The picture is from Christmas 1977. I’m in the back row, second from the left under the candles. It’s a program of a Lutheran congregation in Billings MT, a predecessor to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, or ELCA. While I lived in a range of families since I was in foster care, my primary church experience growing up was mainline; first Lutheran and then Presbyterian Church USA.
I mention this because to be mainline, in particular to be a liberal Protestant, is often taken as a half way house to atheism. Dan Fincke, an atheist philosopher argues that we’re “half way liberated” while one evangelical site calls us “closet atheists”. One gets the idea that we were once evangelical or orthodox or conservative but having been acquainted with the sciences, religious pluralism and the all too human nature of our sacred texts we are those folks who are engaged in an “endless desperate contortions to justify their religious traditions” so as to remain Christian.
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