In my experience, religious leaders talk about how much Jesus loves you as a way to offer sympathy for one’s troubles. It’s a way to assure the suffering will find their reward in Heaven. In other words, we can’t help you for shit, but you’ll be fine after you die.
Jesus loves everybody, even the weirdos we don’t like to talk about. That’s as “progressive” as it gets. The jeans-wearing guitar players are for young people to get acclimated before they get old enough to work for a living and make donations. After all the kum ba ya crap is out of the way, it’s time to preach about how God is on our side when we start restricting freedoms and go to war.
I’d push back against this- firstly, I think you’d be hard pressed to get numbers that get you to “most progressives are atheist” that your observation implies.
Secondly, in my personal experience, lots of the progressive organizing originates in religious groups/congregations.
Thirdly, I think this all devolves quickly into questions of “define progressive” and “define religion” and “what is a real X anyway?”.
So, to answer the OP, knowing many religious progressives, I’d say that religious progressives believe that all religions are liberal at their core. Religious conservatives do not. Atheist progressives might or might not, depending.
There’s also a perspective question that overlaps the question in the OP, which is whether or to what degree any actions done ‘in the name of’ a religion define the religion. Whether the definitional positions of a religion should be looked at through the transitory whims of the people alive right now, vs some lens with a longer or different view?
Also, even though the source material is the same, are different denominations really “the same religion” in all contexts? Is talking about the “Christian position” an ever-more useless fiction? I know Christians who are appalled at current immigration policy, and Christians who believe that “illegals” who suffer physical harm at the hands of the US government deserve it- that the illegals gave us no other choice.
This is arguably not even in the Bible. I became convinced of this after reading a book about the historical development of notions of heaven and hell. The idea of a hell filled with eternal torment developed long after Jesus’ death in response to the persecution of Christians. It was a sort of consolation prize. “Yeah, you’re persecuting me now, but after we die, you’ll all be really sorry!”
Jesus himself was a Jew who apparently had a view of the afterlife in line with Jewish people of the time. While there is a reference to an eternal fire in one of Jesus’ parables, it’s likely the fire was meant to be eternal. There were no references to souls being tortured forever. And even if they had been, Jesus explicitly said that the reason they were cast into said fire was because they didn’t feed and clothe the poor, not because they weren’t “saved.” Also this was a parable, not a literal description of anything.
Many Christians believe otherwise of course, and so many Christians believe in some kind of bad place in the afterlife that you can take it as part of the Christian religion. But I don’t believe the textual basis is there.
I’m a progressive. I’m not into the No True Scotsman arguments about religion. There’s nothing inherently anything about any religion. Religion may have its sacred texts saying good or bad things, but what it means to be X is a matter of people and culture and however they choose to interpret those texts at any given time.
I’m somewhere on the spectrum between agnostic and atheist, and my knowledge of religions comes mostly by osmosis, never having studied any of them in any depth. I would say, though, that Islam does not strike me as very liberal. A few years ago, a mosque opened in our neighborhood. There was a lot of resistance from the neighbors which seemed to us to be rooted in racial and religious bigotry. Never mind that there are probably a dozen or so Christian churches of various flavors in the neighborhood. The mosque had an open house, and we attended because we felt they had as much of a right to worship in the neighborhood as any of the Jesus-branded houses of worship. What we heard, though, especially WRT equality between the sexes, was anything but liberal. Learning about Pillars of Islam was enlightening, but the whole thing about women being special and yet different was very off-putting. On the way home, I commented to my wife, “Wow, that is one fucked up religion.” Still, we don’t mind them in the neighborhood. I mean, I think the Christian churches are fucked up, too.
Religion and culture are complicated. I don’t want to police what other people believe, as long as they don’t try to police me.
Where religion is tricky is that it makes it harder to get someone to see reason on an important issue. For example homophobia. If someone is homophobic because they are homophobic, there’s a chance of getting them to see reason. If someone is homophobic and their homophobia is enforced by cultural religious beliefs, they aren’t ever going to see reason. The stakes are too high for them to change their mind.
So as an institutional and cultural force I think religion can entrench some really nasty beliefs that will be highly resistant to change.
So no I don’t believe other religions are liberal. I think all religions have some issues, some specific religions are problematic in some specific ways and others may create harm depending on the context.
I think the people most inclined to say, “That’s not true Christianity” are Christians. I hear that a lot. They don’t want to be associated with the worst parts of their religion but yeah those hateful people over there are Christians too. Just like I have to accept that some feminists hate men and trans women, people need to accept that their beliefs may also give rise to some ugliness and you shouldn’t just get to pretend that ugliness is called something else.
I mean they know that nobody buys it, right? If someone has a grievance with your religion, separating yourself from that particular expression of that religion isn’t going to make the aggrieved party just fine with your religion. They are just going to think you’re in denial. But if you say, “Yeah, some Christians are really hateful, but I interpret the Bible differently and I don’t believe those things.” Then they at least walk away thinking, “Okay, maybe not all Christians are the same.”
It reminds me of this documentary I watched with a religious friend of mine about the weird way some evangelicals are about Jewish people and Israel. Like the praying for Armageddon thing. And my friend just kept saying “that’s not Biblical” like it was some kind of argument. I get that you don’t believe that thing, I even get that the text may not support it, but those people are Christians whether you want to admit it or not.
To add to this, it’s one thing to say “Your religion may be anti-LGBT, but you need to learn to mind your own business.” I think most folks would agree with that, just like telling Muslims, “You may be unable to eat pork, but you need to let other people practice their freedom to eat it.”
But there are progressives who take it further and say, “No, your religion is not anti-LGBT, in fact, it’s a pro-LGBT religion.” I think that’s what’s pouring a lot of gasoline on the flames of argument. It would be like telling Muslims that the Quran endorses pork-eating. You can tell people to mind their own business, but trying to tell them that their own religious tenets aren’t what they think they are will cause a storm.
Well, Christianity, for example, as described in the Gospels is a religion of love and tolerance. The problem is those people who want to use religion as a tool to establish and maintain their own power. I give you the Spanish Inquisition as a horrid example. I certainly can’t speak for “all religions”, but religion in general has been abused like this for time immemorial.
Violent people are NOT rare - 31.6% of women globally have experienced physical and/or sexual intimate-partner or non-partner sexual violence during their lifetime (Cite). And that’s only one common kind of violence. Around 51% of under-fives (330 million) experience regularly physical punishment, and more than half the world’s youth (more than a billion) experience some sort of violence every year , and 20/16% of that is sexual violence[1](Cite, Cite, Cite).
So no, NOT rare and it’s NOT some “small minority”.
Without derailing the topic, I’ve seen it stated many times on social media in support any time the gay marriage or other LGBT issues are brought up, that Christianity is a religion of tolerance, love and inclusion, and that the loving thing to do is to go to someone’s gay marriage to celebrate it (if invited,) that Christian parents should celebrate and not object if their daughter is doing a lesbian marriage, that it’s what Jesus would want, etc. I’ve even heard of progressives (although, only a few) claiming that there was something homosexual going on between Jesus and His disciples.
The Bible seems to have a lot of different views on tolerance. There’s what Jesus apparently believed, and what his apostles believed, who seemed quite a bit different. The reason it contradicts itself is at least in part because it’s full of different people’s opinions. Some of those opinions were very tolerant, others not so much.
But if you take Jesus as an example, I think it’s pretty clear he was big on tolerance and love.
Not that he was the liberal hippie leftists sometimes imagine him to be. But he definitely hung out with people others were too good for, and his actions suggested he was pretty chill about everything except religious hypocrisy.
The problem is that Jesus isn’t the Bible. His stories make up a small part of it. Everyone else had to get their 2c in.
So I don’t think you can meaningfully say that Jesus is the whole of Christianity. He didn’t even invent Christianity. I’m not even sure the Bible is the whole of Christianity, since so many Christian beliefs aren’t biblical. Jesus may have been a person of love and tolerance but it does not follow that Christianity is inherently about love and tolerance.
This is true of all religions. It’s fine to be partial to your own sacred text, as much as I’m partial to my own, but I think a religion is a lot more than words written down.
Well, often what people are saying is “OUR religion is not anti-LGBT”. I don’t really see a lot of atheists trying to rebut religious homophobes by quoting the Bible or Talmud. Sure, many people will be offended by the presence of LGBT people in the religious community, but they’re not going away.
. I’ll look into it.