Christian progress, Christian regress

The September 2022 issue of the century introduced a redesign of the magazine, which included a new tagline: “Thoughtful, Independent, Progressive.” This was also the title of editor/publisher Peter Marty’s column, in which he explicated each of those three words. Our use of progressive, he wrote, does not map onto any political identity or partisan allegiance. The century’s progressive Christianity is instead a faith that is broadminded, forward looking, and “interested in giving voice to those who yearn for a world where everyone has a seat at the table.”

Too many people—too many Christians—are attempting to take seats away from the table. Kim Davis is a case in point. Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky who became a conservative darling in 2015 when she refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, is now asking the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges. At press time, the court had not announced whether it will consider Davis’s petition to eliminate federal protections for same-sex marriages—whether it will set aside progress and choose regress, a move toward narrower mindsets, backward-looking vision, and fewer people at the table.

Davis has consistently cited her Christian belief as motivation. The high view of marriage held by Davis—who conceived twins with the man who would become her third husband while still married to her first—is apparently incompatible with same-sex unions. But the issue is not one person’s hypocrisy; it is the moral choice facing our society. And so this nation’s and this magazine’s history seems to repeat a cycle. As in the days of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, there are strains of Christianity that opt for progress and others that choose regress.