NO, NICK KRISTOF, MORE PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY IS NOT GOOD FOR AMERICA: The well-known New York Times columnist is just tickled pink that progressive Christianity — aka more recently as the “Woke Church” — is getting more attention these days, thanks to self-proclaimed Catholic Joe Biden in the Oval Office.
Natasha Crain, by contrast, is not a New York Times regular — though her presence there would certainly give both proof that the age of miracles is not done and hope that old grey lady might yet be saved. But Crain lights up Kristof’s column and leaves little more than smoky cinders behind.
Consider just this passage from Crain, which begins with a bolded Kristof quote:
“’Young and middle-aged Americans could be forgiven for thinking that Jesus was a social conservative who denounced gay people and harangued the poor to lift themselves up by the bootstraps, until he was crucified for demanding corporate tax cuts.’
“This is obviously a ridiculous characterization of Christianity and Jesus in particular. If people have this idea of Jesus, they either haven’t read the Bible, or they’ve read too many articles like those of Kristof that repeatedly mischaracterize what those who hold to the historic Christian faith actually believe.
“But more importantly, here is where Kristof begins to blur the lines and equivocate between progressive theology and progressive politics. Notice how he moves from a strictly moral issue (homosexuality) to primarily economic ones (policy decisions on how to help the poor or tax businesses). This is a common move of politically progressive Christians. While they popularly accuse politically conservative Christians of mixing politics and religion, they frequently do the same, bundling progressive politics with what Jesus would ‘really’ want.”
That’s just a taste. Crain ends her lengthy nuking of Kristof by observing that the “oversimplified, assumption-ridden narrative that we find in Kristof’s piece is precisely why people can’t have reasonable conversations today.” Crain should be much better known among political conservative because she has a fine hand for defending the truths of scripture and basic logic against caricatures of both from the Left.