The Global Church Era · contemporary · Global
Progressive Christianity (a broad label, not one movement)
A label, not one group
This name covers many different, distinct groups, each with its own separate history - not one single movement.
About This Movement
This is a label rather than a movement, and the map treats it as one. 'Progressive Christianity' is used by mainline congregations, by post-evangelical networks, by individual writers and by organizations with no relation to one another, and the communities it covers differ from each other as much as they differ from anyone else. Some of them are old mainline parishes with a century of denominational history behind them; some are congregations founded in the last decade; some are simply readers of particular books. There are organizations that give the label a content: the Center for Progressive Christianity, founded in 1994, publishes a set of points that it has revised more than once, and each revision is its own dated document. But no confession, no founder and no membership covers the label as a whole — which is exactly why this map never judges it as a category, and asks about a specific community's own published statement instead.
Sources
- Carrier-body texts, dated: The Center for Progressive Christianity's '8 Points' (org. founded 1994; successive dated revisions - each revision its own dated text) (primary) — One example of the varied statements this broad label covers; the label as a whole is never assessed — only individual bodies, each on its own terms.
- Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology (WJK, 3 vols: 2001, 2003, 2006) (secondary) — The intellectual genealogy behind this current, connected to the wider fundamentalist-modernist rupture of the same era.
- David Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire (Princeton, 2013); Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us (2006) (secondary) — Hollinger is the standard account of the mainline trajectory; Bass writes as a participant-adjacent journalist, useful for present-state claims but not a scholarly source.
- The 'fast-growing current' claim (reference) — The 'fast-growing' claim currently rests on journalism and self-description, not a hard count; Pew and PRRI's landscape data are more independently grounded, but neither actually measures 'progressive Christianity' as its own category. That mismatch between the label and the available instruments is the honest fact here.