Participants blow whistles in a role-playing session during training at Dilworth United Methodist Church in Charlotte, N.C. The training taught participants how to document and protest immigration raids that have targeted the city. The Rev. Jim Burklo says events such as this have brought new attention to Progressive Christianity. (Screenshot Photo Courtesy of Rev. Joel Simpson/Facebook)
Musings | April 8, 2026
Progressive Christianity is having a moment, as its leaders are getting a lot of press attention by getting arrested in protests against the inhumane treatment of immigrants by ICE, and taking stands against the growing threat of tyranny in America. Fundamentalist pastors are loudly railing against progressive Christians, saying they’ve been sent by Satan to lead people astray. Lots of ex-vangelicals are showing up in progressive churches, looking for a kinder and sane-er form of the faith.
But just what is progressive Christianity?
First of all, it is a form of the faith that doesn’t have a fixed doctrine. Progressive Christianity isn’t monolithic – it doesn’t fit in a neat and tidy dogmatic box. So my answer to the question is just that – my answer, and not the definitive one for all progressive Christians! I hope my answer here will help you form and express your own understanding of it. If we can talk clearly about our faith, we’ll be much better able to practice it in our own lives and in the wider world.
Who's Jim Burklo?
“God is love.” This passage from the first letter of John in the New Testament is the start and the finish of progressive Christianity. Is God more than love? That question deserves a lot longer conversation. But if God is no more and no less than love, God is plenty divine in any case! It is awesome to consider that out of this enormous universe, churning with creation and destruction and re-creation, love has emerged, at least on this little planet in an obscure corner of the cosmos. Beyond the love of family and friends, a love has emerged that extends even to enemies, that extends to the whole universe. Progressive Christianity celebrates and cultivates this unconditional love – “agape” in biblical Greek. If there’s more to God than this kind of love, progressive Christians are happy to explore it, but “agape” love matters to us more than anything else. Because love is personal, we talk about God as a person. But whenever we use the word “God” we’re really talking in poetry, because our experience of unconditional divine love is so overwhelming that we can hardly wrap words around it.
For us, prayer is not about asking a supernatural Guy-In-The-Sky God for special favors – though there’s certainly nothing wrong with doing so. Rather, prayer is the contemplative practice that empties ourselves of our small-“s” selves and identifies us with the capital “S” Self, the God of love. By lovingly attending to our own thoughts and emotions and bodily feelings, letting go of definitions and judgments and opinions, we drop away our identification with those experiences and take on the divine role of the compassionate Observer within. This focused prayerful attentiveness spills over into our relationships with others, making us better able to pay deep, non-judgmental attention to them and better able to serve them as they need to be served.
Progressive Christians read the Bible as the language of our faith. We creatively employ its ancient poetry and stories to access our own spiritual experience and express it today. The Bible is humans’ words about their soul journeys, and not the words of a supernatural God directing how people should live and believe today. We take it seriously because we don’t have to take it literally. The Bible’s stories bubbled up from the collective unconscious of humanity. Its myths are made sacred by their powerful resonance with the souls of people over many centuries. The gospel story of Jesus’s ministry is perhaps the greatest myth ever told! But we recognize that other faiths may be as good for others as ours is for us: we’re religious pluralists, eager to learn from other faiths and to incorporate some of their practices into our own. Jesus’s Way was the Way of humility. He entered Jerusalem not on a high horse but on a lowly donkey. How could the religion of such a humble man get so full of itself that it would claim to be the only true faith? Progressive Christians aspire to this humility in our relationships with people of other faiths or of no religion at all.
Progressive Christians strive to follow Jesus’ Way of radical compassion. Jesus was a fully human being who found the God of “agape” love in himself. In St Paul’s words, he “emptied himself” and took the form of a slave or servant. Jesus set his ego aside and understood his central essence as one with the love who is God. And he taught others to do and be the same. He was a mystic – a person who strove to be one with the divine – and his Way leads us to be mystics as well. Surely the real, historical person of Jesus was extraordinarily kind and spiritually awakened. But after he was executed by the Romans, who considered him a threat to their rule in Israel, myths formed around his memory, which we find in the four gospels in the Christian New Testament. These mythological Jesus stories don’t have to be taken literally in order for them to transform us and guide us along his Way. The sacred myth of Jesus’ life and death saves us from selfishness, shallowness, greed and cruelty and leads us to practice kindness and establish justice. The cross focuses us on the ways we “crucify” ourselves and others, and aims us toward the life of forgiveness and redemption on its other side.
Because for us, Christianity is a Way and not a fixed set of beliefs and rules, many of the features of other forms of the faith that so many people find strange or objectionable fall away. Many Christians are focused on one or another form of “orthodoxy” – sets of beliefs that are supposed to be definitive. Progressive Christianity is, by contrast, an “otherdoxy” – it is focused on oneness with the Holy and Wholly Other who is God, and on radical attentiveness to the needs of other people. Progressive Christianity embraces science and common sense. If something in the Bible looks like myth, we assume that it is not to be taken as historically factual. If something in the Bible looks inhumane, we understand it to be a product of a certain historical context that no longer applies to us today.
Progressive Christians embrace social and technological progress. Our churches were the first to ordain women and queer people as pastors and to perform same-sex marriages even before they were legal. At the same time, progressive Christians actively resist the forces in culture today that are oppressive. We advocate in the public sphere for peace and for racial, economic, and environmental justice. We believe that heaven and hell are not literal places we go when we die, but rather serve as metaphors for the positive and negative consequences of our personal and social choices. We stand against selfishness, greed, and insensitivity: we stand against the use of technology to oppress people and destroy the environment. We follow the clear example of Jesus, who put first the needs of the most vulnerable. We measure the goodness of a society by how well it treats the poor, the sick, the troubled, the prisoners, and the immigrants. We understand that there are many ways to create what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven on earth: there’s not one political or economic dogma to follow in building it. We are skeptical of any kind of “ism.” But we are committed to stay engaged in the struggle, for the long-term – that’s why you’ll find a disproportion of progressive Christians in politics and in social change work.
Progressive Christians do life together in community. For us, the church is a fitness center for love! We come together to remind each other of what matters and what doesn’t, to remember and creatively employ the sacred Christian myths and to find fresh meanings in them, to wrestle with the questions of how best to love and take care of each other through good times and hard times, to commit ourselves to serving our fellow humans and to protecting our precious planet. Our churches are defined not by walls of dogma but by a communion table at the center that welcomes everyone to a sacred meal of bread and wine, regardless of ages, wages, beliefs, non-beliefs, or stations in life.
What is progressive Christianity? That’s my answer. What’s yours?
This article is adapted from the Rev. Jim Burklo's presentation on his new book, WATER IN THE DESERT: Progressive Christianity for the Spiritually Thirsty.)