The New Heretics

The long-term erosion of conventional Christian religiosity, characterized by the “believing, behaving, belonging” model, has sustained a steady flow of research into emerging alternatives. These include militant or indifferent “nones”, alternative spiritualities, politicized religiosity, and various reconfigurations of believing, behaving, and belonging—ranging from “believing without belonging” to “belonging without believing.” Rebekka King’s in-depth ethnographic study, The New Heretics: Skepticism, Secularism, and Progressive Christianity, focuses on the latter,  by problematizing the notion of “belonging without believing.”

King’s research, conducted from 2008 to 2010, involved participant observation supplemented by in-depth interviews across five progressive Christian congregations in Canada. King employs the term “progressive Christianity” narrowly to describe a new type of religiosity, distinguishing it from more generically liberal understandings of the same term. King’s progressive Christianity has a mainline Protestant flavor and falls clearly under the belonging-without-believing category. It is distinct in its emphasis on informed choice and its self-conscious rejection of revealed faith, Biblical authority, and even God. It embraces empirical critical thinking in the service of deconstructing traditional Christian dogma, all while retaining a “Christian” identity.

The book’s analysis draws on the anthropology of Christianity and revolves largely around the way in which progressive Christians use language to negotiate and justify their continuing use of a Christian self-identity while professing skepticism toward Christian doctrine. Their need for authentic religious fellowship and community, despite their otherwise secular orientation, is one of the strongest themes in the book. Although it takes different forms, progressive Christianity is essentially a form of secular freethinking that, instead of leading to apostasy, takes on a moral and ethical meaning, and happens within a religious group experience (113). One of King’s interviewees defines progressive Christianity as “a rejection of traditional Christian beliefs, a desire for authentic community, and an emphasis on scientific explanation regarding the origins of the universe” (163).

The exact number of North American progressive Christians, as King defines them, remains unclear. According to figures cited in the book, one-fifth of Americans are liberal believers, even though King’s typical progressive Christian belongs to a smaller and difficult-to-quantify subset, while the potential pool of progressive Christians in Canada is similarly restricted (8-9).

Many believers might also be “closeted” progressive Christians, unwilling to openly express their beliefs (77). This obstacle to the wider empirical study of the phenomenon becomes explicit in one of the book’s final anecdotes, which recounts an official move to expel a minister of the United Church of Canada for expressing progressive Christian beliefs—for defining her religious beliefs as atheist, for example, or for describing a church prayer to “Gracious God” as idolatrous (200-201). This suppressive ecclesiastical context hinders any efforts to determine the size of the group and detect any trends of growth or decline.

If the ethos of progressive Christianity is an extension of mainline, liberal Protestantism, one that is also academic and intellectual in its orientation toward religion (87), then its potential as a form of religious innovation becomes debateable. King’s interactions with church members reveal an old and predominantly white middle-class demographic. As readily recognized by members, progressive Christian congregations lack the youthfulness of more conservative Protestant communities, which have been better at securing the inter-generational transmission of their faith (32).

When combined, these points expose the subject of King’s study (and thus the study itself) to a more general and familiar critique: many rearrangements of conventional religiosity that move in a liberal direction, such as the one studied by King, may be little more than a way station on the road to plain unbelief—if not for oneself, then at least for one’s children. In this reading, the extent and future relevance of progressive Christianity as an emerging iteration of Christianity in North America is questionable. One hopes that King plans to revisit some of these congregations and individual adherents in future research in order to examine these important dynamics.

Despite these unanswered questions, this is a nuanced portrait of an ongoing reconfiguration of Christian faith in late modernity. It will be of particular use to those interested in questions of secularization, lived religion, and lived secularity.

Stratos Patrikios is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government and Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Stratos Patrikios

Date Of Review:

December 2, 2023