Richard Beck on “Progressive Purity” (with Rachel Held Evans)

One of my favorite thinkers in the blog world is Richard Beck at Abilene Christian (with whom and Jana Kris and I dined recently). He doesn’t touch a thing without rearranging my thoughts. He sees American Progressivism and Progressives as creating a purity culture.

Here’s a clip of a few paragraphs from Richard’s post:

But I’m a progressive Christian writing, mainly, for other progressive Christians. Which is to say I think progressive Christianity is getting right some fundamental things about Jesus and the church in a way conservative Christians are not. Yes, I was describingpsychological similarities about how both conservatives and progressives reason about righteousness in the idiom of purity. And about how this “will to purity” creates similar problems for both camps. But at the end of the day, as a progressive Christian I’m oriented to see purity/righteousness the way progressives see it. That’s what it means to own the label “progressive” after all. (See my book Unclean for how I argue that Jesus reworks purity to align it with justice.)

So to be clear, the point of the post wasn’t to say that progressive and conservative Christianity are theologically “the same.” I don’t think that. But I do think that a purity psychology works among both groups and that this psychology, given that it’s a purity psychology, creates similar sorts of temptations….

I think many privileged progressives do use social justice as a route toward self-justification, as a way of overcoming liberal guilt. Especially if you’ve come out of fundamentalism or evangelicalism where a purity-driven moral performance has been inculcated into you, where you learn that you are good because you are being good. For many progressive Christians who are post-evangelicals it’s very easy to import that same purity psychology–I am good because I am being good–into the progressive fight against injustice and oppression. And the tragic aspect to this pursuit is that, as with all attempts as moral self-justification, we can’t ever fully get clean. Not in the evangelical way, nor in the progressive way.

So, yes, there is a legitimate concern that such efforts at moral self-justification in progressive Christianity do unwittingly center the needs, feelings and goals of the person fighting for justice rather than upon the needs, feelings and goals of the marginalized and oppressed….

Either that or you’ve weaponized the phrase “purity culture” so that it can be wielded solely against evangelicalism with the assumption being that progressive Christians are too enlightened or “pure” to ever be “contaminated” by that sort of thinking…

The reason for the ubiquity of “purity culture” is simple: purity is one of the ways humans–all humans, progressives and conservatives, privileged and oppressed–reason about morality. Purity is just a piece of our innate moral software. We can’t help but think of morality in the idiom of contamination. Progressives as much as conservatives. (Psychologists have called this “the Macbeth Effect.” For more again see Unclean.)

To which Rachel Held Evans offered this confession:

I know it may be an unpopular opinion with some of my readers, but I totally agree. I’ve been wondering why so much of what I’ve been feeling lately reminds me of the shame, exhaustion, and perfectionism I struggled with in fundamentalism, and this need to be “pure” in order to be accepted and loved in the progressive community is exactly what it is. Where I see the most overlap between the conservative “purity” mindset and the more progressive “purity” mindset is in the shaming that happens. Now this may be more of a symptom of the internet call-out culture (of which I have been a part; I recognize my complicity in this phenomenon, for sure, and am repenting of it), but what I see happen over and over again is people make what is deemed a mistake or say something “problematic” and they are not only called out for their actions but deemed totally unacceptable as human beings and publicly shamed. A massive pile-on commences. Their motivations and character are called into question, and they are “farewelled,” just like in fundamentalism. I confess this had to happen to me a few times before I realized how destructive it can be, and it pains me to think of the people I targeted in the past. (I understand people disagreeing with what I say or even what I do; what I don’t understand is the demonizing and dehumanization that often follows. This isn’t about critique. It’s about shaming.)

It’s also worth noting that nine times out of ten, this is privileged, educated white folks shaming other privileged, educated, white folks for not being good enough. Obviously, when a marginalized person tells you something is problematic, you perk your ears up more than you would otherwise. That’s a good practice, generally speaking. But I also see all sorts of folks taking advantage of and shaming decent, open-hearted people by appealing to their sense of justice and using words like “racist” “abuser” and “bully” so liberally that those words lose all meaning. (Kinda like how conservatives use the word “heretic” so much it’s lost its potency.)

When I saw you wrote this, I was glad, but I was worried. Because, to be honest, I am much, much more afraid to challenge progressives than I am conservatives. In my experience, the shaming is much more intense because it exploits things I do indeed care very much about – inclusion, equality, reconciliation, justice – and tells me I am disqualified from ever speaking on those things again because I made a mistake. I’ve really been struggling to write blog posts lately because of this intense exhaustion.

What I long for most is not one system of theological and behavioral purity over another. What I long for most is grace. It is grace that distinguishes activism motivated by Christian values from every other kind of activism. So if we’re going to call our activism “Christian,” there has to be room for grace.

Progressive blog world at its finest, folks, its finest.