Challenging liberal Christianity: Jesus gave very clear warnings about losing ‘saltiness’ – Catholic Herald Online

Christians are supposed to be unpopular. They are supposed to be out of touch with contemporary society (whether that means first-century Palestine, early medieval Europe, 19th-century Africa or 21st-century China).
Non-believers finding Christianity offensive or alienating is a feature, not a bug. If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first, Jesus says to the disciples. St Paul notes that the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
There is something in authentic Christianity to upset and challenge everyone. For conservative-minded people there is the radical scepticism about wealth and property and bourgeois respectability, the emphasis on mercy and forgiveness rather than ritual and social correctness, and the insistence that those on the fringes of society are just as precious to God as pillars of the community.
For the more liberal-leaning folk there are those irksome and demanding restrictions on sexual expression and personal freedom, the stark warnings about sin and judgement and right doctrine, and the affirmation of hierarchy and divine authority.
It always surprises me, therefore, how much Christians fret and wring their hands about how the rest of society sees them. Obviously in any walk of life where you are trying to persuade people of something, it is worth thinking about how you are perceived and how effectively you are communicating a message. But the aforementioned fretting is too often focused not on how Christians communicate, but on what they communicate.
There seems to be a fairly widespread lack of confidence in the actual content of the Faith, rather than uncertainty about how best to present that content. There is a difference between someone wanting to explain traditional Christian teaching on sex and marriage in a better way because it’s hard for modern people to understand, and someone saying that teaching should change because modern people find it hard to understand.
Almost by definition, it tends to be those on the revisionist or liberal end of Christianity who most lack confidence in the content of Christianity, and particularly the moral content.
It seems to me that a great problem faced by liberal Christianity is to retain distinctively Christian ethical commitments in the public sphere. I have read quite a lot of arguments by Christians who are pro-choice on abortion, and there doesn’t seem to be very much to distinguish them from the generic prochoice secular arguments. They tend to adopt the jargon and assumptions of non-religious pro-choicers uncritically, with a few vaguely Christian concepts thrown into the mix to add a sort of religious garnish.
Liberal Christianity is a somewhat vague term, but generally it means those forms of Christianity which lay heavy emphasis on individual reason and experience as means of discovering truth, maintaining a general posture of scepticism or even antagonism towards historical orthodoxy and practice.
Liberals tend to be heavily influenced by academic and intellectual trends in the world outside the Church, such as equality feminism, sexual liberation, form criticism or critical theory. They are very often critical of conventional “Godtalk” and can be uneasy about the straightforward assertion of miraculous and/or supernatural happenings.
My problem with this approach is that it is neutered and silent on the issues where Christian convictions are most beleaguered and despised: the sanctity of life, the importance of marriage, the rights of Christian conscience. Yes, it speaks with a strong prophetic voice on issues like peace and social justice. But as a priest acquaintance of mine once said, who is against peace and justice?
Are people really risking anything personally, socially, culturally or politically by standing up for what I will reluctantly call the “leftish” Christian stuff?
In 2024, Christians are not being driven out of business because they support a Palestinian state, or because they oppose cuts to welfare. People don’t, by and large, lose friends or jobs or social status for having those beliefs. People are amused and irritated and bored by socialist clerics – but the real vitriol, contempt and ridicule is reserved for those who stand up for Christian orthodoxy on abortion, sexuality and gender.
Jesus gave very clear warnings about losing “saltiness” – the clarity and savour and distinctiveness of Christian teachings.
It is sometimes said in support of changing longstanding Christian teachings on personal morality that “the Holy Spirit is doing a new thing”. It seems curious to me that the Holy Spirit’s “new thing” regarding sexual morality and the sanctity of life should so closely resemble the dominant moral views of secular society.
And that it should have been detected only in Western countries just at the time when adherence to the “old thing” is starting to bear significant personal, professional and social costs for Christians.

Photo: Jesus tells the Pharisees and Herodians to ‘render therefore unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ (Mark, chapter 12). (Photo by Edward Gooch Collection/Getty Images.)

This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click here.

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