In their article on the six-way fracturing of evangelicalism, Michael Graham and Skyler Flowers observed that there was a type of left wing exvangelical—a "five" in their schema—who had left the church, but still in some way tried to preserve their proximity to Jesus. This isn't a terribly surprising thing, of course: the attempt to adopt a kind of a la carte spirituality is quite old.
To take only one famous example, recall that Thomas Jefferson took a scalpel to his Bible in order to create a book that preserved the moral wisdom of the Bible and of Jesus (as judged by the slave-owning Jefferson) and removed all the "absurd" supernaturalistic content.
So with Graham and Flowers's "fives" something similar was happening: They wanted to preserve Jesus as a moral exemplar and happily affirmed the goodness of Jesus's moral teachings, even if they were likely to condemn his behavior in one or two places, as with the Syrophoenecian woman, for example. They also typically liked the Sermon on the Mount.
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