There is a sense in which (I have argued) every thoughtful Christian must be a conservative. The Holy Spirit has done a lot thus far in the history of our people, and we must live up to what we have already attained. We must conserve it. There is another sense in which we are to be progressive — the Holy Spirit has a lot yet left to do in the history of this world. We must progress towards it.
But unlike that unruly tribe we call progressives, Christian progressives are looking for that city whose maker and builder is God. We know where we are going, and we don’t just exult (as they do) in the fact that we are making good time, who knows where. And unlike the secularist conservatives, we are not in love with the existing evils, prepared to fight off every attempt to replace them with other evils.
So there is a sense in which the Christian faith is both conservative and progressive, and another sense in which it is neither. The Christian faith is inescapably political, but must not allow itself to be coopted by secular and unbelieving partisanship. But to reject partisanship is to reject compromises with secularists who want to hook up with an evangelical voting block. The necessary rejection of partisanship is not a rejection of particularity. There are times when every faithful Christian must vote for this candidate and against that one, pray for the success of this referendum and for the defeat of that one.
That said, I refer you to this sentiment, cited over at Baylyblog. The expressed desire to keep the gospel “unfettered” is actually a desire to have an Obama-like gospel — always there, and always voting “present.” You see, if the gospel requires us to say and do something particular, then enemies of the gospel can always accuse us of being in cahoots with some secularist organization that has said something very similar to that particular thing. And thus they can steer us with ease. We can’t say anything particular because there is always a group out there that we could be falsely identified with. We must preach an unfettered gospel, by which we mean a floaty thing above all our heads, which will guarantee that those little floaty things that we call our souls will, soon after we die, ascend up to that Euclidian floaty place called Gnostic Heaven. There we will have great fellowship with those giants of the faith — Cerinthus, Carpocrates, Basilides, and Valentinus. Ecclesia deformata et semper deformanda.
You see, if the gospel says that repentance and belief actually mean something in this world — like canceling that sex change operation, or forgoing the nuptials with someone whose genitalia are uncannily similar to yours, or letting your kid stay alive, or even worse, having a repentant king say that such goings-on ought not to be going on — such particulars might create a stumbling block. No stumbling blocks! We must preach an unfettered message of repentance, by which we mean that we must thunder a message that every man must repent of “stuff.” Like what? You know, stuff.