Progressivism is the religion of white North American elites. It's very white. It's very suburban. It's very upper class.

You know it resonates with people who generally are doing pretty well.

Welcome to the Alisa Childers Podcast. My guest today is David Young, who is a pastor and author and a speaker who has just written a book about progressive Christianity.

He has a particular insight into this current movement of progressive Christianity based on his education. We're going to get into that in just a moment.

David, I want to bring you in here and welcome to the show. I'd love for you to tell us a bit first before we get into your backstory, who you are and what you do.

Thank you.

So, well, I am, as you said, I've been a minister for about 40 years now and I've worked for church outside of Nashville and senior minister there. But before that, I also taught some at the university level and have just been really sort of paying attention to how do we do theology, how do we live out faithful Christian lives.

What do we do with the scriptures? So those things have been obsessions of mine, essentially my whole life. So even when I was a kid, I was being told, you know, you're going to be a pastor when you grow up and so forth. And it just so has always been part of my life and a real joyful part of my life. It's been an anchor from my life.

Well, you got your PhD from Vanderbilt Divinity School. Was it Divinity School or is it? I was in the graduate department of religion, which it was a, it's a separate school, but they share resources and some of the courses are the same and the faculty often overlap.

Okay, so this is a religion at Vanderbilt. Yeah.

This is a notoriously liberal seminary and it was. Yeah. Yeah. And so you, you kind of got your education from a very liberal seminary. I'd love for you to tell us about your experience there and how that affected your own faith, how that helped you see the seeds that are now growing out into this sort of, you know,

a branch of progressive Christianity that we see today because ultimately it's based on the same foundation and that would be what you got from from Vanderbilt School. So tell us a little bit about that experience.

So while I grew up in a pretty rigid evangelical church and which by the way all made sense to me, I never went through a rebellious period. It, it always resonated with me and I went to a seminary and got an undergraduate degree and a mattress degree also from conservative evangelical seminaries.

And then at that point, I wanted to teach in the university. And so I applied to different universities and I was accepted at Vanderbilt. When I went there, what I expected was to be so thoroughly challenged by liberalism is really what we call it then.

That I wasn't sure.

And since it was a mistake on my part to go because I wasn't even sure I would be able to hold on to my faith, which it's foolish now on hindsight to think that I was worth risk that. And the first year or so there at Vanderbilt, it did challenge my faith.

There were a lot of things that hadn't really thought through and challenges, especially about scripture and religious authority and what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

But it didn't take long before really what I began to see the shallowness of what we call the broilism is progressiveism today and sort of the arbitrariness of it.

And how at the end of the day, it looked to me that most of the students there and even the faculty were just.

They really desperately wanted to follow whatever secular America was saying they weren't in so badly that they were willing to sort of rewrite things usually a couple of years behind whatever secularists were saying they were rewriting the Christian faith and wanted to sort of keep up with secularism.

And a lot of it just struck me as just a desperate need to fit in a desperate need to be relevant.

And so pretty soon I started to see through it and actually I left Vanderbilt with a higher faith in scripture than I had when I went in and I had a pretty high view when I went in.

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