Editor’s note: This is the third of four in a blog series by Jonathan Saur. Each day this week, he will offer a new post.
II. Why I am not a conservative
III. Why I am not a progressive… or a liberal… or whatever they call themselves these days…
We invite you to read and weigh in on the discussion.
III. Why I am not a progressive… or a liberal… or whatever they call themselves these days…
The progressive philosophy is a little easier for me to discount than the conservative philosophy. And I say this as someone who, for years, identified as a progressive. I was raised by progressive parents. I worked for a progressive Democrat, spending the formative years of my mid-20s around progressives, working alongside them, advocating for their causes, which (at that time) were my causes.
Perhaps it is because, through life experience, I have had my optimism (so prevalent in progressivism) tempered by realism. Perhaps it is because I don’t see a progression when I look at history. Instead, I simply see the same problems being played out, through different languages and different technologies.
At the end of the day, I think that my criticism of progressivism, or liberalism, or whatever it is called now, is rooted in the belief that we can’t make the world a better place. That isn’t what our role is. It’s a fairly standard critique. Our efforts, no matter how well meant or nobly intended, will only produce a different set of problems than the problems that we have tried to fix. I am not the first to say this, nor will I be the last.
I believe that there was no greater figure to embody progressivism than Robert Kennedy. I don’t mean when he was younger. Not the Robert Kennedy who served as his brother’s sidekick. No, I mean the Robert Kennedy of the 1968 presidential campaign, who casted a vision for a better society and held up his contemporary society to a vision of something better, and showed the ways in which society had failed.
A poster from the 1968 Robert Kennedy campaign hangs in my room. When I worked as a congressional staffer, it used to hang in my office, as a symbol of hope. Now, it hangs as a symbol of nostalgia, of a time when I believed that our human efforts could, somehow, save the world.
What I have come to accept, however, is that holding society up to some idealized future, or some idealized vision, is a fruitless endeavor. And when the Bible casts a vision of justice, an idealized future society, born of the imagination of humans, is not what the Bible is talking about. When the Bible talks about justice, it is holding the world up not against some idealized vision crafted by humans, but instead up against the divine will for the world. Progressivism is, ultimately, rooted in human reason and imagination. The Bible is rooted, as Walter Brueggemann has shown, in the “prophetic imagination”, which is rooted in revelation.
And, ultimately, it is not humans who build the Kingdom of God. God is building the Kingdom of God. We are simply called to witness to this Kingdom and to show the ways in which the world falls short of it. We highlight injustice, and we point to God’s justice as revealed in Scripture (and not born of our imagination), knowing that our own efforts cannot build the Kingdom.
There is humility in the prophetic witness of the Bible that I find lacking in modern-day progressive philosophy. Society is not ours to fix, and our human efforts will not fix anything, ultimately. Instead, it is God’s to fix. This does not mean that we cease from speaking out against injustice – no, if anything, we speak out all the more loudly, because we are warning our fellow humans against separation from God and what this will lead to.
But it does mean that we cannot, ultimately, share the ideological space occupied by progressives. We do not believe in progress of society. We believe in the work of God, which will at times look like progress, and at other times like regress. Either way, it is God’s work which is being done, and which we witness to and partake in. It is never ours to claim ownership of.
Jonathan Saur is a candidate for ministry in Los Ranchos Presbytery. He lives in San Juan Capistrano, CA.
