Alisa Childers: The Dangers of Progressive Christianity
This is the Babylon Bee Interview show. In this episode of the Babylon Bee Podcast, Kyle and Ethan talk to Alisa Childers. Alisa Childers first gained fame by being in the Christian Pop band, ZOEgirl. Alisa has since moved on from music into becoming a Christian Apologist with her own podcast and her debut book, Another Gospel?, available wherever you find books. Alisa's apologist story began when she discovered her Pastor was a self proclaimed "Hopeful Agnostic" thus leading her on a journey of discovering historic Christianity and the true meaning of rap core. Ethan and Kyle receive all the CCM back stories including that of the mysterious Carman. Be sure to check out The Babylon Bee YouTube Channel for more podcasts, podcast shorts, animation, and more. To watch or listen to the full podcast, become a subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans. Topics Discussed Alisa's logo design explanation What is Historic Christianity? Origin of ZOEgirl Alisa's Crisis of Faith Hopeful Agnostic Pastor Journey towards becoming an Apologist Defining Progressive Christianity Ways Progressive Christianity is infiltrating the Evangelical Church Subscriber Portion Cool Stories Newsboys food habits Ending up on Aerosmith's bus Altar call with Journey ZOEgirl name Origin Rapcore 10 Questions G.K. Chesterton Babylon Bee Altar Call
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Hard-hitting questions.
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Do you like it?
Taking you to the cutting edge of truth.
Yeah, well, Last Jedi is one of the worst movies ever made, and it was very clear that Ryan Johnson doesn't like Star Wars.
Kyle pulls no punches.
I want to ask how you're able to sleep at night.
Ethan brings bone-shattering common sense from the top rope.
If I may, how double dare you?
This is the Babylon B interview show.
Oh, hey there, everybody.
It's me, Ethan Nicole, and my co-host.
I'm not really your co-host, but I'm.
Where's Kyle?
I don't know.
I guess I'm filling in for him.
I'm Dan.
I'm the producer, by the way.
Dan Coates.
He's the man behind the scenes almost all the time.
So we decided we wanted to start doing these intros for the show.
So we started because we started the interviews.
Like, really, a lot of times people don't know who the heck's going on or who the person is.
And me and Kyle are bad at remembering to do that.
And I think we definitely forgot to do that in this one.
So it's all in the show notes.
You guys just don't read it.
Yeah, you could read the show notes before you listen to the podcast, but most people listen to a podcast in the car.
So you probably shouldn't read show notes while you're driving.
Well, I'm talking about you and Kyle.
Oh, yeah, you read the show notes.
If you read it, that's true.
We could read it.
No, it always feels well.
The thing is, usually we have the person on, we're talking to them, and then we start recording.
We're like in the middle of a conversation.
Yeah.
Anyway.
This is a good one.
It kind of, yeah.
So this is a really good interview.
I didn't know what to expect.
Elisa Childers, Childers.
Yeah.
Zoe Girl.
So she was in a pop Christian group called Zoe Girl.
It's like Spice Girls for Christians, I think, or something.
And I think that's dancing and like singing.
I guess they used to sing on treadmills or something.
We finally found somebody that knows something about Carmen.
Yeah, that's a big surprise for subscribers because that's the subscriber portion.
She had like, and then she loves DK Chesterton.
So she came out of, you know, she went through rehab for a while and then came out of Christian pop music and became an apologist.
Apologetics.
Apologetics person.
Yeah.
And she's been, you may have seen her on YouTube.
She's got a book out about progressive Christianity, which is like Christians who like, they just, they call her, like, they're Christians, but they don't really believe the Bible, I think.
Is that sure?
That seems to be my assessment of what.
Yeah.
Another gospel?
Yeah.
So the name of the book is Another Gospel.
So without further ado, this is our interview.
It's actually me and Kyle, but I wanted to, I'd like having Dan's help.
He was here.
Was it a good interview, Dan?
I thought it was a good interview.
We'll see how it turned out.
Pleasantly surprised.
It was really fun.
Not that I thought it was going to be bad.
I just didn't know what to expect.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, hello, Elisa, and thank you for joining us today.
We were just admiring your beautiful podcast set, and we're a little jealous.
Thank you so much.
It's great to be with you guys.
I'm a big fan.
That's a cool logo.
So what's going on with the logo?
Can you tell us a little bit about this?
Is this your personal logo, like for you?
Does this represent Elisa?
It actually represents, so what you see down at the bottom are the roots of a tree, and the roots represent historic Christianity.
So the apostles, Jesus, the early Christians, and then we are kind of that shoot that's coming out of the middle.
So it just represents being connected to our roots as Christians.
Oh, okay.
I thought it was like your Enneagram score or something.
It's not.
I thought it was like a peace sign that got all beat up.
Messed up.
Yeah, some people thought it was a peace sign.
Something that thought it was a guitar that, you know, we could bring the music element.
So you could just claim that it had the guitar influence.
And then it's cool.
Yeah.
So you keep talking.
I noticed that you always talk about historic Christianity.
So, what do you mean when you say historic Christianity?
Because that probably has a lot of baggage or different implications or connotations for different groups of people.
Yes.
And I'm glad you asked that question because that's an important question.
So, most of my ministry deals with interacting with progressive Christianity.
And so, when I was first studying the movement, I wanted to know kind of what was the opposite of progressive Christianity.
So, there are different words people might use, like conservative or they might use evangelical or things like that.
And for me, what's that?
Actual Christianity.
Actual Christianity.
Yeah, we could just say actual Christianity.
But those words have a lot of baggage and kind of the meaning can change over time, I think, with some of those words.
And so, I chose the word historic.
And so, what I don't mean by historic is that you can just go back into history and find some medieval mystic that says what you like and call that historic Christianity.
What I mean is we go back to the earliest Christians, even some of the pre-New Testament creedal material.
What did those people say Christianity was?
What did Jesus say it was?
What did the apostles and the earliest Christians say that Christianity meant?
And then we trace that through church history.
And of course, we can see that Christianity goes off the rails from time to time.
We have reformations and things like that.
But so, when I'm talking about historic Christianity, I'm not speaking for a certain denomination or something like that, but it's true Christianity as defined by the earliest Christians, more or less.
Okay, so you're not like Eastern Orthodox.
No, a lot of people, yeah, a lot of people say, Well, you should just be Eastern Orthodox.
But I think that when you look at, and it depends also, I haven't done a totally deep dive on that yet, but from what I can tell, they're sort of like the converted Protestants that say one thing about Eastern Orthodox.
And if you go to the ones who are kind of more born into that tradition, it sounds a little different.
So, I'm still trying to figure all that out.
But, yeah.
Yeah.
And if you were Eastern Orthodox, you'd have to grow a really long beard, and that might disqualify you.
So, might be difficult.
Yeah, might be hard.
All right.
So, you started in like CCM, Zoe Girl.
For people who know Christian contemporary music is like Christian pop music, Christian pop music.
And you made this journey.
It's interesting.
We were shocked.
We're like, we get to talk to someone who was in CCM and like isn't an atheist now because he's standing on the smoldering pile of wreckage.
All my Christian heroes from that day, I'm like, oh, I'm going to follow them on Twitter.
Oh, they're not Christian.
So I don't know.
You want to talk a little bit about that journey and what that was like?
Yeah, man, that's a sad statement, but it's kind of funny because it's true.
It's like we're seeing so many deconstruction stories come out of people, especially in the era that I was in in CCM, deconstructing and either going into some kind of extreme progressive Christianity or atheism or something like that.
Yeah, it was a really interesting experience being in Christian music in the late 90s, more early, early 2000s for me than late 90s.
But my experience, I mean, mostly I had pretty good experiences with other artists and with people.
You know, there were some stinkers and some, I talked about in another interview, just kind of getting to go around and visit every different kind of church you can imagine, just from the big mega churches to the small liturgical churches and kind of witnessing what that was like in different places.
And so I think that by the time I got to when I was going through a time of doubt and deconstruction, I was pretty primed for it because of some of the things that I saw that, you know, were, I think, legitimate critiques of evangelical culture.
Yeah, I have a lot of questions about the different churches you visited, but I think I want to ask that in the subscriber portion.
Okay.
We'll save it.
We'll save the juicy stuff for our paid subscribers.
What's the journey like to, I mean, to become a Christian pop star?
Like, do you start off playing coffee shops or were you like, we're like record executives like walking in a room and like, we're putting together a female boy band, Christians.
And you're a pretty good singer.
Sing and let's see if we want you.
And then you sing and they're like, yeah, you're in.
We got two others over here.
How's it work?
Well, kind of like you just said.
So I was a toll of making that up.
No, that's pretty much it.
So I was doing some things like some coffee shops and youth groups and global stuff, conferences and things singing as a solo artist.
And then when Zoe Girl was manufactured, so it was put together by our manager and our record label.
And so they both had my demo because I had sent it to them as a solo artist.
And then they said, well, hey, we're putting together this girl group and we think you'd be great for it.
So I actually moved to Nashville based on that.
And then it was just through some random events that we met the other two girls.
Interestingly, none of us came from an audition.
We actually had some auditions, but none of us came from one of those auditions.
It was just sort of random connections.
Like with Chris, Kristen, she was in a kind of a more emo alternative band.
And so one of the people at the record label had seen her perform and thought she would be perfect.
And we just hit it off.
And then I kid you not, like, this sounds like a made-up story, but we actually found the third member, Chrissy, through a children's musician who was a kazoo player who actually lived in a treehouse.
I laughed over the last part of that.
Tree house?
Did you say that?
A kazoo player in a treehouse.
Yes.
So Chris was actually in a pop group with the singer Pink before she was in Zoe Girl.
I'm coming.
Sorry.
Yeah.
Contact.
Yeah.
And so this professional kazoo player knew Kristen and he knew Chrissy.
So he connected us with.
She played kazoo for pink?
I never realized there was a kazoo player in pink.
That's crazy.
It's one of the lesser known success stories of the legacy.
So you've moved into apologetics and I'm curious because, you know, I really like apologetics.
But probably one of the hardest things to defend in the Christian faith as an apologist is Christian pop music.
So how do you get your defense for that?
Oh, my goodness.
We could just play some Zoe Girl music videos and we'll ask you to defend them.
No way.
I'd be like, no, I can't defend those lyrics.
I mean, I was thinking more like Toby Mac and stuff.
Oh, gotcha.
Defending like whether or not it should be a thing or.
Oh, I'm just being.
He's just being.
I'm just don't listen to him.
I'm a grumpy old man when it comes to music.
So I'm always, nah.
Do you still listen to Christian music?
Do you still listen to CCM?
Are you like, you wash your hands over listening to CCR now?
CC, what?
You know what?
I hardly listen to any music at all.
My whole life shifted.
It's like I went from spending most of my life as a flaky artist diving down every artistic rabbit hole I could find to being on the complete opposite end of things where now I just want to cozy up in bed and read a 4,000-page commentary on the book of Acts, you know.
I don't have time for much music these days.
Gotcha.
Maybe we could have like a heavy metal band that could do a 4,000-page heavy metal version commentary on Acts.
We'll get her into it.
Yeah, you know, I don't know.
So you went from CCM world to apologetics, and you talked about having this crisis of faith where you, you'll tell it better than I will, but you basically found out your pastor was like an atheist.
So tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, no, that's basically it.
So when Zoe Girl came off the road, I was married and I had a new baby.
And my husband and I began attending this church in Middle Tennessee.
It marketed itself as this non-denominational evangelical church.
And we really loved it.
We actually, my husband and I had never experienced sermons that were more intellectual.
Just the insights the pastor would bring were really impressive.
And we were just loving that.
And we loved the people.
The people were so welcoming.
And, you know, we kind of were joking about going around to all the different kinds of churches for so long.
It was really refreshing to just not feel judged.
It was refreshing to be so accepted and not put on a pedestal because I had been in music.
There were a lot of people at that church at the time that were in music in one way or another, and it just wasn't that big of a deal.
And so we just loved this place.
We felt like, man, we have found our church home.
And so after we were attending for about eight months, the pastor invited me to be a part of a smaller study and discussion group, and he compared it to seminary.
He said, if you go to this four-year class, you'll come out on the other side, able to converse with seminary graduates.
And this is what we're going to do.
So we would pick a book and we would study the book and discuss it each week.
And so in one of the first, it may have even been the first class, the pastor said, he just like announced, I'm an agnostic.
And he called himself a hopeful agnostic.
And it was really kind of jarring because, again, I mean, I'd been to this church for eight months listening to him use more scripture than almost any pastor I'd ever heard.
And but, you know, I just thought, well, maybe I shouldn't be so judgmental.
You know, I'm just going to be open-minded.
Maybe he's just really honest that, you know, he's not fully convinced or something.
I don't know.
I just didn't want to judge.
But it was really jarring.
And I remember being really uncomfortable after that first meeting.
But yeah, as the class went on, he was not kidding.
I mean, everything I'd ever believed about God and Jesus and the Bible was basically deconstructed, explained away.
Now, I, at the time, I knew the Bible, but I did not know apologetics.
I didn't know much about church history.
I'd never studied systematic theology.
I had pretty, you know, pretty subjective hermeneutics, I would probably say.
But I mean, I didn't know how to refute some of the things that he was saying.
It's like I knew in my heart that it was wrong, but I didn't know how to answer it.
And so I lasted about four months.
We ended up leaving the church.
And it was really after that that I went through my own crisis of faith because I think all of those doubts that he had planted, that's when they took root and grow and grew in my own heart.
And I went through my own deconstruction, although I didn't know that's what it was called.
I'd never had heard that word.
I just was losing my faith, but against my will.
I didn't want to lose my faith, but it was just kind of happening to me.
Yeah, I was thinking if you get a job at NASA and they're getting ready for the giant fly up to the moon or whatever, and then the main astronaut captain guy comes out.
It's got a big mustache, and he's like, By the way, you know, you guys might not agree with me, but uh, the earth flat, right?
Flat earth.
I don't believe in science, yeah.
I'm a hopeful agnostic, I'm an agnostic about all that.
Here are the keys to the shuttle.
Right.
So, you guys, uh, so okay, so you found out that uh so he started planning all these doubts, which good job, Pastor.
Um, and then you're like, wow, I should get into apologetics, otherwise, I'm gonna just gonna become a some just a pop artist, not Christian.
Yeah, I mean, I had heard the word apologetics, I knew it existed, and I kind of knew what it was, but I never really studied apologetics.
I think I went to a Baptist high school, so they gave us like one apologetics class as seniors.
Like, okay, here's your one apologetics class now, off to college, you know, that kind of thing.
Uh, but I mean, I think it was more of a maybe just a world religion overview, kind of, and it was good.
I remember it being very informative, but um, here I was, you know, in my mid-30s now, and I actually didn't know where to look for answers, and I was so naive, you guys.
I really thought the pastor thought all of these questions up.
I thought he was like so brilliant because he thought of all these objections that I had never heard before.
And so, I didn't know there were so many apologists and just intellectual giants who'd been dealing with all of these questions for thousands of years.
But I just remember a darkest moment.
And in fact, this is the scene where I actually opened my book to just bring the reader into my darkest moment of doubt was when I was rocking my baby girl in my rocking chair.
I would sing hymns kind of into what felt like this just thick, black darkness.
It just was dark in the room, but there was something more to the darkness.
It was like this spiritual darkness.
And I would sing hymns into the darkness, just I think by faith, just to kind of just sing what I knew I wanted to be true, but I wasn't sure that it was true.
And so, I was doing that one night, and I remember just kind of crying out to God as a last-ditch effort: like, God, if you're real, then you have to show up.
You've got to give me something, you've got to send someone who can answer some of the questions that I have right now.
Because at the time, I didn't know any Christians who could answer those questions.
And so, God answered my prayer when I was just kind of fiddling with the radio one day in the car.
And I heard a man on a college campus, and he was answering questions to skeptical college students.
And it was like an hour and a half long.
And it was, I kid you not, like every question they were asking was almost in order the objections that the pastor had brought about in the class.
And so, that's when I discovered this wide world of apologetics.
And I started getting connected to all kinds of different apologetics ministries.
I got connected with Southern Evangelical Seminary, where I started to audit classes.
And so, yeah, God really used apologetics and sound thinking and good theology to rebuild my faith that was essentially just in shambles by that point.
But I'm just, I'm so thankful because I honestly, at the time, I didn't know if anybody could answer some of this stuff.
I was really hoping when you had that prayer and asked for a sign from God that like a giant holographic Wizard of Oz style William Lane Craig head just appeared in your room and it was like the Caleb argument is this.
I know, right?
When you were singing hymns into the darkness, just curious, were you singing the good old hymns or like a Christian pop version?
It was actually, I didn't know this at the time, but it was a modern hymn before the throne of God above.
That's the one that stands out in my mind as the one I sang the most often.
Because for me, it's like when it says, before the throne of God.
Now I can't remember the words.
Sorry.
When Satan tempts me.
I knew that if that wasn't true, then I had no hope.
And so I was clinging to this advocate, this idea that I had an advocate before the Father, probably more than anything else.
Well, so you went on to write this book, Another Gospel, and we want to talk about some of the marks of progressive Christianity and some of the challenges that you write about in here.
But we first wanted to suggest that if you wanted to sell more books, you could just write a book called like, Girl, Wash Your Face or something like that.
Yeah.
Just a little helpful.
Girls.
Get your humane straight.
I can't say that.
Girls, straighten out your hermeneutics.
Girl?
I don't know.
It's a just helpful tip.
I don't know.
Just trying to help.
We're just trying to help.
All right.
Well, let's talk about some of the stuff you're talking about here.
So you have this division set up between historic Christianity and progressive Christianity.
So what, I guess, first off, what's the main thing you think that defines progressive Christianity?
Yeah, so progressive Christianity is not a creedal movement in that they're united around certain beliefs.
You know, if you go back all through history with Christians, we've always been creedal.
There's always, even going back to within three to five years of Jesus' death and resurrection, there were creeds emerging and circulating that summarized what Christians believed and what united them.
And so progressive Christianity just doesn't really work that way.
And I think that's because it's largely a movement that's reacting against evangelical culture of the late 80s, 90s, 2000s.
And so it's really not so much about what you believe, it's about what you do.
And so you can have two progressive Christians that one might think Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead, the other one might not.
And they're okay to be in unity with each other because it's really not about that.
Whereas that would be a problem for historic Christians if somebody came in and said, hey, I don't think Jesus was raised from the dead.
That's cool.
Okay, great.
We wouldn't support that one.
And so I think that to define it broadly, you could say if you take the theological liberalism that arose in the late 1800s, early 1900s, you marry that with the postmodern mood of where we are right now, with cultural, with relativism and moral relativism and where culture's at.
If you marry those things together and you just drop it right into the middle of the evangelical church, you have progressive Christianity because largely it's a movement that's growing up and out of the evangelical church.
So it's, you know, you're not going to find atheists who heard the message of progressive Christianity, found it convincing, and converted, or Hindus or Buddhists.
These are ex-evangelical.
That's why we have the hashtag ex-evangelical.
This is an ex-evangelical movement of Christians that are just basically adopting the liberal conclusions that burned their way through the Protestant mainline denominations and are now just being reinvigorated, I think, in the evangelical church, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Is there a connection?
I know sometimes there's some confusion.
Is there a connection between politically, being politically progressive and progressive Christianity?
Are these just two different, completely different spheres?
That's a really good question.
And that is actually a question, especially in the climate right now, that I'm investigating a little bit more because there are definitely political elements, of course, for sure.
My book is completely a theological look at it, but I'm starting to kind of try to dig down deeper into the sort of political overtones because, I mean, it's definitely going to be not Republican.
It's not conservative.
But I think that a lot of progressive Christians were maybe reacting against what they viewed as evangelical church getting married to the Republican Party.
And so they were reacting against that.
But they've almost kind of ended up on the other side of things doing their own version of that.
Gotcha.
Man, I lost my head.
I had something.
You had a good question.
Yeah, it's gone.
That's common, man.
Just wait one second.
What is the inspiration if you've gone agnostic and you're you pretty much believe that you can kind of pick and choose from the Bible?
How do you hold on to your, that's, I don't know, in your studies, how do you hold on to your faith?
Like, how, what is the drive for these people to lie?
Yeah, like, why?
Why do you stick around?
Why tag Jesus on to whatever you want to be true?
Does it give you like a badge to be a pastor or something?
I just don't.
Well, yeah, that's a really good question.
And there was some interesting things I've heard from Bart Campolo.
And I'm sure you guys are aware, Bart Campolo, his father, Tony Campolo.
And Bart started to go through progressive Christianity and he started to sort of rethink the resurrection and all of these core doctrines.
And then when he declared himself a secular humanist, he was being interviewed and he said, you know, if you're going to deny core doctrines, you should just be intellectually honest and go all the way into atheism or, you know, secular humanism or something like that.
And that's what he did.
And I actually have to say I agree with him.
I think that if you are persuaded that core beliefs of Christianity are not true, you shouldn't call yourself a Christian.
But I think the reason so many do, and this is what's, I think, hard for people to understand who haven't really experienced the movement, you know, like on a personal level a whole lot, is that progressive Christians, it's not like they're just sitting around and going, hey, I just, I don't really like this about conservative Christianity.
So I'm just going to change it and I'm going to still call myself a Christian.
In their mind, they actually think they are the correct version of Christianity.
They think that more conservative or historic Christians, they would probably not like the term historic because they would probably think they're the ones trying to bring back historic Christianity.
But in many cases, they think that for Christians to say, for example, that homosexuality, homosexual behavior would be a sin, they would say, well, that goes against their view of the Bible.
Like they really think that the Bible teaches that that's not just okay, but it's holy and blessed before God.
And so you have sort of this major.
But I think what we see, though, is kind of what you were hinting at before is like you're basically creating a Jesus in your own image.
Like whatever you would do, whatever you think is good, whatever you think is moral, you're going to slap the label of Jesus on that and call it Christian.
But what's so, I don't know, which is so like mind-blowing to me is if you really study the words of Jesus, they disagree with Jesus on almost everything.
And so I just kind of, I try to make the point when I'm talking about this is like, it's fine if you don't think that Christianity is true, if you don't think that the core claims of Christianity are correct, reject them and just call yourself something else.
But it's basically rejection of the core doctrines of Christianity, but trying to keep that label of Christian and Jesus on it.
Because I think that Jesus almost becomes like a mascot for whatever they think is good or moral or true or life-giving or hopeful or healing.
They put the title Jesus on it.
We found that we almost have an easier time talking to atheists who we disagree with, or who we agree with more on political things or cultural things than we do talking with progressive Christians because there's this barrier where we think we're talking about the same things.
We think we're talking about the same Bible and the same Jesus, the same doctrine, and we're not.
So I guess when you've talked to friends or family that are going down that road, when you've talked to people that are going down that road, what's a good tactic for Christians to take when we deal with when we encounter this kind of stuff in our churches or among our friends and family?
Yeah, and I want to answer that, but I want to also just add to what you said.
What you said is so true.
It is actually easier to talk to many atheists because atheists, generally speaking, are not relativists.
Most atheists are the laws of logic.
They're going to affirm that truth exists and it can be known at least to some extent.
And that's the difficulty with progressive Christians is very often they're openly relativist.
They're seeing progressive Christianity being a postmodern correction of the Christianity that came before it.
So that makes it extra difficult because when you're not dealing in the realm of objective truth, it's very difficult to have meaningful conversations.
And so I think one way to do that is to go to Jesus because progressives tend to not like Paul, but they like Jesus.
And so if you go quoting Paul to a progressive Christian, they're not even probably going to listen to you because they don't like Paul.
They think Paul had biases.
They think Paul had prejudices that colored what he thought about things, which absolutely really speaks to the progressive view of the Bible because they're not viewing the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation as the word of God, internally coherent, telling the same story.
And so they look at different biblical writers and say, well, I can disagree with what that person said because they're not really speaking for God.
And so that's one thing you have to be aware of when you're talking to progressives is you can't just pull out a verse from 1 Corinthians because they're not going to probably accept Paul.
They're more likely to accept the gospels.
So if you go to Jesus, I think that's the key.
And so when I have a presentation I do on progressive Christianity where I go through the historic and progressive views of the Bible, the cross, and the gospel.
And then I only use Jesus.
What did Jesus think he was doing when he died on the cross?
What did Jesus think, at least the Old Testament scriptures were?
What did Jesus teach this gospel that he taught?
What did he think that was?
And I think that's maybe one way to get an inroad with progressive Christians is ask them, you know, so you're a Jesus follower.
Would you say that it's important for a Jesus follower to agree with Jesus on whatever he taught?
And that would be a good first question.
And if they don't think they have to agree with Jesus, well, there's probably no point in even having the conversation because they're just following their own inner compass anyway.
But if they say, no, I think that I want to get back to the teachings of Jesus, start with the Bible.
Well, what was Jesus' view of the Bible?
And see what they say.
And then maybe you can point out all the dozens of times where Jesus quotes the Old Testament or quotes an Old Testament prophet even and says, he doesn't just say the prophet said, he said, God's word said, or God's to you.
There are tons of examples of that in the Gospels where he refers to the Old Testament as the word of God.
Of course, fighting temptation in the wilderness with the authority of the scriptures.
Jesus had a very, very high view of scripture that would not agree with the general progressive view of the scripture.
So I think going to Jesus is an important and asking a lot of questions, trying to kind of, as Greg Kochl says, put a pebble in the shoe, as it were.
What are some of the ways that progressive Christianity is kind of subtly making its way into mainstream evangelicalism?
I'm trying to think of like, I mean, I don't know, maybe there's examples that come to mind off the bat, but either popular books or movements or people or even just topics or are there things that you think are a sign of maybe people would look at those things and think, oh, that's progressive Christianity.
Burn it.
But they're thinking, oh, this is nice.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing is right now, it's so mixed together with everything else.
You have major Christian publishing houses publishing progressive Christian books.
You have major Christian conferences that have progressive speakers in, maybe unknowingly, I don't know.
I don't want to assume anyone's motives, but I think that right now we're at the point in history when it's just exploding within the evangelical church.
And so it's sometimes hard to tell the difference.
And so you want to look for the person's view of scripture.
Like I kind of mentioned before, if they're not viewing the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation as God's internally coherent, inspired word, that's a big sign.
If they're rejecting core elements of the atonement, referring to the atonement as cosmic child abuse, that's a big sign.
If the gospel becomes not about sin and redemption of sinful man being reconciled to a holy God, but becomes like that gets completely jettisoned in favor of social justice.
That's something to be looking for.
So you're going to be looking more for signs.
But yeah, I mean, I think one, and this is super controversial.
So I'm not like totally against Enneagram.
I think a lot of people will just like, if the Enneagram even gets brought up, they're like, oh, it's heretical.
And, you know, maybe it is.
I don't know.
But I do know that the major writers of all the Enneagram books are all progressive Christians.
You've got Richard Rohr, who's considered like a spiritual father and a mentor to so many in the progressive church.
Basically, he's the one who brought that in to the evangelical church.
And a lot of people don't know that.
They don't realize that it came in through a progressive venue.
And so that's possibly one area of vulnerability in the church as well.
That was actually an example I was thinking of, but I didn't know anything about Enneagram, so I didn't want to say it.
We only talk about things that we know a lot about.
What's your Enneagram number?
I have no idea, and I am not a member.
I'm not a number.
Can't put me in a box.
I don't think that I am a number.
Do you want to talk more about this pathway?
What you were just talking about of looking for these signs of progressive Christianity, I noticed there's kind of there's this overlap with the kind of the seeker-sensitive church and progressive Christianity, where I think it probably comes from a different place where you have seeker-sensitive pastors that are like, oh, we just want to bring more people in and be more attractional.
But they end up kind of teaching very similar things where the atonement is, if not denied, it's kind of shoved off and becomes a less important part.
So have you looked into that at all, like this overlap between the attractional church and progressive Christianity?
Yeah, again, that's not something I've done a deep dive on, but just like the political element, I'm starting to look more at that to see where it intersects because I think you're absolutely right.
When you think about, okay, so you brought up Girl, Wash Your Face, right?
Yeah.
So this is a book that is not even remotely Christian.
In fact, this book, the way she summarizes the gospel is the exact opposite of the gospel.
She sums up the Christian gospel as realizing that you're already perfect just as you are, that you're enough just as you are, which of course is the exact opposite of the real Christian gospel, which tells you you are a sinner and you need a savior.
And so you look around and you have in a lot of seeker-friendly churches, but also even churches that might not even categorize themselves as seeker-friendly.
Doing women's studies on Girl, Wash Your Face a few years ago, doing a five-week study on it.
You can go to the Bible app and find a five-day devotional of Girl Wash Your Face.
And so this is marketed as Christian material, but it actually tells the exact opposite of the real gospel.
And so I think we see a lot of things like that, that that's where those things are going to intersect with the seeker-friendly church.
Because let's be honest, the gospel is hard.
I mean, this is why the rich young ruler went away sad.
You know, Jesus asks us to deny ourselves, to pick up our cross and to follow him.
That's not easy.
That's not going to bring in the crowds.
And so I can see the temptation with seeker-friendly churches to water that down a bit and to shift to more of a, hey, you're beautiful, you're wonderful, you're enough just as you are, because that message makes us feel good and you can throw some Jesus on it.
And I don't think everybody's doing this, you know, from some kind of nefarious motive.
I think in a lot of cases, they're really wanting to bring people in and they want to show them the love of Jesus.
And they want, you know, people have maybe had so much fire and brimstone.
They want to show them, you know, that they're loved and that they're valued and all of those things.
But I think we need to be careful to not mix up the message in that.
Yes, you are created in the image of God, which gives you inherent dignity and value, but you're also fallen and you're sinful.
And you have to be reconciled to a holy God.
And I think that's the part of the message that can be difficult with seeker-friendly churches because that's not a seeker-friendly message if we're really telling the truth, you know.
Yeah, and you talk about these different things that progressive Christians deny, these core doctrines.
And one of those that you talk about is what you just mentioned, the reality of sin, the reality of sin and the fact that sin separates us from God.
You want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, so not many progressive Christians would deny sin outright.
They'll say, yes, sin is a thing.
It exists.
And they'll use all kinds of different language to describe what it is.
But the key difference between progressive Christianity and historic Christianity is that progressive Christians largely deny any kind of original sin.
So that we would have a sin nature that's passed down to us, that our sin would separate us from God.
So this is a big thing in the progressive church.
It is not your sin that separates you from God, according to the progressive church.
It's sometimes they'll say it's your shame.
It's a self-imposed separation.
So you really aren't separated from God.
And this gets into their views of even the nature of God.
And there's a lot of panentheism in the progressive church.
So they're going to have a much more of a monism view of reality, a more pantheistic view of reality, where you're not separated from God because in many ways, and not all would say this, but you're kind of the same thing.
You've got this inner divinity.
Everybody has this inner divinity we need to discover.
But it's not sin that separates us from God.
In fact, they'll even teach Genesis 3 that way, that it was when they thought that they were naked, it was their shame that separated them from God, but they never had to be separated.
All they needed to do, in fact, I think Brian McLaren says, is just recognize their belovedness before God.
And so you can see the implications for the atonement on this as well.
If you, you know, sin might exist, but it's not separating you from God.
Well, of course, the idea that the father would require a blood sacrifice of his only son would be horrific if you don't actually think you're separated from God in the first place.
Agree or disagree.
Quote from Michael Gungor.
Heaven is not a place where you are made perfect after you die.
Heaven is the realization that you're already perfect as you are now.
When we are unconscious of our fullness or perfection in any given moment, we tend to live in ways that we could call evil.
But this evil is a relative description of destructive behavior, not an ontological reality that encapsulates the essence of a person.
Agree or disagree?
Disagree.
What's crazy is he was saying that directly to Hitler's face.
It was wild.
You are not evil.
Yeah, pretty much when you said Michael Gunger, you didn't have to read it.
Disagree.
You didn't disagree about that.
Brutal.
Yeah.
But that's the message, though.
You know, in fact, I remember when he, that was a tweet, right?
He posted that on Twitter.
Yeah, no, the best part of it, I just looked it up, and the best part of it he deleted.
So I wasn't able to.
There's far where he says, like, nobody is evil.
And I couldn't know.
Probably a lot of examples thrown back at him.
It looks like he deleted it.
Maybe.
Oh, maybe it's some responder deleted.
I don't know.
Well, anyway.
Sorry.
Nobody is evil.
Nobody's evil.
We're all just imperfect realizations of perfection.
So what about the embrace of intersectionality, race stuff, all the Black Lives Matter stuff?
I mean, there's a lot of churches that are jumping on that bandwagon.
Some are trying to give their own take, I guess.
But what's your take on all that?
Yeah, so this is interesting because this has been in the progressive church for years, but things are changing so fast that when I had completely written my book and turned it in, and I hadn't even mentioned anything about critical theory, and things changed so quickly to where the messaging from the highly platformed progressive leaders went,
it seemed like overnight from all of this theological stuff to oppress versus oppressor stuff.
And this happened like so fast.
And it happened before.
I know we're seeing that a lot in the evangelical church now, but it was in the progressive church first.
This is the message that they were preaching, particularly like when Sarah Bessie wrote a blog post about what caused her to become affirming of same-sex marriage and same-sex relationships.
When she's writing the blog post, she starts out by saying, you know, I can't really tell you what's true about this because I'm basically I'm white, I'm married, you know, in all these categories.
She said, I'm not the best guide for you because basically because I'm white.
You got to look for the margins because that's who's going to tell you the truth about these things.
And so this view that truth is found through the lived experience of minorities, this is something that swept into the progressive church very quickly and basically became their gospel.
And then even more recently, we're seeing that get ramped up in the evangelical church too.
But it's been in the progressive church for a while.
And to where we might have before said their emphasis is social justice, it's gone to just this high-level critical theory in the last year or two, I would say.
Wow.
So do those pastors just like start their sermon and be like, hold on, and then they hand the mic to like the first oppressed category they see in the audience.
Like, sir, you look African-American.
Would you like the mic?
They're not going to learn anything from me.
Because you would think that would be more consistent.
Yeah.
Tithes are going to that guy now.
I'm stepping down.
Oh man, well, you want to go into our subscriber portion and really have some fun.
We're going to dig into the CD underbelly.
I was wondering the seeds.
What's CD mean and an underbelly?
CD is like dirty or dirty and filthy.
Filthy.
Underbelly.
I don't know why the underbelly has a frog.
And they got a CD underbelly.
I'm trying to figure out where that comes from.
I kind of regret using that phrase now.
What does that mean?
I want to know the etymology.
We're going to get all the juicy behind-the-scenes stories from CCM.
So let's go into our subscriber portion.
And we're going to talk more about Progressive Christianity.
You can check out Elisa's book, which is another gospel?
Another gospel.
I was trying to see if there was a subtitle.
There's a question where you have to say no.
Oh, sorry, that's right.
Another gospel?
Can you do your little pinky finger?
And it's on Amazon and other book places.
Bookseller.
Are there bookstores left?
I don't know.
I always say I have bookstores.
I'm like, I don't know if there's any bookstores left, but if there are, you can find it there.
Let's go to our subscriber portion.
Let's do it.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
I walked on Aerosmith's bus once.
Oh, wow.
You have a great story about Journey, though.
Okay.
And I took you not before God, right when we invited people to receive Jesus.
So here we go.
Number one, have you ever met Carmen?
Yes, I toured with Carmen for almost a year.
Wait, wait, whoa, Give us all the details.
Okay.
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