Neo-Gnosticism in Evangelical and Progressive Christianity

During my first semester at Yale Divinity School, I have found myself in an unusual position. I arrived as an evangelical Protestant, having grown up in the Southern Baptist Church, and stepped into a theological environment dominated by progressive mainline Protestantism. The friction between these two worlds has been instructive—not least because it has helped me see something unexpected. Despite their sharp disagreements on nearly every contested issue in contemporary Christianity, evangelicals and progressives share a common theological error. Both have, in different ways, absorbed the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.

This is not a minor observation. Gnosticism was one of the most significant threats to early Christianity, and the Church Fathers spent enormous energy combating it. That its core impulse keeps resurfacing—wearing the clothing of traditions that would emphatically deny any Gnostic sympathies—suggests that the temptation it represents is deeply rooted in human nature.

What Gnosticism Was

Gnosticism was a diverse religious movement that flourished primarily in the first through third centuries alongside early Christianity. (I should note that modern scholars debate whether “Gnosticism” is even a coherent category—Michael Williams argued in Rethinking “Gnosticism” that the term “makes sense neither self-definitionally nor typologically,” and Karen King’s What is Gnosticism? showed how the category was constructed by ancient heresiologists to define orthodoxy by creating a heretical “other.” I use the term here as a useful shorthand while acknowledging the diversity it flattens.) While Gnostic groups varied widely in their specific teachings, they shared several core convictions. The material world was seen as corrupt, deficient, or even evil—the product of a lesser or malevolent creator (the Demiurge), not the true God. Though it should be said that not all traditions were this extreme: Valentinian Gnostics, for example, presented the Demiurge as ignorant rather than malicious, and some Nag Hammadi texts lack the full Demiurge mythology entirely. Salvation consisted in escaping the material realm through gnosis, a special knowledge of one’s true spiritual nature. The body was a prison for the soul, a temporary encumbrance to be endured rather than a good to be affirmed.¹

This dualism—spirit good, matter bad—had profound ethical implications. Some Gnostics became strict ascetics, mortifying the flesh to liberate the spirit. Ancient heresiologists like Irenaeus and Hippolytus also accused certain Gnostic groups of libertinism—embracing indulgence on the grounds that what one did with the body was spiritually irrelevant. I should be transparent that this asceticism/libertinism binary is contested in current scholarship. The Nag Hammadi primary sources overwhelmingly reveal ascetic tendencies, and Williams (1996) and others have argued that the libertinism charge was largely heresiological polemic rather than historical reality. Bart Ehrman notes in Lost Christianities that Gnostic scriptures “unanimously advocate a harsh asceticism.” Still, the logical structure of the dualism permits both responses—and both flowed from the same premise: the body does not ultimately matter.²

The early Church recognized Gnosticism as a fundamental threat to the Christian faith. Irenaeus of Lyon wrote his massive treatise Against Heresies around 180 AD specifically to refute Gnostic teachings, insisting on the goodness of creation, the significance of the body, and the reality of the bodily resurrection.³ The orthodox Christian response was emphatic: the material world is not evil. God created it and called it good. The Word became flesh—not spirit, not idea, but flesh. And the hope of the Christian is not escape from the body but the resurrection of the body. These are not peripheral doctrines. They are the heart of the creed.

Evangelical Gnosticism

This concern is not merely academic. In contemporary American evangelicalism, a recognizably Gnostic pattern has taken root, even if few would identify it as such.

The most obvious manifestation is in evangelical sacramental theology—or, more accurately, the lack of it. In much of the Baptist and broadly evangelical tradition, baptism has been reduced to a “mere symbol,” an outward sign of an inward change that has already occurred. The sacrament has no ontological effect; it does not actually do anything. It is a wedding ring, so to speak, symbolizing the marriage but entirely separable from it. This is commonly called the Zwinglian or memorialist position, though it is worth noting that Zwingli’s own mature theology was more nuanced than what later carried his name. In his Exposition of the Faith (1531), Zwingli affirmed that Christ is “truly present in the Supper” and that the bread is “divine and sacred”—what scholars describe as a “spiritual real presence by the contemplation of faith.” As Ian Hugh Clary has put it, “in a sense, Zwingli was against the Zwinglians.” The bare memorialism that characterizes much of modern Baptist practice developed through its own historical trajectory (Anabaptists, English Separatists, Baptists), not solely through direct dependence on Zwingli. Either way, the position as commonly practiced represents a significant departure from the sacramental realism of the early Church.⁴

Similarly, the Lord’s Supper in many evangelical churches has become a memorial meal—a mental act of remembering rather than a participation in the body and blood of Christ. The physical elements are almost incidental. What matters is the invisible, spiritual transaction happening in the heart of the believer.

This pattern extends beyond the sacraments. The paradigmatic evangelical conversion experience—“asking Jesus into your heart”—is an entirely internal, invisible event. There is no outward form, no physical sign, no bodily participation. The locus of salvation is the individual’s interior spiritual life, disconnected from any material or communal reality. Philip J. Lee identified this pattern in his important study Against the Protestant Gnostics, arguing that American Protestantism broadly—conservative and liberal alike—had absorbed Gnostic assumptions including alienation from creation, dependence on private illumination over public event, world-denying escapism, exclusivist elitism, and syncretistic compulsion. Lee’s critique targeted all of Protestantism, not just evangelicalism, but the evangelical manifestations are particularly vivid.⁵

I must admit that, as an evangelical at the time I originally wrote these reflections, I had similar complaints about this aspect of evangelical theology—or at least how it is commonly expressed in evangelical circles. I frequently encountered such teaching growing up in the Southern Baptist Church. The suspicion of liturgy, the discomfort with ritual, the insistence that what matters is “a personal relationship with Jesus” rather than participation in the visible, institutional, sacramental life of the Church—all of this reflects a devaluation of the physical that the earliest Christians would have found bewildering.

[Author’s note: I later converted to Catholicism during my time at Yale, which I will discuss in a future post. These observations were written from my evangelical perspective at the time.]

Even within evangelicalism, this concern has been raised. Thabiti Anyabwile has written about “evangelical Gnosticism,” warning that evangelicals risk divorcing the spiritual from the physical in ways that undermine the full-bodied faith of the New Testament. It is important to note that Anyabwile’s argument was written specifically in the context of racial justice—he argued that evangelical Gnosticism dismisses embodied realities like race and racism as irrelevant to the spiritual life, producing what he called an attempt to “rule out Christian ethical duty in favor of ‘just preaching’” and generating almost no serious theological reflection on identity, race, and racism.⁶

Evangelical sexual ethics, too, often reflect this tendency. While conservative Christians rightly affirm the moral significance of bodily behavior, the reasoning behind these convictions sometimes betrays a suspicion of the body itself—the flesh as inherently dangerous, sexuality as an area of life to be feared and suppressed rather than ordered and affirmed. The result is a form of asceticism that looks more Gnostic than incarnational.

Progressive Gnosticism

The progressives, however, have not merely rejected evangelical theology on these points but have, in my observation, almost completely abandoned historic Christian teaching on the subject of the body. And here is the irony: in doing so, they have landed on the other side of the same Gnostic coin.

If the physical body does not tell us anything of real consequence about who we are—if what matters is the inner self, the feelings, the intellect, the self-conception—then we have adopted a framework in which the spirit (or psyche) is the true self and the body is merely an instrument or shell. The progressive emphasis on interior identity as the defining reality of personhood, independent of and sometimes in opposition to bodily reality, follows a logic that the ancient Gnostics would have recognized immediately.

While evangelicals take their Gnosticism toward asceticism—suppressing the body, fearing its desires, devaluing its role in the spiritual life—progressives take it toward a form of libertinism. If the body is not theologically significant in its own right, then what one does with it becomes a matter of personal expression rather than moral theology. The inner self is what counts. The body is a canvas, not a text.

I want to be clear: this is not a simple “progressives are immoral” argument. It is a structural and theological observation about how both movements have absorbed different aspects of the same ancient heresy. Both devalue the body. Both locate ultimate meaning in the invisible or interior realm. Both depart from the early Christian insistence that the material world—and the human body in particular—is theologically significant, that it has something to tell us about God’s purposes and about our own nature.

I should also be transparent about my method here. The application of “Gnosticism” as a diagnostic for modern Christianity has a long scholarly pedigree—Eric Voegelin, Hans Jonas, Harold Bloom, N.T. Wright, and Michael Horton have all deployed it. But my specific mapping of evangelicals onto the ascetic strain and progressives onto the libertine strain is my own synthesis, not an established scholarly consensus. The individual components are well-grounded in the literature, but the systematic pairing onto a left-right theological spectrum is, as far as I am aware, original to this essay. Readers should engage with it as theological argument rather than a straightforward report of what scholars have concluded.

Why Gnosticism Keeps Coming Back

I am still working this out in my head and evaluating what I hear and encounter around me. But the appeal of Gnosticism—and why it was such a significant threat to the early Church—is becoming much more apparent to me.

Gnosticism appeals to our desire for control. If the body is irrelevant, then we are free to define ourselves entirely on our own terms. If the material world is fallen or illusory, then we are not bound by its constraints. Whether that freedom expresses itself as asceticism or libertinism, the underlying impulse is the same: the refusal to accept that the physical world, including our own bodies, has an authority over us that we did not choose and cannot simply override.

The orthodox Christian alternative—that the material world is good, that the body matters, that creation has a structure and meaning that we are called to receive rather than impose—is a harder teaching. It requires humility before a given reality rather than the assertion of autonomous self-definition. It is no surprise that every generation finds new ways to resist it.

Studying at Yale Divinity School, immersed in conversations with both progressive and conservative Christians, has helped me see these patterns more clearly than I could have from within either camp alone. The Gnostic temptation is not limited to one side of the theological spectrum. It is a perennial challenge to Christian faithfulness, and recognizing it requires an honest examination of one’s own tradition as much as a critique of others.

This essay grew out of observations I originally recorded in my Week 10 at Yale journal entry. I also wrote a companion piece on a related cultural dynamic: The Obsession with Oppression at Yale Divinity School.

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1. 1 Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 42–47. Originally published 1958.

2. 2 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), xiii–xxxvi.

3. 3 Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, particularly Books I–II. See the translation in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (1885).

4. 4 On the Zwinglian memorialist position and its departure from earlier Christian sacramental theology, see Bryan D. Spinks, Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

5. 5 Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

6. 6 Thabiti Anyabwile, "Evangelical Gnosticism," The Gospel Coalition.