BY THE ALLIED REPORT (STAFF) • 05 JUNE 2026

Church Interior Event (Wix Stock Media)

Christianity has always been a faith that stands out from the world, calling believers to live by a unique standard that never changes. Yet, today’s culture often views the faith sparked by Jesus Christ through a very narrow lens. Many inside and outside the faith assume that the only choices available are either a politically driven, rigid, legacy, and even nationalistic version of Christianity, or a broad, affirming, and tolerant version of the religion. Media and culture often paint this second, inclusive rendering as a benevolent coalition offering tangible services and goods. Built on a social gospel of universal acceptance, tolerance, and a quick embrace of new cultural morals, it is widely assumed to truly capture the heart of Jesus Christ's teachings. And, to many, it looks like a safe refuge from archaic sermons about absolute truth, personal sin, and the reality of a wrathful God.

But this therapeutic refuge is, in fact, a lethal counterfeit of the truth. Far from representing an authentic, balanced expression of Christian faith, this movement is a dangerous twist of Biblical truth, even using much of the same terminology, appearances, and material. It trades the unyielding sovereignty of God, the God who declares the end from the beginning and accomplishes all His good pleasure (Isaiah 46:10), for the shifting sands of personal human autonomy. Whether you look at structural attacks on human life through abortion, which is an outright war on the Creator who weaves the unborn in the womb (Psalm 139:13), or analyze the collapse of truth within church institutions (2 Thessalonians 2:15), the core battle of our generation is now fixed on this exact line.

It’s a Slow Fade: We Didn’t Arrive Here Overnight

To understand how the church arrived at this point, we must look past modern debates and trace what we see now back to its roots. Progressive Christianity is not a sudden cultural trend. It is the direct theological child of nineteenth-century European Higher Criticism and Enlightenment rationalism. The movement began in German universities, pioneered by theologians like Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the father of modern liberal theology. Schleiermacher tried to "rescue" religion from secular skepticism. He did this by shifting the foundation of faith away from objective Biblical truth and pinning it instead onto subjective human feelings and religious experiences.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this shift crossed the Atlantic and embedded itself inside American mainline denominations. Propelled by the "Social Gospel" movement, championed by figures like Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), the focus of the church drastically flipped. The primary goal was no longer the supernatural rescue of lost souls from eternal judgment and the wrath to come (1 Thessalonians 1:10). Now it was geared toward the reorganization of societal structures. Under a banner of unity that prioritized social cooperation over doctrinal purity, historic Christian doctrines, such as the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and the substitutionary atonement, were systematically dismissed by liberal scholars as primitive myths.

“For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18)

By the 1920s, this creeping secularization triggered the historic Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy. Modernists argued that Christianity had to adapt its core doctrines to survive in a scientific age, while orthodox theologians recognized that "adapting" the faith meant abandoning it entirely. The driving force behind this drift was a deep craving for cultural respectability, a desire to align the church with the spirit of the age rather than stand on the unyielding truth of a supernatural text, willfully forgetting “that friendship with the world is enmity toward God” (James 4:4; see also Ephesians 2:2, 1 Corinthians 2:6-8, Romans 12:2).

The Core Axiom: Human Autonomy Versus Sovereign Authority

True Biblical faith stands on an absolute starting point, a final authority that dictates boundaries, morality, and ultimate hope. That starting point is the self-revealing God who has spoken definitively through His inerrant Word. The core truth of reality is that God is the supreme Creator, and all of humanity is directly accountable to His unchanging character and revealed law. As Scripture declares, “the law of Yahweh is perfect, restoring the soul” (Psalm 19:7), and every mouth will be closed because the whole world is held accountable to God (Romans 3:19).

But the liberal gospel of Progressive Christianity flips this dynamic completely on its head. Its starting point is not the objective reality of God’s revelation, but the subjective landscape of human experience, personal desires, and modern cultural consensus. In this system, individual feelings and personal autonomy serve as the final judges of truth. If a Biblical passage conflicts with modern therapeutic feelings or cultural trends on issues of sexuality, gender, personal identity, or even women’s roles within the church, it is the Biblical passage that must be deconstructed, reinterpreted, or thrown out entirely.

This shift transforms religion from a supernatural rescue mission initiated by a sovereign Creator into a glorified self-actualization project managed by creatures. When a pulpit trades the cross of Calvary for a rainbow-tinted vanity mirror, it stops preaching rescue for sinners from the wrath of a holy God. Instead, it teaches them to patch up their self-esteem and maintain a positive attitude in this temporary life. When the human will is placed at the center of the universe, God is demoted from the sovereign Judge and Savior to a cosmic companion whose primary job is to validate our choices.

This is a complete inversion of the Biblical order of operations. Isaiah 5:20 says, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness, who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” True saving faith does not demand that God bend His standards to affirm sinful man’s natural inclinations. Rather, it bows the knee to Christ’s absolute authority through His infallible Word. It recognizes that true regeneration transforms our desires from the inside out, removing the heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh through the sovereign indwelling of the Holy Spirit (Ezekiel 36:26–27).

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)

The Systematic Rejection of Scripture’s Inerrancy and Sufficiency

To sustain a religious system built on human autonomy, one must first dismantle the authority of an objective text that exposes and condemns human rebellion. This is why the sin-tolerating theology of Progressive Christianity is fundamentally incompatible with sola scriptura, the historic conviction that Scripture alone is the final, sufficient authority for the church. The doctrines of Biblical inerrancy (that Scripture is free from error in all that it affirms) and sufficiency (that Scripture contains everything necessary for life and godliness) act as an insurmountable barrier to the progressive agenda.

“All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16)

Because God’s divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3), any effort to supplement or correct the text with secular sociology is an implicit denial of its structural sufficiency. Every word of God is tested, and adding to His words makes a person a liar (Proverbs 30:5-6).

In order to survive the convicting weight of the Bible, progressive theology strips the text of its supernatural character. It treats it instead as a purely human library, a historical record of ancient people doing their best to understand God and their world within their own limited, culturally conditioned contexts. By reducing the prophets and apostles to historical writers trapped in ancient prejudices, the progressive movement grants itself permission to override their words whenever they conflict with modern feelings. This is heresy.

This systematic dismantling of Biblical authority is the precise mechanism of theological liberalism. Defining the boundaries of this trajectory on a June 2, 2026 episode of The Briefing, Dr. Albert Mohler provided a vital warning:

“Theological liberalism is a rejection of the orthodox standards of the Christian faith and it is a rejection of the notion of Biblical authority and the Biblical shape of Christianity in terms of the actual truth claims made in the New Testament...”

This is not a new battle. Over a century ago, during the height of the modernist controversy, the great theologian J. Gresham Machen recognized that this trajectory would lead to a total departure from the historic faith. As he masterfully wrote in his enduring work Christianity and Liberalism:

“In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.” (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923)

Writing on Machen’s insight, Burk Parsons highlighted the deceptive nature of this theological shift in Tabletalk Magazine, saying:

“Machen’s thesis has long been witnessed, as we have seen liberalism show itself time and again as an entirely false religion that preaches an entirely false gospel.” (Parsons, "Liberalism: A Different Religion," 2023)

By keeping the vocabulary of faith while rejecting the objective truth of the text, progressive theology creates a counterfeit religion. If the Bible is not inerrant, it cannot be trusted. If it is not sufficient, it must be supplemented by the ever-changing theories of secular sociology. The moment a church claims that Scripture must be corrected by modern cultural insights, it has formally abandoned Christianity and erected an altar to human opinion.

The Pluralistic Capitulation: Functional Conduits of Deconstruction

The rejection of Biblical sufficiency does not always wear the obvious badge of radical progressivism. Sometimes, the exact same spirit of theological liberalism operates directly under a mask of orthodoxy. Increasingly, this compromise is driven by elite evangelical commentators who claim to hold sound doctrine, but functionally neutralize the authority of God's Word in public life.

They may not openly preach the social gospel of dying mainline churches. Instead, they hide the exact same surrender behind the respectable language of political pluralism and classical liberalism. By turning the church’s clear moral duties into mere partisan opinions, they pull off the same work of deconstruction. Under the guise of civic fairness, they systematically soften the sharp edge of Scripture just to keep their cultural respectability.

David French exemplifies this subtle drift through his public advocacy for the Respect for Marriage Act, where he defended the legal codification of same-sex marriage under the banner of pluralistic religious liberty. To a Biblical worldview, prioritizing a pragmatic, state-sanctioned compromise over God’s unchanging creational ordinance of marriage, wherein a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24), is a direct capitulation to human autonomy, trading the absolute rule of the Creator for a state-sanctioned compromise.

A similar compromise is driven by a prominent denominational voice who has used his influence at the ERLC and Christianity Today to pivot the church away from a steadfast defense of God’s foundational design for human flourishing through Biblical morality. By framing orthodox convictions on the family and the public legal restraints of sin as an embarrassing, partisan stumbling block, Russell Moore mimics nineteenth-century modernists who sought to rescue the church’s reputation by sanitizing its counter-cultural edge. This approach ultimately sidelines the Biblical reality that the civil magistrate is ordained as a minister of God to bring wrath upon the evildoer (Romans 13:4), wrongly reducing an issue of creation order to mere political friction.

Other platforms, including Baptist News Global and The Gospel Coalition, routinely publish authors who have grown hostile toward foundational Christian truth and clear delineations between objective right and wrong. Driven by a desire to retain the spiritual comfort of a faith without any absolute authority, they labor to twist Scriptural boundaries until they can align with their own moral sensibilities.

In his book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta takes the church’s Biblical duty to oppose secularism and abortion and reduces it to a cynical caricature. He reframes these vital moral convictions as mere right-wing nationalistic idolatry, political theatre, and a vice to be dispensed with post-haste. By psychologizing the historic conviction to defend life down to a mere political issue and discounting it as partisan platforming, Alberta’s deconstruction embodies the sobering reality exposed in Romans 1:32, where Paul notes that “although they know the righteous requirement of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.”

Throughout the book, Alberta characterizes the church's efforts to oppose secularism not as an act of obedience to the truth, but as a result of “ephemeral fear” and “partisan subterfuge.” He frames any attempt by believers to secure public justice or influence the laws of the state as a corrupt, carnal grab for an earthly kingdom rather than what it is: a faithful stewardship to restrain outward evil, protect innocent life, and uphold public justice based on God’s unchanging moral standards (Micah 6:8).

Scripture leaves no room for such passive neutrality regarding the wickedness listed in Romans 1. To neutralize the church’s public opposition to things such as the LGBTQ+ movement (verse 27), the slaughter of the innocent (verse 29), and many other grievous sins that the Lord hates, is to provide cover for those who applaud it, ultimately surrendering the absolute authority and sufficiency of Scripture to a culture already under God’s divine judgment for the very same.

The Redefinition of Sin and the Idolatry of Affirmation

Nowhere is the structural split between these two worldviews more visible than in their respective treatments of sin and redemption. In Biblical Christianity, sin is defined as any lack of conformity to, or transgression of, the holy law of God. It is exactly as the Apostle John dogmatically defined it: sin is lawlessness (1 John 3:4). Because humanity is by nature dead in trespasses and sins and fundamentally children of wrath (Ephesians 2:1–3), sin is an infinite insult to an infinite God. It results in spiritual death, total depravity, and a state of condemnation deserving of infinite punishment that can only be remedied by the substitutionary atonement of the perfect Son of God, Jesus Christ.

Progressive Christianity completely redefines sin. In its therapeutic framework, sin is no longer viewed as personal moral rebellion against a holy Creator, but is externalized as institutional oppression, systemic intolerance, or a failure to love oneself. Consequently, the ultimate moral evil in this universe is not the breaking of God’s law, but the refusal to affirm an individual’s self-defined identity and personal autonomy.

This redefinition has catastrophic implications for the Gospel. When personal autonomy is idolized, explicit Biblical prohibitions against sexual immorality, LGBTQ+ practices, and abortion are repositioned as outdated taboos that hinder human flourishing. The movement demands a gospel of total affirmation without repentance. But a gospel that refuses to name sin cannot offer true salvation, for Christ came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Luke 5:32).

This subversion directly upends the hierarchy of the Greatest Commandments. While Christ establishes supreme vertical love for God as the first commandment, with horizontal love for neighbor flowing from it (Matthew 22:37–39), progressive theology flips this order entirely. It elevates the creature above the Creator, promoting actions demonstrating that true love for others actually supersedes obedience to the Lord. In this inverted framework, love is stripped of its holy character and reduced to a sentimental demand for total validation of sin. But this is a lethal deception. To affirm someone in a behavior that Scripture explicitly warns will lead to eternal judgment is not an act of love—it is the height of spiritual cruelty masquerading as compassion. True Biblical love does not rejoice in unrighteousness but rejoices with the truth (1 Corinthians 13:6). It refuses to validate or affirm the godless desires of the fallen flesh, choosing instead to earnestly seek an individual’s rescue from wrath through the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

The Erasure of Apostolic Authority: The Assault on Paul

Countless arguments against the liberal gospel of Progressive Christianity are anchored directly in the words of Paul. Short of rewriting Scripture outright, the Apostle’s explicit warnings unmask these revisionists, damning their assertions to the realm of destructive heresy. In short, Paul’s words are lethal to much of the liberal gospel. Because Paul’s epistles present an unyielding defense of God’s justice, explicit moral boundaries, and the penal nature of the atonement, the glorious truth that Christ was delivered over for our transgressions and was raised for our justification (Romans 4:25), his writings represent an epic roadblock to the Progressive Christian religion.

To circumvent this, their theologians often pit Jesus against Paul, falsely claiming that Jesus preached a simple message of unconditional affirmation and inclusion (broadly termed as “love”), while Paul corrupted it with rigid, legalistic dogmas. This subversion found academic cover in the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), launched by E.P. Sanders’ 1977 book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Sanders argued that Protestantism misread first-century Judaism through the lens of Martin Luther’s battle with Roman Catholicism, inventing the concept of “covenantal nomism” to claim Paul was merely fighting Jewish nationalism rather than human works-righteousness.

Building on this groundwork, leading NPP advocate N.T. Wright explicitly rejects the historic view of imputed righteousness. In his book What Saint Paul Really Said, Wright reduces justification from a forensic declaration where God imputes the active obedience of Christ to a guilty sinner by faith alone (Romans 4:6; 2 Corinthians 5:21) down to a horizontal badge of church identity. This deconstructs sola fide, one of the core foundations of the Protestant Reformation. While Wright himself does not claim to promote moral relativism, his theological shift opened a dangerous door. Progressive Christianity seizes upon this framework to argue that justification is merely about communal identity rather than the legal eradication of guilt before a holy God, allowing revisionists to hijack his ideas as a loophole to force their own moral relativism into the text. Writing for Ligonier Ministries, Phil Johnson warned that Wright:

“...makes it abundantly clear that he does not like the notion of imputation, because he does not believe divine righteousness is something that can be reckoned, or put to the account, of the believer. And he is equally silent—ominously silent—about the biblical teaching that the believer’s guilt was imputed to Christ and paid for on the cross.” (Johnson, "What's Wrong with Wright: Examining the New Perspective on Paul," 2025)

By altering the vocabulary of justification, the New Perspective effectively denies the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers. It systematically dismantles the very mechanism of salvation that sparked the Reformation, leaving people with a gospel that cannot actually save. Such animosity toward Paul is a deliberate attempt to erase his letters’ authority. By targeting Paul through the academic pontifications of Sanders and Wright, Progressive Christianity seeks to cut out the heart of Biblical soteriology, specifically original sin (Romans 5:12), total human inability (1 Corinthians 2:14; cf. John 6:44), and the absolute necessity of the substitutionary death of Christ, in order to construct a framework of self-styled righteousness and moral relativism. This flight from the objective truth of salvation reveals that when the truth of the Gospel is not understood to be a refuge, it becomes an intolerable offense.

The Offense of the Gospel: Why Truth Provokes Deconstruction

The progressive movement is deeply offended by the doctrines of Scriptural inerrancy, infallibility, authority, and sufficiency. Although often passed off as such, this intense animus does not stem from an intellectual dilemma or a neutral historical critique of the manuscripts; it is an inherently moral and spiritual reaction. An authoritative, infallible Bible presents a direct existential threat to the sovereign self. It demands absolute submission, confronts personal sin, and shatters the illusion that we belong to ourselves.

“For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18)

When confronted by the unyielding standard of the Word of God, the unregenerate heart faces a stark choice: either submit to the Lordship of Christ through repentance and faith, or deconstruct the authority of the text to escape its moral weight by whatever means plausible to the tormented mind. The modern phenomenon of Christian deconstruction is, at its root, a public flight from the binding authority of God’s truth. It is an attempt to rewrite the rules of reality so that the individual can retain the label of spirituality while indulging the desires of the flesh. Often, this rebellion avoids overt hostility, masking itself instead as a sophisticated skill of nonconfrontational diplomacy. In reality, it exposes a disturbing truth: the deconstructionist would rather negotiate comfortable cooperation with the sin God condemns rather than bow before the absolute authority of a holy Sovereign’s truth by condemning sin as sin.

Because an authoritative Bible shatters illusions of self-ownership, those who love themselves will inevitably grow to resent the Biblical texts that demand submission and surrender. Unmasking the real heart-motives that drive this contemporary departure from historic orthodoxy, Dr. John MacArthur delivered a penetrating analysis during his series on Christian deconstruction at Grace Community Church when he read a passage from John 6 and then said:

“The bottom line is love of self, love of sin; love of self, love of sin. And to say it another way, they reject the Word of God—and you see that in the distinction of the text I just read. Peter says, ‘We’re not going to leave, because You have the words of eternal life.’ It comes down to the words, folks. It all comes down to the words—not to emotional experiences, not to music, not to good feelings, not to sentimentalism. If you believe the words, you stay; if you resent the words, you leave. That’s what it comes down to.” (MacArthur, "Christian Deconstruction, Part 1," 2023)

The progressive mind is profoundly offended by the absolute nature of God’s words because those words refuse to compromise. When Christ proclaims that the way is narrow and that true discipleship requires a person to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow Him, proclaiming plainly, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” (Luke 9:23; cf. Matthew 7:13–14), He leaves no room for personal autonomy. Faced with an unyielding Sovereign, the rebel soul simply invents a manageable savior, ultimately seeking refuge in a counterfeit religion that offers the false promise of kingdom blessing without a Lord.

A Counterfeit Religion: Distinguishing True Grace from Secular Sentimentality

When the Biblical diagnosis of humanity’s ruin is rejected, a different interpretation must be manufactured. The result is a religion of secular sentimentality masquerading as divine grace. In this system, grace is transformed from a supernatural act of unmerited favor whereby a holy God justifies a wretched sinner through the blood of Christ into a blanket, non-judgmental acceptance of all human behavior.

This forgery of grace offers an entirely different view of Jesus. The true Christ is the One “who gave Himself for us that He might redeem us from all lawlessness, and purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good works” (Titus 2:14). Rather than the incarnate Word, the eternal Son of God who came to satisfy the wrath of God (divine justice), defeat sin, and establish His spiritual kingdom through a regenerated people who walk in holiness, the progressive “Jesus” is a sanitized, historical archetype, reduced to a social revolutionary whose primary objective was to dismantle earthly hierarchies.

This radical reimagining finds its contemporary theological anchor in popular authors like Richard Rohr, whose alternative, mystical frameworks replace the objective reality of the substitutionary atonement with a pantheistic “Universal Christ.” This changes the Savior from the Redeemer of sin into a mere cosmic symbol, ignoring the fact that He “suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, so that He might bring you to God” (1 Peter 1:3), and that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Ultimately, such a heretical reinvention of Jesus Christ is nothing less than a fatal corruption of the true Gospel, yet the compromised mind all too eagerly embraces the deception. Again, in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen writes:

“The Christian religion . . . is certainly not the religion of the modern liberal Church, but a message of divine grace, almost forgotten now, as it was in the Middle Ages, but destined to burst forth once more in God’s good time, in a new Reformation, and bring light and freedom to mankind.” (Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 1923)

Machen’s words from a century ago remain remarkably discerning. The progressive church of our day is simply the old modernist heresy wearing a new therapeutic coat. It offers a message of human achievement and emotional affirmation, but it is utterly devoid of the supernatural grace that breaks the power of canceled sin and reconciles a lost soul to an infinite God. It is a false religion.

The Purity of Sola Scriptura: Severing the Gospel from Political Idolatry

To maintain absolute Biblical integrity, we must recognize that Progressive Christianity is not the only false religion threatening the pulpits of our day. A parallel deception exists through the standalone heresies such as Reconstructionism, Dominionism, and the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). This framework is not a mere defensive reaction to liberalism; it is its own fully formed system of false worship. Both extremes commit the exact same architectural error: they treat the absolute authority of God's Word as a plastic asset to be molded by human desire, whether the text is deconstructed to validate progressive therapeutic sensibilities, or hijacked to engineer a conservative earthly theocracy, the result is the creation of a false religion. By equating the kingdom of God with social progress, replacing regeneration with activism and materializing salvation, both exploit the Creator for secular utility and both willfully forget Christ’s definitive declaration: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).

Consequently, the unchanging verdict of Scripture applies across the entire ideological spectrum without partiality. At its root, this deception is simply shifting final authority from an unyielding text to the fluid ambitions of man. Whether a movement rejects Biblical authority by endorsing pride in sexual deviance and abortion, or by transforming the eternal Gospel into a tool for idolatrous levels of nationalistic pride, the root sin is identical: a prideful refusal to bow to the absolute sufficiency of God’s Word. Both sides create a false god out of human utility.

God ordained civil government to restrain evil, and Christians may use political tools to protect the innocent and stand for public justice (Romans 13:4). But, while political laws can restrain outward bad behavior, they cannot change a human heart or rescue a soul from eternal judgment. True Biblical Christianity does not look to political empires or cultural trends for its validation. It stands firm on the rock-solid reality of an inerrant Scripture, preaching sovereign grace, total repentance, and absolute surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. To survive rampant modern apostasy, the church must reject every compromise, cast down its political idols, recognize man’s sinfulness and the pride of personal autonomy, and get back to Christ crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2). Any faith that tries to offer a crown without the cross or affirmation without transformation isn't a modern update to Christianity. It is a completely false gospel that leaves people lost in their sins. A gospel that refuses to name sin cannot save you from it.

Your Scripture’s truth, silences the lies

Story of redemption, the solace for our cries

Your Word, Oh God! Foundation of faith

Promise of salvation, we’re rescued by Your grace

Your Scripture's Truth

(Ben Ditzel)