Not "Conservative"

A few weeks back, I made a comment during a Sunday morning message that insulted a member of the church. What I said was along these lines: "Such cultural evolution, and the progressive church's spiritual response, has been the bane of our right-wing conservative brothers and sisters..."

The member's point was that there are many conservatives who want to see culture evolve. They want to see thing progress. They want to see the world become a better, safer, kinder place to live.

Admittedly, this member is probably correct. Conservatives and liberals alike want to make the world a better place in which to live. Perhaps I used the wrong word. Instead of saying that cultural evolution and the progressive church's response to it are the bane of conservatives, I should have said that it is the bane of those who fear progress.

The opposite of "progressive" is not "conservative," after all. The opposite of progress is regression, repression and fear. We have seen and heard a fair share of progress' opposite in the past fifty or so years. In fact, we hear from repressive camps any time that we have experienced meaningful cultural evolution. They so fear cultural development that they seek to pull culture back into a previous configuration, beginning with their own religious culture.

The American response to a cultural evolution that began sometime in the 1960's has been to gather in regressive and repressive religious organizations. The destructive religious climate is far worse in other parts of the world, of course, where it has led to the degradation of women and children and violence enacted on any who would dare represent the cultural evolution. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a young girl who was shot in the head for daring to work for the education of young women in her culture. The opposite of progress is repression, regression, hatred and violence.

Those practices do not belong to political or cultural stances, like conservative or liberal. They are distinctly religious in nature. The enemies of cultural evolution, and of a spiritual one to which it can lead, has been decidedly religious. Religion has become the voice of repression and regression. Perhaps that is the chief reason that modern culture has rejected religious institutions in general, even while those same institutions have grown and amassed huge followings.

If the Church of Jesus Christ is to survive the current cultural evolution in which it finds itself, it will be through progressive means instead of repressive or regressive ones. How can the church become an instrument of the great things that are coming from the current contemporary cultural evolution? How can it lead to a spiritual and practical evolution in our denominations, churches and judicatories?

Next time, I will be more careful in the words that I choose. I apologize.