There used to be more openness to Christianity in center-left media: What happened?

Meador’s analysis is quite interesting. I can’t fairly represent it with a few excerpts, but here’s a bit more…

First, as acceptance of transgender identities became a litmus test for the American left, the conflict between left wing political ideology and Christianity was redefined and intensified. A left wing media figure in 2015 might be able to signal friendliness to conservative post-liberals, for example, both as a sign of sincere desire to understand the appeal of Donald Trump and as an openness to alternative theories of American social collapse. Social breakdown was, after all, a long-standing concern of many on the American left dating back decades and certainly well-established by the early 2000s when works like Nickel and Dimed and Bowling Alone hit American bookstores.

But once the issue of trans identities arose, an openness to traditional Christian accounts became more costly: Christianity was no longer seen as a plausible conversation partner with left-wing political concerns around public justice. Instead, it became regarded as a threat to the lives of transgender individuals that made it impossible for trans people to publicly exist as their authentic selves. The social costs for progressive non-Christians of simply expressing an openness to or curiosity about traditional forms of Christian belief became much higher, in other words.

The second problem is closely bound up with the first: It is actually fairly simple for a Christian to pick up the chief political concerns of what we might think of as a first-term Obama liberal (Obama before he publicly supported gay marriage, in other words) and out-narrate a secularist about how to best address those concerns.

….

But trans issues were different: Christianity can’t really affirm the instincts that lead there in the same way it could affirm the instincts of a certain sort of feminist or someone on the economic left or someone alarmed about ecological destruction. So for evangelicals schooled in a strategy of outflanking progressive non-Christians through superior narration of their concerns and priorities, trans issues created a problem.F

Later…

What should we learn from this shift? Three things come to mind.

First, as Schaeffer and Keller both recognized, an encounter with Jesus leading to faith and new life will generally involve an encounter with a Christian community whose way of life bears witness to Christ and, as we say at Plough, to the fact that through Christ “another life is possible.” Or to turn in a different direction for the same basic idea: John Piper said in Let the Nations Be Glad that “mission” flowed from “worship.” “Missions happen because worship doesn’t,” in his famous phrase. The worshiping Christian community is central to the work of evangelization and outreach.

Second, the reason that mission flows from worship is because the problems of new birth and Christian discipleship are organic problems, not mechanistic problems. Mechanistic problems are solved through technical means—get the right tool, the right skill, the right equation and you’re golden.

It’s kind of a lot.

But regardless of how the Christianity vs. Culture journey got to where it is, we’re at a place where we need to adjust both our expectations and, for many, our tactics. We’re not really going to solve social problems through policy—if even if we “win” some elections, etc. (We have compromised so much on what a ‘win’ is anyway, it is pretty much meaningless…. but political wins were never going be transformative, even back when they were actually wins.)