Interesting Talarico Take

Tyson Zahner

 

 My last post about James Talarico's progressive Christian theology generated hundreds of conversations. The most interesting ones were with progressive Christians themselves… sincere, thoughtful people who love Jesus and genuinely believe they're following Him more faithfully than the traditional church has.

After engaging in several of these conversations, I noticed a pattern underneath every progressive argument… a shared worldview that produces them. And I think understanding that worldview is more important than debating any single issue, because until you see the operating system, you'll keep getting lost in the apps.

So this isn't an attack on progressive Christians. It's an honest attempt to describe what I think their worldview gets wrong.

I'll start with their core move…

Every conversation came back to some version of this: "Jesus summarized everything as love God and love your neighbor, and that overrides the harder moral teachings."

But I see two problems here.

One is simply a breakdown in what we mean by "love".

Progressive Christians tend to hear that word and translate it into merely compassion, empathy, and understanding… which then becomes affirmation, tolerance, and acceptance. By that definition, any moral boundary starts to feel unloving.

But that's not the biblical definition. Thomas Aquinas defined love (agape) not as mere emotion, but as a conscious decision to "will the good of the other" which sometimes means saying the hard thing, not the comfortable thing.

For example, no one would look at an 80-pound anorexic girl who believes she's overweight and say the loving thing is to affirm her. We all understand that sometimes the most loving thing you can do is refuse to affirm what someone genuinely believes about themselves because affirming it might destroy them.

Even Jesus in His most intimate, final moment demonstrated this while hanging next to two thieves in agony.

Jesus didn't remove their suffering or tell them their choices didn't matter. He offered truth. And one of the thieves accepted it, but only after saying, "we are receiving the due reward of our deeds" (Luke 23:41). Repentance came before redemption. That's what love looked like from Jesus when it mattered most.

The other problem is that this worldview ignores where Jesus said all the Law and the Prophets "hang" on these two commandments (Matthew 22:40). That word "hang" matters.

The law hangs on love the way a picture hangs on a nail. The nail holds up the picture, but it doesn't replace it. Remove the nail and the picture falls. But remove the picture and you just have a nail in the wall.

In other words, love and obedience aren't in tension. They're inseparable. Jesus Himself said: "If you love me, keep my commandments" (John 14:15).

And then there's the question no one could answer…

Several people told me their faith is grounded in experiencing Jesus in their hearts… that a personal relationship with God supersedes strict adherence to a text.

I don't dismiss that the Holy Spirit works in believers' hearts.

But here's the question I kept asking, and no one could answer:

(well, they tried, but every answer relied on the same circular reasoning the question was designed to expose)

If what you feel in your heart can override what the text says, doesn’t that make Christianity infinitely malleable? In other words, how do you ever know when you're wrong?

For example, slaveholders in the antebellum South believed God ordained their way of life. They felt it in their hearts. They were wrong even though they were sincere.

The text was the corrective that eventually dismantled their position. Abolitionists didn't win by saying "I feel in my heart that slavery is wrong." They won by showing, from Scripture, that the trajectory of the biblical narrative demanded liberation. They appealed to the text, not away from it.

If feelings had been the final authority, slavery might never have been abolished… because the slaveholders' hearts told them they were right, too.

And here's why it's so hard to argue with progressive Christianity…

In my previous post I mentioned Jonathan Haidt (a social psychologist who is not religious, not conservative, and has described his own political leanings as liberal).

Haidt wrote The Righteous Mind about why good people are divided by politics. His research isn't about theology. But it explains why progressive Christianity is so effective and so persuasive to so many.

His core finding was this: conservatives draw from a broader moral palette including care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. Progressives weight care and fairness far above the others.

In chapter 12, Haidt himself wrote: "When I speak to liberal audiences about the three 'binding' foundations — Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity — I find that many in the audience don't just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia."

Progressive Christianity does the same thing theologically. It elevates the care and fairness dimensions of Jesus's teaching above everything else… then treats anyone who draws from the other moral foundations as a Pharisee.
The result sounds like pure love. But it's a narrowed moral vision that has quietly set aside half the palette and declared the remaining half to be the whole gospel.

In one of my conversations, a self-described progressive Christian told me plainly: "The vast majority of progressive Christians aren't against border enforcement, traditional marriage, or institutional order. The difference is we don't see those as moral issues."

That's not underweighting those foundations. That's removing them from the moral category entirely which is exactly the pattern Haidt describes.

Ultimately, I don't doubt the sincerity of the progressive Christians I spoke with this week. But sincerity isn't the same as accuracy.

A worldview that makes your own heart the final authority (above the text, above 2,000 years of consistent teaching) is a worldview that can never be corrected. Every hard teaching gets replaced by "but love." Every moral boundary gets reframed as legalism.

But that's not freedom.

Anyone who's loved an addict knows that removing every boundary doesn't set someone free. It just removes the only things that might have saved them. It's a prison with no walls… a place where you can wander anywhere, but no one can ever tell you you've gone the wrong way.

The deep end of Christianity isn't the version that tells you what you want to hear. It's the one that loves you enough to tell you what you need to hear.