose a lot more that we have taken for granted—moderate political discourse, an ability and willingness to make community with people with views different from our own, the protection that reasoned political discourse gives to all citizens.
If the place for Christians to stand is with the downtrodden and the oppressed, it just might be—though it may well sound heretical—that the place for Christians to stand in early twenty-first century America is in the middle. It’s to stand with the middle class, the virtue of moderation, the hope for a renewed civility in our politics and a renewed sense of a commonweal in our economics. The mainline churches of American Protestantism once held this ground as their own; but over the years both their political orientation and the positions taken by their national organizations have gravitated from centrist to more left of center.
Maybe the most radical thing the mainline Protestant churches could do to in the years to come is to reclaim the middle—to focus on the forgotten middle of our economic and political life. After all, it was because of the essential moderation in American political sensibilities that progress toward civil rights, women’s equality, and legal equality for the BGLT community could discussed in the public square.
Progressives, more than virtually anyone else in our society, have a stake in the maintenance of the middle. It’s time to reinvest.