I was reading an article today, written by a leader of the evangelical movement.  He has been rightly upset about the general castigation of the evangelical movement. mostly because the views of the most stridently conservative parts of the evangelical community do not represent the broader evangelical movement.  Unfortunately we, as a society, are more likely to generalize than we are willing to converse.  He has been trying to shed some light on this issue, and provide rationale for how we need to think about, and, more apparently, address divergent views in a respectful fashion.

I sent him an email in response to his asking for my thoughts on the article.  While I made a few minor suggestions, I told him that I thought it was a well articulated piece and addressed, by openly acknowledging, some of the self-imposed challenges that evangelicals face.  His response was to thank me and say that he hoped the piece wasn’t deemed “too liberal” to publish.

I find it interesting that faith-based beliefs have now been categorically described as being conservative, when the figure of Jesus was anything but.  Jesus upended the social structure of his time, questioning everything about how people should be loved to negating the believe that religion was reserved only for the learned and the holy.  His message of loving thy neighbor as thyself was seen to be completely revolutionary and counter to the notion that the Jews were the chosen race and the only race worthy of love.

But these days, the idea of being both a liberal and a person of faith seem to be impossible to conjure.  Yet the same kind of social issues that would cast Jesus as a liberal back in the day, would cast any of us as liberal in modern times.  There is still a call for social justice, for helping the poor, for loving the outcast–that liberal viewpoint has changed in two thousand years.

So maybe the question shouldn’t be “are our beliefs liberal?”  Instead we should ask, “are our beliefs loving?”