The name doesn’t make the band, the band makes the name

Last updated on: September 8, 2014 at 6:15 pm by Fred Clark

The name doesn’t make the band, the band makes the name 2014-09-08T18:15:34-04:00 Fred Clark

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Matthew Paul Turner has some thoughts on the label “progressive Christian.”

It’s an odd label — two expansively elastic words have gotten squooshed together to provide a new label for … something or other. This new label has produced much pondering — How should it be applied? To whom should it be applied? To whom should it not be applied? What are the boundaries? (We must have boundaries!)

Meh. Whatever. Just don’t call me late for dinner.

The truth is that, at least in its most recent Web & Twitter incarnation, the label is something of an accident. It’s the label settled on for a bunch of Christians whom other Christians weren’t sure they wanted to share a label with.

Rewind a few years and you’ve got this group of nice people trying to create this thing that could bring together people from all sorts of different religious persuasions — Catholics, Protestants, white evangelicals, Mormons, Buddhists, Pagans, atheists, Muslims, Hindus … everybody. (That was the goal, anyway — an ambitious goal perhaps inadequately approximated,* but still a neat idea.) The aim was to create a community of communities — a forum that would both allow groups to talk amongst themselves and to talk to one another without having to sacrifice their own identities to some kind of lowest-common-denominator hegemony. (Again, the reality may never achieve the ambition, but I like the ambition.)

So they start getting people to join the various groups and slowly the project starts growing, but they soon encounter a bit of a problem. The evangelical niche is off to a lively start, but the bigger/louder voices there aren’t quite the kind of typical voices that maybe other white evangelicals would be expecting. And that’s making it harder to get those other white evangelicals to join the conversation.

This problem was kind of baked into the nature of the project. The whole idea of a community of communities joining in a respectful, mutual exchange of ideas is something that tends to make a lot of white evangelicals anxious. (There are going to be Pagans and Papists and atheists at this party? What fellowship hath light with darkness?) So it wasn’t surprising that a disproportionate share of the first evangelical Christians they got to accept the invitation were maybe a bit out-of-step with most of the evangelical subculture.

Take, for example, Scot McKnight, whose Jesus Creed was the first playful-primate-sized** blog in the fledgling evangelical community. McKnight is a terrific, prolific blogger, a thoughtful guy, and one of the nicest folks you could ever hope to meet. But while he’s got impeccable evangelical credentials as a theologian, he’s also an outspoken proponent for women’s full equality in the church — going so far as to practice what he preaches by sharing his platform with a female theologian (gasp!). That’s “controversial” for a lot of white evangelicals. McKnight is also an outspoken, albeit gentle, critic of young-Earth creationism. That’s strike two.

So the standard-bearer for the evangelical community they’re trying to build is someone that a lot of other evangelical types disagree with on two subjects they regard as very important. That makes recruiting more evangelicals to join the community of communities more difficult.

Still, though, Jesus Creed was less of an obstacle than the other evangelical blog they featured with a similar sized readership. If favoring women’s ordination and a non-literalistic hermeneutic for Genesis made Jesus Creed controversial, advocating marriage equality and legal abortion made that other blog anathema. (It also didn’t help that the other blog was probably best known for making fun of a very popular set of evangelical books. And wasn’t Republican. And had an unfortunate fondness for elliptical dirty jokes.)

It just wasn’t going to be possible to create a viable white evangelical community with voices like that on the roster.

At the same time, the mainline Protestant community wasn’t thrilled with being labeled the “mainline Protestant” community due to the way that label has, over time, morphed into a kind of euphemism for old, shrinking, no-longer relevant congregations with really nice buildings.

So then, what if we just take all the … um … ainmay inelay Protestants, and all the evangelicals that the other evangelicals don’t want, and lump them all together into a big catchall community? (McKnight can stay, for now, but not those other folks.)

Not a bad idea. But what do we call it?

OK, then.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* About which, more later.

** I still miss the late great “Blog Ecosystem” run by NZ Bear/Rob Neppell at The Truth Laid Bear. In the early years of the blogosphere, TTLB tracked blog traffic according to a whimsically Linnaean system, a kind of Great Chain of Blogging with “Higher Beings” and “Mortal Humans” at the top, working down through “Playful Primates,” “Large Mammals,” “Marauding Marsupials,” “Adorable Rodents,” etc. It was a big deal, back in 2004 or so, to learn that your site had grown from a mere Slimy Mollusc to a Crawly Amphibian.

The ranking and scorekeeping wasn’t the main point, though. Neppell created the thing “to avoid having to pick who to put on my own blogroll.” TTLB’s ecosystem was thus a terrific way of finding new blogs, new writers and new voices. It tracked everybody — liberal, conservative, warblogs, lawblogs, lifestyle blogs, watchblogs, etc. — back when it was still possible to track everybody.

It was great fun to scroll through all the molluscs and marsupials you’d never read before, all the while thinking “Wow — there must be hundreds of blogs out there.”

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