August 26, 2021
Deconstructing your faith and ultimately deconverting from your fundamentalist religion can be very uncomfortable, even traumatic. As such, it often helps to take baby steps. After all, it can take quite a toll on someone’s mental health to admit, all at once, that everything they believe and thought they knew is a lie.
Many deconstructing Christians deal with this by embracing Progressive Christianity after letting go of their more fundamentalist or evangelical beliefs.
Progressive Christianity is kind of an amorphous term. It encompasses an ever-shifting lineup of beliefs and practices. Put simply, it’s a label for Christians who still believe in the Christian God and that Jesus was the Son of the God, but hold to a far less fundamentalist belief system. This mainly manifests with social issues. Progressive Christians often affirm LGBTQ+ people, trans people, and other lifestyles not usually condoned by the Church. Generally speaking, Progressive Christians are also concerned with “fixing” the modern Church so that they, too, accept these people and lifestyles.
Basically, a Progressive Christian still believes in God but does so without condemning large swaths of the population.
While that sounds all well and good, I still personally consider Progressive Christianity as a pit stop that’s useful in softening the blow of a painful deconversion rather than a belief system to hold long-term. I went through this myself.
While it’s a good thing that these folks are more inclusive than their fundamentalist brothers and sisters, it still pains me to see them continue to believe that their salvation, strength, and ultimate purpose come from some entity exterior to themselves. I’m an adamant believer that you’ll find everything you need already within you. Even Jesus said so.
One big thing onto which Progressive Christians affect their progressiveness is the Holy Bible. The Bible contains tons of issues for the individual who has a Progressive Christian belief system. These issues are the ones you likely already know: slavery, denouncing of LGBTQ+ people, subjugation of women, and depicting the Christian God as condoning mass genocide. So how do Progressive Christians update this jarring stack of ancient documents?
By reading the Bible metaphorically instead of literally.
I dabbled with this solution myself. I reread large chunks of the Bible through a lens of metaphor rather than literal. And… it helps. It felt good to read challenging passages and be able to say, “Oh, this is just a metaphor for that” or “this story is an allegory to teach a lesson.”
- It felt good to believe that Job didn’t literally exist nor did God literally allow all those horrible things to happen to him just to test his faith.
- It felt good to believe that the crusades in the Book of Joshua didn’t literally happen and were all just a myth about how God’s chosen people came to be.
- It felt good to believe that the insane laws in Leviticus were merely a demonstration of how we would be expected to live if God hadn’t sent Jesus to die for our sins.
- It felt good to place Paul’s letters firmly into the context of his culture and to divine some imaginary permission from God to “update” them to the modern era. (“Of course women are allowed to speak in church!”)
But as I cruised through the Bible gleefully chipping away all the stuff I didn’t like, I quickly came to an alarming realization—there was hardly anything left.
Eventually I’d whittled the entire tome down to the Resurrection. If the Resurrection wasn’t literal, I reasoned, then there was no need for Christianity. Up to that point, all my efforts had been to preserve the need for a religion in my life.
Shortly after, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that if everything else in the Bible was myth, allegory, and legend, then it made little to no sense that the Resurrection would be the only thing found within those pages that was real. I had to let it go, and thus fully deconvert.
Now, as I look back, I can’t help but notice the absurdity of holding a metaphorical view of the Bible. I understand that it’s far more comforting than a literal view, but at the end of the day, what’s the point?
What’s the point of defending hundreds upon hundreds of pages by saying, “Yes, it says this, but it really means this entirely other thing?” That kind of interpretation doesn’t work for any other book in the world. Why the Bible?
The answer is because many people need it to work. They aren’t quite ready to fully deconvert, so they cling to a metaphorical view of Scripture.
I do sympathize with these people. I really do. Again, I was in their shoes once. But in the end, I finally had to admit that it just wasn’t working. I had to admit that the writers of the Bible meant what they said and it was ridiculous trying to put words into the mouths of authors who’d lived a thousand years ago.
In the end, a metaphorical view the Bible—or any other aspect of Progressive Christianity in my opinion—is a bridge to help transition you out of a fundamentalist belief system. For that, it is useful. But like all bridges, it’s meant to eventually be crossed.