Progressive Christianity is
as Much of a Threat to Your
Kids’ Faith as Atheism
By Natasha Crain
IN
OUR BACKYARD, we used to have a beautiful lime tree. One day
I noticed a thorny vine had started growing around it. It looked
enough like the rest of the tree that I figured it was just another stage of
growth. A quick Google search told me thorns often grow around citrus
trees, so I didn’t think much more about it.
Then, within a couple of months, the thorns took over the tree, and
it began to die. A gardener looked at it and said these particular thorns
weren’t part of the tree at all. It turns out they were a foreign invader.
Had the foreign invader looked more foreign, I would have realized the
need to uproot it immediately. But because it shared surface-level simi-
larities with the tree, I was fooled into thinking it was all the same thing.
I often write about the threat hostile atheists pose to kids’ faith today.
But atheism is not the only threat. In fact, there’s a particular threat that
can be even more dangerous because it less obviously requires attention.
It’s like the thorny plant that gradually killed my lime tree because I didn’t
even realize it was foreign. That threat is called progressive Christianity.
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