I’ve been following Tripp Fuller’s @tripfuller tweets for a while now.  I think I just retweeted some of  of his just a couple days ago (like this one: 

Apocalyptic discourse is needed to establish a standing place over against the ideological regime of capitalist realized eschatology
Noon, August 3, 2011

Here , I’m interested in Tripp’s analysis on how he can say this:

Just don’t say that Liberal and Progressive are not theological. They are inherently so and the distinction between the two is worth the effort

Progressive is not Liberal

I’m interested because I have a hunch I would agree with the analysis that leads to such a statement.  I expect it is a socio-theological analysis.  What a theologian thinks about what is Liberal and what is Conservative is , indeed,  a good theological conversation starter.,  and also a good indication of how the analyzer thinks about such things.  But to say that Liberal and Conservative are “inherently theological” doesn’t jibe with my sense that these are originally political terms of distinction or categorization.  I, of course,  could be wrong,  historically.  It’s just what I’ve always thought.  My sense is that these categories have been adopted into theological circles as a major “either/or”, “this side or that side” categorization.

I roundly agree with this observation:

The problem seems to come when people fail to make a distinction between Progressive and Liberal – even equating them.

I see this happen constantly with fundamentalists and “tea-party” Christians who have taken to using “Progressive” politics and “Progressive Christian” as their new target of choice.  And this seems to happen equally on the political debates AND theological ones.  A UMC-sponsored online community experiment I used to frequent 3 or 4 years ago was filled with such equation (and would often feature the combo term “Liberal/Progressive”).  One of my defenses in these debates would be to object to the use of “Progressive” as a proper theological category,  because it was “a political distinction rather than a theological one”.  So you see why I would have a reaction to what Tripp says here.  But .  like I said earlier,  I would probably be nodding my head in agreement with a lot of what Tripp would say or write in unpacking this.  I wouldn’t be surprised if I would end up saying “Now that you say it that way,  I can go with it”.  So we’ll see.