Ryan Bell, case study of Political Progressivism to the religion of Progressivism.

Ryan Bell is back in the news as he was recently interviewed by the Christian Post. In the article entitled: Former pastor Ryan Bell on why he abandoned his Christian faith: I gave it my best shot Bell gives us some clues about how his politics became his religion and the new Progressivism displaced his Chrisitan faith. I doubt he understands how this really happened to him but it is something many of us have warned against for the last several years.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all profess an all-knowing and all-powerful supernatural being: God.  Progressives may say they do not belong to a religion because they do not believe in God.  But Progressivism professes an all-powerful State.  The State is Progressives' god and determines what is moral and immoral and has the power to destroy whom it wants. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/progressivism_takes_its_place_among_the_major_religions.html

Toward the beginning of his interview Ryan Bell says:

" Another way to think about this is that conservative Christianity is a very bounded community. There are clear markers of who is in and who is out. Part of the theological and ministry project I found myself a part of was widening that community to include more people and a broader analysis of politics. Eventually, it widens so far that it includes everyone and at that point, I didn't feel the need for Christianity, per se. It was just the human family.

Notice how his supposed broader analysis of politics led him to feel no need of Christianity. Progressives often feel that they have the truth on politics, that truth becomes their truth and their believe in their political views is their new religion. Bell continues:

CP: How do you describe yourself now? Would you call yourself an atheist?Bell: There's no one identity that perfectly captures how I think of myself today. I am an atheist, for sure, but there's so much more to me than that. I'm a humanist in the sense that I don't believe anyone is coming to save us. We are the ones we're waiting for. I'm also a democratic socialist, which describes how I understand politics. My humanism and my democratic socialism go hand in hand. I can't separate existential questions about meaning and value from political questions about who has access to a materially good life.

Bell's Progressivism led him to socialism and socialism to humanism which is actually a religion

Roy Wood Sellars, who drafted Humanist Manifesto I, wrote in The Humanist (Vol. I, 1941, p. 5), an article “Humanism as a Religion,” in which he stated:Undeniably there is something imaginative and daring in bringing together in one phrase two such profoundly symbolic words as humanism and religion. An intimate union is foreshadowed in which religion will become humanistic and humanism religious. And I believe that such a synthesis is imperative if humanity is ever to achieve a firm and adequate understanding of itself and its cosmic situation….
Religious humanism rests upon the bedrock of a decision that it is, in the long run, saner and wiser to face facts than to live in a world of fable. https://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/10697-is-humanism-a-religion

With Bell's new Progressive religion it is the way of integrity:

...Do you think this trend is being driven by the current secularization of American culture?Bell: The short answer is, yes, I think there is probably a positive feedback loop of some sort at work here. Secularization is driven by people determined to live their lives out from under old norms that turned out to be very exclusive and harmful to large swaths of the population. That secularization, in turn, encourages others to step out and live their lives with integrity and authenticity. If we take secularization to mean the de-religionization of America, then I think this means people are increasingly comfortable re-evaluating their ethics without reference to religion. People like Joshua Harris have done incredible harm to people by telling them that who they are isn't trustworthy or good. When you start to see the falsehood of that narrative come to life in the lives of the people you've influenced then yeah, that's either going to force you to question the foundations of your belief system or it will force you deeper into denial. Thankfully (from my perspective), Mr. Harris has chosen the path of integrity.

In an article in the Atlantic entitled: "Politics as the New Religion for Progressive Democrats" We read this:

Democrats have traditionally had a strong base of religious voters. A decade ago, more than 80 percent of self-identified Democrats were affiliated with some sort of religion, according to the Pew Research Center. The party was nearly one-quarter Catholic and nearly one-half Protestant, including mainline, evangelical, and historically black denominations. By 2014, those numbers had shifted significantly: Pew found that 28 percent of Democrats identified as religiously unaffiliated.

One of the closing paragraphs of the Atlantic article sums it up:

"Perhaps the takeaway from this data, then, is that the Democratic Party is going through a transformative moment of both sentiment and identity. Many liberals are feeling anger, and finding ways to express that. The elite part of the party, especially those who are well educated, is most engaged. And for these people, progressive politics may offer a form of meaning making, especially if they are disconnected from other forms of ethnic or religious identity."

It is pretty clear that Progressivism will lead to two things. 1. the removal of Christianity and 2. Progression toward socialism. As Bell says. "My humanism and my democratic socialism go hand in hand."  We always have to remember that in socialism the democratic part is just window dressing. 

"But democracy is by no means a limit one may not overstep; it is only one of the stages in the course of development from feudalism to capitalism, and from capitalism to Communism. Vladimir LeninThe goal of socialism is communism.Vladimir Lenin

Bell is on the path to the more Perfect savior of humanity via socialism and communism. We all know the old Soviet Union and its attitude of Atheism the political progressivism of Ryan Bell and frankly, many of the writers at Adventist Today and Spectrum are on that same path.

For Further reading consider this article from Discover the Networks:

Marxist doctrine holds that just as society evolved from feudalism to capitalism, it will inexorably progress still further to socialism and eventually communism. Communists consider socialism to be an intermediary step between capitalism (out of which socialism is said to grow) and communism. That is, communism (whose motto is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”) is deemed a further development, or “higher stage,” of socialism (whose motto is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his deeds”). Communism, in other words, is viewed as the more “perfect” of two systems that both advocate public ownership of the means of production, centralized economic planning, and the widespread redistribution of wealth.

The socialist principle of distribution according to deeds, or the quality and quantity of work that people perform, stands in marked contrast to the communist principle of distribution according to people’s needs. The former, because it accepts deed-based distribution of wealth, is considered easier to implement in a capitalist society without large-scale overhauls of existing political and economic structures. In essence, socialists view capitalism as a viable economic mechanism whose reins must simply be transferred from the currently dominant “oppressor class” that misuses capitalism to exploit workers, into the hands of the “worker class” which could use the system for laudable ends. http://archive.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?catid=115&type=issue