I'm fascinated by John Gruber's attempt today to rehabilitate X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter). I take issue with some of this rhetoric, but I do think he offers a highly relevant insight useful for progressive Christian leaders.

If you're not familiar with Gruber, he makes his living as a tech observer and Apple apologist.^[1] I generally find him to be a reliably cogent thinker and writer. But I found this bit to be uncharacteristically fawning:

The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator. If you believe the world is falling apart and doomed only to get worse, that our obvious and real problems cannot be surmounted, X is not the platform for you. If you think the world is full of fun and amazing people and things, that humanity’s defining feature is our collective ability to solve any problem, that the only time better to be alive than today is tomorrow, it might be.

If you have stayed away, or even just mostly away, from X for years and then come back, people just say things like “Hey, glad you’re back!” On the other networks, especially Mastodon, they tell you you’re “feeding Nazis” — by going to the platform where Tim Cook posts Pikachu videos. These people have either lost their minds or refuse to check their prior assumptions. (Most of the ones who chime in about it publicly are the lost-their-minds types.)

Ostensibly, this is just a tech business observation. But Gruber often veers into political commentary and, make no mistake, that is part of the work this post is doing. He has been commenting increasingly on the fraught politics of Artificial Intelligence, for example. I would characterize him as a pragmatic, common sense liberal and the quote above is typical of his usual strategy. He often stakes out a pragmatic middle. Occasionally this can resemble a variation of the "argument to moderation" fallacy and, in this case, I think the resemblance is strong.

Much of this is implied, but here is the anatomy of his argument:

• The first extreme: Some say X is a fascist platform, irredeemably compromised by Musk’s ownership and political commitments.
• The second extreme: But alternative platforms such as Bluesky and Mastodon are dominated by pessimism, ideological policing, and moral condemnation.
• The virtuous middle: X has become a welcoming, optimistic community where reasonable people can enjoy technology and human creativity without ideological interference.

In the U.S., the pragmatic middle – or what I would call the "milquetoast middle"^[2] – has been elevated to ideological status. In this country, you can convince nearly anyone of nearly anything if you stake out two scary "extremes" and position yourself (or your product/service/politics/religion) in the so-called middle.

The biggest problem I have with his post is that, by characterizing people who are morally and ethically opposed to X as having "lost their minds," Gruber engages in exactly the kind of ideological rhetoric he claims to be critiquing. Pointing out that Mark Zuckerberg is also a problematic billionaire^[3] doesn’t somehow invalidate criticism of Elon Musk or the platform he controls. Ethical distinctions matter, even when our alternatives are imperfect.

But there is something here that I find genuinely insightful.

Gruber is also claiming X has become a better experience than its upstart competitors like Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon because people on those platforms largely reflect a negative social vision whereas the people on X reflect a positive one. I don’t know whether his characterization of these platforms is accurate. But embedded in that characterization is a separate insight that I think Gruber gets right; one that is highly relevant to progressive Christian leaders:

One social network cannot succeed solely by being a morally preferable alternative to another social network. It must offer an intrinsically worthwhile social experience.

And here's the thing: What we call "church" is a social networking technology.

For decades, we progressive Christians have distinguished ourselves from conservative Evangelicalism by our commitments to inclusion, theological openness, and social action. These distinctions matter enormously. In my view, conservative Evangelicalism does more harm than good. This creates not only an opportunity but a moral imperative to offer better alternatives for people who want to be Christians in good conscience. But being a morally preferable alternative to Evangelicalism doesn’t necessarily make progressive Christianity a compelling option.

I often meet gay and lesbian Christians who attend local conservative Evangelical megachurches despite the harmful theology and politics of those spaces. When I ask, Why in the world would you attend a church that vilifies your sexuality?, they always reply with some version of, Because it's a better experience:

• "They have more people my age."
• "I have a great community of friends there."
• "Their kids and youth programs are amazing."
• "The music and preaching are really good."

I've met even more ex-Evangelicals who have relayed to me some version of, After I left [conservative Evangelical church] I tried going to progressive churches, but it was a bad experience:

• "The congregation was tiny and everyone was old"
• "They have no youth group for my kids"
• "The music and worship were weird"
• "Their groups are really rigid and don't fit my needs"

Or, even worse:

• "I experienced the same misogyny, homophobia, control, & abuse in those supposedly progressive spaces."

Progressive Christianity is often skilled at articulating what we are against (misogyny, racism, homophobia, fascism, authoritarianism, etc.) to the point where we sometimes seem to specialize in a negative social vision. We are very good at conjuring dystopian futures to motivate action. And some progressive leaders (usually those who don't actually pastor churches) are quite good at playing martyr for the lost cause of social justice.

But we have not been nearly imaginative enough (indeed, progressive enough) about what our convictions and communities might exist for, or how to translate our claimed values into liberating, compelling, and sustainable communities.

When I do hear progressive leaders conjure a positive future, it often sounds like the Obama years, the Civil Rights era, or The West Wing. In other words, our vision is often a myth imported from the past. The more time that passes, the more mythical these constructs become. This is perhaps why most of our liturgies, ministries, and leadership structures invoke whatever century our particular denomination was birthed from. On the whole, we have not learned to build communities here and now that instantiate a positive, progressive, liberationist vision of the future (at least, not one in which Christianity plays a substantive role).

By contrast, many Evangelical churches are more progressive ecclesiologically than are many progressive churches. They are incredibly adept at translating their convictions into utopian visions of the future and then embodying those futures in ways that translate to the surrounding culture. Granted, those "utopias" tend to look increasingly like The Handmaid's Tale with better "vibes." But for an awful lot of people, vibes are not only why they show up, but also why they stay – even in harmful spaces.

Yes, the progressive antitheses listed above certainly imply better social possibilities (liberation for women, BIPOC, LGBTQ people, etc.), but are we adequately directing our energy and resources to actually generate – that is, envision, resource, and build – newer, better, and more compelling experiences of Christian community?

In some instances, yes. But on the whole, I think no.^[4]

I often reflect on this thought experiment: If every conservative Evangelical church in my area suddenly became LGBTQ-affirming, would my progressive church still exist? Would yours? Are we uniquely meeting our community's needs in any way other than to simply be an identity marker of their moral protest against conservative Christianity?

Don't get me wrong: I am not advocating for sidelining or moderating our moral and ethical commitments. That is the wrong move and one many so-called "liberal" Mainline churches have made. And I am not implying that our distinctive moral and ethical postures have no connection to our systems and structures of community. Quite the opposite; I think we have failed to do precisely that. Finally, I am not cynical about the possibility of reclaiming Christian spirituality from conservatives for love and liberation^[5]. It is, in fact, quite possible to beat a larger and better-resourced competitor (as Threads, indeed, appears to be doing in its competition with X).^[6]

But in the absence of a genuinely better experience of community – one where our progressive/liberationist values are embodied in our structures of Christian belonging – it's all too easy to fall into the trap of cranking up the volume on our moral protest as the only available means of differentiating ourselves. That strategy tends to produce the oppressive form of moral purity Gruber is (understandably) reacting against.

Because moral purity doesn't exist.

More to the point, moral purity isn't a sustainable value proposition since, eventually, everyone fails its tests. And when they do, they often run to the milquetoast middle for shelter. The alternative isn’t moral compromise. It’s building communities whose compelling experiences of love, liberation, and belonging make our moral commitments worth living.

Notes