Why Progressive Christianity Isn’t Christianity

by Paul Batura | March 13, 2026 | Culture

Southern Seminary’s Dr. Andrew Walker has established himself as a leading voice in Christian culture –an unafraid, unapologetic evangelist. He doesn’t mince his words when helping the faithful interpret the muddied and often heretical pronouncements of those who might claim Christianity but are either deliberately or ignorantly confused about it.

Writing in the Daily Wire earlier this week, Walker critiqued a recent column from David French, a New York Times columnist. It’s always a challenge to get inside a writer’s head and impossible to know what’s in their heart. But there’s enough of French’s weekly words to identify a pattern and propose a premise.

Walker writes:

There is a deep and corrosive bitterness driving it. His contempt for conservative Christians who have voted for Trump has mutated over time into something uglier: a reflexive and condescending derision of anyone who refuses to share his political judgments, dressed up as prophetic moral clarity. Let us all take a lesson that deep-seated rage at Donald Trump and his Christian supporters does not justify placating doctrinal error. When you begin describing a progressive politician who affirms abortion as a ‘Christian X-ray’ that illuminates the failures of orthodox Christians, you have not elevated your commentary. You have descended into trollish editorializing with a more elite platform.

Walker, who serves as Associate Dean in the School of Theology and Associate Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at Southern Seminary, concluded his essay with his trademark clarity and practical teaching touch:

Progressive Christianity is not Christianity. Any movement, and any thirty-something seminarian, that denies the core doctrines of the Christian faith has not offered a fresh reading of the tradition. It has departed from the tradition. The tradition has a word for that departure. It is called heresy. And anyone, including certain New York Times columnists, who aids and abets such departures by insisting they still count as authentic Christianity, is not offering serious commentary on the Christian faith. It is offering theological malpractice to a very large audience.

It’s too bad that Andrew Walker’s words are only being published in the Daily Wire and not the Old Grey Lady. Readers of the 174-year-old newspaper are regularly subjected to distorted perspectives of Christianity. They would be much better served if Andrew Walker was given a column.

But why is progressive Christianity not Christianity? To put it simply, those who subscribe to it are abandoning historic Christian doctrine and replacing it with a more culturally friendly interpretation of long-established truths.

At the foundation of progressive Christianity is the reinterpretation and recasting of Scripture. To the progressive, it’s akin to a political liberal’s belief in a “living and breathing” Constitution. In this distorted and tragic worldview, God’s Word is not inspired or authoritative if it conflicts with or contradicts modern sensibilities.

As soon as you reject or wobble on the authority of Scripture, everything else is up for debate and amendment. I once had a Presbyterian pastor friend tell me that he knew many pastors of very large churches in the libera; Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination who didn’t believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. They chose to focus on the teachings of Jesus they liked and ignored what they didn’t.

Progressive Christianity distorts God’s sacred and holy Word and contorts itself in trying to justify everything from abortion to same-sex “marriage” to the false but feel-good belief that “all roads” somehow lead to eternal life.

The late Dr. Adrian Rogers, who served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention three times, was credited with helping lead the “conservative resurgence” of the denomination. Warning against what he believed to be theological liberalism, he often said the Christian faith faced its most serious threat from within.

“I believe the greatest enemy of the Bible is the so‑called Christian who simply ignores the Bible or disregards it,” he once said.

Andrew Walker never served with Dr. Rogers, but he knows the history and admires the principled stand that he and others took to resist tragic, theological drift. Reflecting on it, Walker wrote:

Truth is costly. Similarly, architects of the Conservative Resurgence paid a price for orthodoxy. Relationships were strained. Churches divided. Left and Right flanks took shape. But the biblical Gospel was worth something to these men — worth dividing and even losing a denomination over. It wasn’t just disputes over property and trustee alignments, it was a dispute about what the Gospel demands of its adherents.

Andrew Walker wrote those words in 2014 – and still believes and lives them in 2026.

Photo credit: Southern Seminary