Liberal Christianity
Being a liberal Christian, I don’t talk about Jesus much. In fact, when I hear people talking about “the Lord,” outside of a church environment, I almost break into hives. Weird, since I’m an ordained Christian minister! Some of the problem is that I or my children have been treated badly in the name of Jesus. (You can read a bit about that in my entries on “Walking the Walk” versus “Talking the Talk.”) But some of it is that I was raised in the Lutheran tradition, in which we just didn’t talk much about Jesus or matters of faith. My Catholic friends didn’t talk about those things either, and talk about faith was pretty much reserved for sending people from the other tradition to hell.
And then there’s the fact that some people get really emotional when talking about Jesus. I’m also a native-born, white Minnesotan, raised by people who were from good, strong, stoic, northern European stock and when people start getting emotional about anything we tend to stiffen up a bit. There’s a fine line between being emotional in public and doing something like masturbating in public!
My church home is now The United Church of Christ, a liberal Christian denomination. We mostly talk about Jesus in terms of how Jesus would expect us to act in the world. We’re focused on issues of justice and inclusiveness. And if you scratch a UCCer and try to get an answer to what he or she believes in, you’re likely to get some very vague answers.
You may wonder, with all our supposed focus on activism and saving the world, why I didn’t talk about the UCC as embodying the Christian “walk” in the world and instead talked about World Vision. World Vision will tell you that underlying their action is their Christian beliefs that Jesus wants people to love and take care of each other; that we are to spread his love for us through our actions. We liberal protestants are shy about proclaiming our beliefs because we don’t want to appear to be trying to make converts. So we just do the good deeds and try to appear to be a secular organization. Not always, but often.
I understand the desire to not be about making converts. It comes less from a love of Christianity than it does for a respect of people from other traditions and religions. We want to respect all people and honor the idea that God can work in more ways than one. We would never want anyone to believe that we think we are better than them because of our religious beliefs. We don’t want to be like “those people” who talk about Jesus and their relationship with Jesus to point of making other people uncomfortable. We don’t want to evangelize. And yet, by our reticence to talk about our beliefs, we almost take ourselves entirely out of the Christian conversation.
Proclaiming beliefs certainly puts us in the way of criticism. But it also opens up the discussion and gives people something to work with. Those of us in liberal Christian traditions need to claim Jesus as our own and enter the discussion.