The progressive Protestant project of North America and Northwestern Europe is fast concluding. It abandoned orthodoxy early in the 20th century in favor of a cold modernism that rejected supernaturalism in favor of stern moral reform. That focus on science and rationality gave way to postmodern self-discovery and deconstruction, with obsession over self-identity, including race and ethnicity, but most especially of late sexuality and gender.
There was an online hullaballoo last week about the “sparkle creed” at a very progressive Lutheran church outside Minneapolis. Offered as a substitute for more traditional creeds, the clergywoman cited God as “nonbinary,” having “two dads”.
A Fox News segment reported on the sparkle creed as a “crisis” for Christianity. But no one needs to worry that Christian orthodoxy is seriously threatened by sparkle theology.
The cleric at Edina Community Lutheran Church cited her belief in the “rainbow spirit who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.” What does that mean? Likely neither she nor the congregation that stood to join her could really explain.
The church’s website highlights the congregation’s advocacy for “LGBTQIA+, inclusion, racial justice and ecofaith.” It also cites immigration and “reproductive justice.” And it highlights misdeeds towards native peoples:
We acknowledge that Edina Community Lutheran Church is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of the Dakhóta Oyáte*, the Dakota nation. Treaties developed through exploitation and violence were broken. Tribes were forced to exist on ever smaller amounts of land.
Acknowledging this painful history, we as a congregation confess our complicity in the theft of Native land and acknowledge that we have not yet honored our treaties. We further confess that Christians and Christian churches have benefited from this land theft. We commit to being active advocates for justice for Native People and to truth telling that leads to healing.
Do any native people attend Edina Community Lutheran Church? Most churches with native people tend to be more traditional and more focused on traditional Christian work, not the activism preferred by some white liberal Protestant churches. And the overall project of theological deconstruction almost entirely belongs to white progressives in fast declining Mainline Protestant denominations.
Theological progressives often herald their latest favorite fads as representing the inevitable future. And some dour traditionalists gladly collaborate in this prediction. After all, isn’t the world, and the church, constantly degenerating to ever new depths of depravity? And nothing can be done but complain!