Christian movement seeks solidarity with poor and suffering

Have you heard about the movement in (American Protestant) Christianity away from spiritual materialism and toward the vision of Christ as representing God's solidarity with "even the least of these"? These values have always been a part of the Christian tradition, although obviously like any cultural institution such values can become subverted for the sake of politics, and apparently they are becoming more of the central focus for many Christians. That isn't to say that the people who helped to bring the "neocons" to power under the agenda labeled "Guns, God, and Gays" have vanished or that for many evangelicals and other Christians issues such as abortion have become passe, but it turns out that more and more followers of Christ are into- well, I'll let someone who is chronicling this "revolution" describe it:

Elizabeth and I have been traveling the country for the past few months working on a couple of different projects. Right away, we kept bumping into these amazing communities of “progressive evangelical” Christians—that is, people who hold a lot of progressive (even radical) political views, but who believe in an almost fundamentalist theology. It’s a huge movement—possibly of up to twenty million active participants. And so I decided to start this blog as way of explaining it to my secular progressive friends and colleagues back in DC.

I have been watching this “Revolutionary Christian” scene for a couple years already. Honestly, I thought I was exaggerating its size when I was trying to get my friends excited about it. But, as it turns out, it’s far bigger than I ever imagined.

When Elizabeth and I got married, I started going to church with her. We were in North Carolina then, and explored many different non-denominational and charismatic evangelical churches. I was shocked at how radical they were when it came to social-economic issues. They all seemed to be whipped up in the beginnings of some sort of conscious mass return to the spirit of Early Christianity—of leaving your wealth behind, not just helping the poor but joining the poor, adopting kids lost in the foster system and HIV+ babies, etc….

Only small handfuls of people in the congregations were actually doing those kinds of things, but they were being held up as the ideal, while the preachers relentlessly laid down the new/ancient theology of building “the Kingdom of Heaven” here on Earth, and of a Jesus who is “the God of the poor and oppressed.”

For me, surprise turned to feverish curiosity when a mostly upper-middle class/suburban/Republican mega-church had a sermon, based on the New Testament Epistle to the Colossians, that railed against the “Empire” of Pax Americana—the empire of “might makes right” and idolatrous consumerism.

I wonder if there is a connection between this movement and the (environmentally) Green movement within American heartland-style Christianity?


Thanks to Metacrock for bringing this story to my attention.c