The Liberal Majority
The Liberal Majority
By Martin Marty
March/April 1991
8.7 percent of Americans prefer to be seen as “liberal Protestants,” against 15.8 percent “conservative Protestants.” Most liberals are partly conservative, and many conservatives are partly liberal. Both types attract allegiances from the 58.3 percent who prefer to “Catholics,” “Moderate Protestants,” “Black Protestants.” With lines blurred, it is useful to inquire not about shadings, but about the liberal pole.
Just as fundamentalists, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and conservatives differ wildly with each other over fundamentals, such as baptism, The Lord’s Supper, human will, and eschatology; so liberals differ wildly with each other over the content of the faith, specific dogmas.
How liberals color their belief is therefore the only useful topic. Though they are critical liberal heirs of the Enlightenment, they display more suspicion of reason, science, individualist freedom, and progress, than did their grandparents. But being Christians they continue to see God active in the realms of the first three of these elements. Because they are liberal Christians, they believe in a transcendent and immanent God. But they are more ready than were their grandparents to address transcendence.
They believe in the divine incarnation and whole-making activity of Christ, but are more ready to stress the “fully human” elements in orthodoxy than are some of their traditionalist counterparts, while often finding less sure rationales to support the witness to the “fully divine.” They believe in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church (more than do many conservatives, such as premillennial fundamentalists who have trouble finding it at all), but are more likely than conservatives to see its borders open, not closed. They thus find it more porous to the possibility of integrity in other faiths than are those versions of Christianity which enjoy thick barriers against others and great distances between them.
In Paul Ricocur’s terms, they are aware of “criticism” or “interpretation,” but for liberal Christians, this awareness did not lead them to lose faith. Nor did it inspire them to join those hardliners who believe “in spite of interpretation!” Instead, they believe “through interpretation.” This mode leads them to such commitment to openness, relativity, ambiguity, and paradox, that some of them match Robert Frost’s depiction: A liberal is someone who will not take his own side in an argument
At their best, those near the liberal pole combine commitment with openness and express a humility about their belief, which has as much biblical grounding as do the commitments of their more arrogating and self-assured “conservative” counterparts – many of whom are apostate liberals who keep fighting their own pasts and caricaturing the hard-held faith of those in whose company they formerly found themselves.
Martin Marty is a professor at the University of Chicago and senior editor of The Christian Century.