From a reader:
I saw this in First Things, regarding a book that apparently offers corroboration of you thesis from an interesting source:
It has become fashionable in some theological and political quarters to eschew the term liberal in favor of progressive. The linguistic victory for conservatives by which the former term is now radioactive leaves Jim Wallis’s Sojourners and my own employer, Christian Century, fishing for new terms.
Amy Laura Hall, a United Methodist clergywoman and theological ethicist at Duke Divinity School, is determined to wrest that term away also. Her new book, Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (Eerdmans), aims to show that the powerful narrative of “progress” in twentieth-century American Protestantism is linked indelibly with eugenics, abortion, Hiroshima, racism, sexism, psychotropic drugs for kids, and the triumph of a neoliberal economics that grinds the heads of the poor (or, better even than Amos’ language, keeps them from ever existing). This avowedly “pro-life feminist” has hopes that her and other mainline churches in America will reject their “willed amnesia” in the face of past sins and undertake the “hard, contextual work of memory.”
BTW, finished the book last night. Great work, congratulations.