Letter from Charmaine Getz
Religion – February 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
I thoroughly enjoyed Martha Quillen’s essay, “Can we get along?” However, I’d like to point out that a “Christian liberal” can have two meanings.
It can mean (a) someone who identifies him- or herself as a Christian but does not accept basic tenets, such as the Virgin Birth (this covers folks like the Anglican Rev. John Spong). Or it can mean (b) someone who identifies him- or herself as a Christian within the orthodox, mainstream definition but is also politically liberal. Some of my more conservative bretheran and sisteran would lump both kinds together as “heretics” or “apostates.”
Speaking from my own experience, when a mainstream Christian tries to align with non-Christian liberal activists he/she may well be met with wariness, skepticism and outright hostility. For instance, when I was a member of the National Organization for Women, I constantly ran into the view that Christianity was an anti-“womyn,” Earth-hating, patriarchal, war-mongering religion that had violently supplanted all the utopian, Nature-loving, women-led goddess religions of the pre-Christian world.
I now attend a mainstream church that ordains women and is politically progressive. It supports efforts and organizations that may be regarded as socially and politically liberal. But it recognizes that there is a honorable diversity of thought among believers and does not require its members to toe some kind of party line. This makes it awful hard to organize and throw a big hissy fit for the TV cameras.
Left-leaning Christians tend to prefer reason, common ground, tolerance and intelligent action as opposed to selective interpretation, diatribes, claims of privilege and noisy demonstrations. Guess which is more likely to get headlines and TV coverage?
Regards,
Charmaine Getz
Boulder
