A lot of people today are wanting to label themselves as ‘progressive’: in favour of the new, rejecting the old. This is especially the case when it comes to articulating and living out new perspectives on identity, sexuality, and gender. To be progressive is good; to be a traditionalist, stuck in the past, is bad.
In some wise words from Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis is, as ever, good at both building bridges with this cultural moment, and getting us questioning what progress might really look like:
‘We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.’1
All of us want to make progress in our ongoing (personal and corporate) struggles with questions of identity, sexuality, and gender. We all want ourselves, and others, to thrive as human beings. This hasn’t (understatement alert) always happened in the past.
But as the societies and generations that have most rejected traditional patterns of thinking and behaviour in these areas now face ever-increasing and unprecedented levels of confusion, anxiety, and self-harm, we need to re-examine what future progress might look like.
Will it come from pressing forward into the unknown and continually embracing untried ways of expressing ourselves? Or might we, more sensibly, take a moment or two to pause and work out whether we’ve made some wrong turns?
Perhaps the most truly progressive voices could be those, like us here at Living Out, who are urging a return to more traditional, biblical understandings of how best we inhabit our bodies today? Which, if better lived out than in the past, could be the best steps forward for us all.
- CS Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperCollins, 2016), p.28.
