Progressive Christianity in final analysis forms and then ascends a mountain of its own making, at the summit transfiguring the community’s internal inclinations into external dogma. Such idol-making is the only recourse for Progressive Christianity, dwelling in the shadow of nihilism, rubbing modernism and postmodernism together in bifurcated hopeful-despair for a flame to arise.

What does an elder who is leaving a local evangelical church because—in part—he felt this church wasn’t taking social justice issues seriously have in common with another Christian who is forsaking Classical Theism for Open Theism? Further, what unites these with a third Christian whose journey of deconstruction equates to a refusal to accept the status quo, who questions every whiff of Christian dogmatism because he thinks it arises from the hegemony of church history?

First, these are three friends of mine who do—in one case, did—profess to be Christians. Second, these three are sojourners to a city built by human hands, a trek some call “deconstruction” and others Progressive Christianity.

Third, though their journeys look different, they share an assumption: that historic Christianity should be questioned, and more, overturned by the canons of postmodernism, namely, the removal of metanarratives (overarching stories or beliefs/dogmas).

Complicating this, Progressive Christianity doesn’t fully embrace the logical end of deconstruction—abject moral relativity commensurate with postmodernism’s “death of God.” Progressive Christianity treats truth as if it is knowable, though it does so arbitrarily. Ultimately, Progressive Christianity adopts a metamodern posture toward the knowability of truth, retaining a sort of placebo-like-faith in modernism’s optimism in the knowability of truth, while ultimately maintaining postmodernism’s rejection of absolutes. 

Progressive Christianity seeks to have its cake and eat it too.

From Blue Jazz to Rainbow Flags

Progressive Christianity has left the Emerging church behind. Up-and-comers like Brandan Robertson (leader of Sunnyside Reformed Church), Tim Whitaker (The New Evangelicals), or sophisticated thought-leaders like Pete Enns (The Bible for Normal People) have replaced the Rob Bells and Donald Millers (Blue Like Jazz) of the previous era.

Progressive Christianity has moved (note the word) from mere postmodern deconstruction to principled-but-selective metamodern reconstruction of religious ethics and belief adopted as if true. Metamodernism gets its assumptions from postmodernism—an “as if” true proposition still only performed as true—but escapes nihilism by appeal to the moral codes most suitable to its appetite. Metamodernism lives in perpetual pendulum swing between denial of truth and embracing truth “as if” it could be so.

As Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker define it:

Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and fro or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern.

This is why metamodernism has been likened to having your cake and eating it too. Robertson’s church, Sunnyside Reformed, is a good example of Progressive Christianity’s selective reconstruction of meaning. In scrubbing every page for a doctrinal statement, one finds only their Open and Affirming Covenant which gives primacy to inclusion and “all expressions of human diversity” in a homogenized and triumphant “unity of faith.” No creeds or confessions are referenced or affirmed.

What is clear is what Sunnyside church affirms above all: affirmation itself.

Nearly every page of the church’s website stresses the preeminent importance of inclusion. As Sunnyside’s church covenant expresses (adopted in October 2024), they consider themselves “one body with many members, embracing people of every race, ethnicity, creed, class, age, gender, marital status, physical or mental ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.”

This radical inclusion leaves open the full scope of “the life and mission of our church.” Anyone, regardless even of beliefs, is invited to “participate fully in our worship, rites, and sacraments, and to take leadership roles within our congregation.”

Sunnyside may be “over easy” on doctrine, but what they value appears clear: the only rule is that there are none. Or—scarcely different—no rule is allowed which seems to hurt or exclude another person. This selective dogmatization of inclusion at the expense of clear exclusionary teachings in Scripture—such as Romans 1:24–27, where homosexual behavior is clearly condemned—evinces Sunnyside’s metamodern, arbitrary posture, which has become a hallmark of Progressive Christianity. Indeed, Robertson and his church aren’t an isolated case. The widely adopted Phoenix Affirmations—twelve affirmations written originally in 2006 by United Church of Christ minister Eric Elnes—first affirms “walking fully in the path of Jesus, without denying the legitimacy of other paths God may provide humanity.”

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