Progressive Christianity's Golden Calf

Utterly predictable

It’s always caught my eye that when Aaron and co. made the Golden Calf, he didn’t present it as a new god. Nor was he making a Canaanite or Egyptian god. Instead, he presented the calf as “your god, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt” (Exodus 32:4b).

It was a graven image made of gold like most other idols, but it was also supposed to be Israel’s God. When God’s people commit idolatry, it doesn’t always come in the form of adopting the culture’s gods directly.

Rather, it often looks like trying to marry the God of the Bible with the gods of the culture. It’s attempting to bring Him down to our level.

I believe that’s exactly what progressives do in their effort to retain some semblance of Christianity while compromising entirely with the Godless culture. Like Aaron, the result has been the creation of their own golden calf that they’re pretending is the true God.

"The Marginalized" are the golden calf of progressive Christianity.

On any given issue, you can tell in advance what side they're going to take—and it's not because of their keen exegesis of the Biblical text. If you’ve seen people argue over who’s more oppressed or use “I’m offended” as a moral high ground, you know how this works. The only thing left, then, is to find a way to read that conclusion INTO the Biblical text.

LGBT issues

Calling homosexuality or transgenderism an abomination, as the Bible does, is heavily frowned upon because it might offend. Instead, they'll either compromise entirely, find a way to blur the lines of what is or isn’t sin, equivocate unrepentant LGBT sins with literally any other sin anyone has ever committed, or "whisper" about the sin before turning to scold other Christians for not being nice enough to "the community."

Abortion

If you can even get them to admit abortion is wrong, they'll immediately turn it around to "But most Christians aren't pro-life, just pro-birth!" Their first priority will always be to come to the defense of the women who abort their children.

Egalitarianism

“Men shouldn't have exclusive right to leadership—we have to stand up for the women who have been silenced for too long.”
“Men have been in control and all we’ve done is mess things up. It’s time to let women lead.”
“It’s harmful for my wife and daughters to come to church and be told they can’t use their talents.”

In other words—male leadership is offensive, women are oppressed under it, therefore we have to change things up.

Marriage

Men are the problem, women are the victims. The old Father's Day Sermon/Mother's Day Sermon trope illustrates this perfectly. Men can hardly do anything right, and they need to improve in every way. Women can hardly do anything wrong. In fact, if a woman does something wrong, it’s probably the man’s fault.

Church

Every few months some post goes viral on Facebook talking about how judgmental Christians are (I wrote about one such post here). Outsiders are spoken of as more noble, more sincere, and just plain better than church members.

The result is that church resources are often directed toward pandering to the carnal lost at the expense of the hungry saved. Those lost and in rebellion to God are painted as victims who would clearly be in church if Christians just got their act together. As it stands, the lost are too good to be part of us, and in that case, who can blame them?

Immigration

Christians who support obvious policies like “Nations should have borders” are blasted for not seeing “the image of God” in every person illegally crossing the line. The Law of Moses said to treat immigrants fairly. So, no matter what negative effects it has on the citizenry, everybody is welcome.

Racism

Only one race is ever guilty of it, and boy are they really, really guilty. All of them. Whether they think they are or not.

This is all just Critical Theory, religious edition.

They abandon objective truth from God's Word for the culture's Marxist critiques of power dynamics to determine who needs to repent and who is already clean. But they can make it sound so Christ-like that many get taken in by it without realizing what happened.

It’s also why we have the C.S. Lewis fire extinguisher problem. You can talk about one half of the sins involved in each of the topics listed above (husbands running over their wives, churches being too unwelcoming, white racism, etc.) without any pushback. The idol hasn’t been disrespected.

But the minute you put the other side under the microscope (wives running over their husbands, churches being too welcoming, minority racism, etc.), the reaction is swift and merciless. Don’t touch somebody’s golden calf.

We need discernment grounded in the Word and its timeless truths, and the kind of prophetic, uncompromised truth-speaking that God's men of old used. It's the only way idols are destroyed.

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Notes

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