[Dialogue] Earlier Spong reflections

[KroegerD@aol.com]

An Analysis of the Evangelical Vote in the Campaign of 2004 II
By John Shelby Spong
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Last week I began an analysis of the rise in religious and evangelical
fervor that was so powerfully displayed in the presidential election in
November. For many it was a frightening and incomprehensible spectacle. I
suggested in that column that historically, the primary function of religion
was to bring security to a radically insecure human life. I sought to
demonstrate that religion finds its origin in the compelling need of
self-conscious creatures to cope with the angst of existence.
Self-conscious beings know themselves to be separate from nature and
vulnerable to nature's forces. Human beings live in time that enables us to
recall a past we did not inhabit, and to anticipate a future that does not
include us. We live with the awareness of our mortality. Religion's first
agenda, therefore, is to bank the fears associated with being alone and
mortal in a vast and frightening world. It accomplished this task by
postulating a supernatural spirit or spirits, who had the ability to take
care of us in ways that we did not feel competent to handle for ourselves.
Our ability to manipulate this deity by our behavior and worship were also
powerful parts of the "religion equation." We were taught that, if we
behave according to the revealed will of the deity, God would reward us with
divine protection. It is a very favorable quid pro quo. This behavior
control became a part of all religious systems. If we pleased the deity by
worshipping properly, including praising God with extravagant words of
flattery while making our requests known, that God will answer our prayers.
This is where the almost hysterical human compulsion to adhere to set forms
of worship emerges in religion, and explains why religious liturgies are so
filled with excessive titles for God: "Almighty," "Most Merciful," "Ever
Loving," "Eternal" and many other accolades fill our prayers. We also tell
God in liturgy what we hope God is: "You are more ready to hear than we to
pray," and "Your nature is to be merciful and long-suffering." Because
human beings use flattery to manipulate human power figures, we assumed it
would work with God.

This sets the stage for understanding why it is that if someone challenges
our god-perception or violates the deity's perceived standard of conduct,
such behavior causes us to fear that divine wrath will descend on the whole
clan, creating a powerful control system. Why else would human beings resist
so vehemently new insights that challenge both traditional authority and
established behavior patterns; while guarding against any deviation from the
'true faith.' This fear alone makes sense out of the irrational religious
behavior that has marked religion through the ages, such as burning heretics
at the stake or making claims that we possess the absolute truth of God. The
powerful corollary to that claim is that to disagree with us is to disagree
with God! Ideas of papal infallibility or scriptural inerrancy are both
patently absurd by every rational standard, but they continue to be part of
the security systems of competing religious traditions because they appeal
to human inability to cope with uncertainty or relativity. The hold of this
security system on the human psyche is easy to demonstrate, so is the trauma
experienced when these sources of security began to waver.

When the medieval synthesis, challenged by new learning, began to break
apart, anxiety rose in exact correlation. It took a while for these
challenges to get to ordinary citizens since the authorities did not want
the average person to look into the mechanisms of control. That is still
present in religious circles today. Commonplace ideas discussed at religious
academies seldom get to lay people; for religion to be effective it must
have all the answers, in order to hold rampant anxiety in check. "Why is
it," a poster I saw asked, "that churches claiming to have all the answers
don't allow any questions?" I know, for example, of no recognized biblical
theologian in the world today who believes that the virgin birth is about
biology or the resurrection is about a resuscitation of a deceased body, yet
references to those realities still bring anxious howls of protest from
those whose security is invested in literal certainty.

In a pre-modern world of limited opportunity and no means of mass
communication, new knowledge and new insights took centuries to trickle down
to the masses. The challenge to the view that the earth was the center of
the universe posed by Copernicus did not create great waves of protest until
Galileo a century later developed the idea further using his magnificent new
telescope. Galileo then wrote about it attempting to win converts, thus
drawing public attention to that which religious leaders preferred to keep a
private matter. Only then did the hierarchy of the church condemn Galileo.
Age and physical infirmity saved him from the stake. Bruno who stated a
similar position a hundred years earlier was not so fortunate.

When the 16th century Reformation successfully resisted Catholic attempts to
restore unity to Christianity, the power of the church to resist the
challenge of new ideas was greatly tempered. Insecurity and uncertainty
rose, but so did warfare and religious torture. When Isaac Newton, published
The Principia in the 17th century, he visibly shrank the arena in which
miracle and magic had once served as explanations. Yet the fact that today
the Roman Church will not canonize a saint without the documentation of
miracles remains a way of pretending that piety still has the power to
determine supernatural events.

By the time that Charles Darwin suggested that there was a different way to
look at human origins, the church's power had waned so that religious
leaders challenged him only verbally. He was neither imprisoned nor muted.
However, Darwin did withhold publication of his findings about evolution for
years before publishing them in 1859, apprehensive of the church's power.
Some of his more challenging ideas were delayed to an even later date.

The Roman Catholics were the first to respond to all of these destabilizing
ideas. To shore up their fading power, they built in the 19th century their
'Maginot Line' of the pope's infallibility. It took the more fragmented
Protestants until the early 20th century to fortify their flagging defenses.
Their leaders issued a series of pamphlets entitled "The Fundamentals,"
which enjoyed massive circulation. These pamphlets gave birth to the word
"fundamentalist" and laid out the Protestant claim for the inerrancy of
scripture. They also sought to establish the core doctrines of evangelical
religion such as the virgin birth of Jesus, his physical resurrection and
the necessity of blood sacrifice for atonement, which they asserted, was
achieved in the story of the cross. None of these positions is today
intellectually defensible, but these pamphlets served to bring a fleeting
security back to the fragile believers. The Scopes trial was their major
victory.

While still trying to react to scientific learning, the world of biblical
scholarship launched in Germany in the early years of the 19th century,
began its relentless assault on the underpinnings of the literal details of
the Judeo-Christian faith story. The church responded to this new tension
by beginning its inevitable split between security-seeking fundamentalists
and the 'modernists' who tried to embrace new realities.

Next instantaneous communications began to shrink the size of our world and
relativized all faith convictions as every religion became aware of other
traditions. Anxiety continued to grow. Conservative churches began to
retreat more and more into pre-modern enclaves. The more open mainline
churches began a rapid decline as its members, unable any longer to believe
the old stories, simply dropped out, taking up citizenship in the 'secular
city.'

The first line of defense employed by the rising secular consensus was to
replace traditional symbols with their secular counterparts. When the
certainty of life after death declined in the Western world it was replaced
with a passion to build the Kingdom of God on earth. That idea inspired the
various movements in liberal politics that appeared in the 20th century
calling themselves things like: Christian Socialism, Communism, The New
Deal, The Fair Deal, and The Great Society. The energy of prayer once the
primary weapon used to fight illness was replaced by medical breakthroughs
that secularized health issues. The secular passion, however, to build a
better world and to cure disease was not successful. Poverty, ignorance and
racism continued to flourish in the Great Society and things like the HIV
virus and mutant forms of ever-evolving viruses refused to yield to modern
advances. As optimism died, human beings increasingly turned either to
fundamentalist religion or to secular materialism in the constant search for
meaning. Evangelical religion grew by focusing negatively on the things
that threatened its personal security. As a result, evangelical concern was
not directed to the preaching of the gospel, the care of the poor or the
feeding of the hungry, but on abortion and gay rights.

Abortion was understood as the last stage in the woman's battle to have
control over her own body. No one fought any longer over the morality of
birth control. The secular world embraced abortion; the religious world
recoiled before it calling it murder. In a similar manner Gay Rights were
viewed as a direct challenge to the authority of scripture. 'We cannot
embrace what God abhors,' they said. Homosexuality, however, was what they
abhorred, not what God abhorred. They seemed to think that Jesus'
invitation read, "Come unto me some of ye, not all of ye." So as
uncertainty rose, the passions flowed, motivating the voters to turn out in
droves. Congregations became centers of political activism. To put the
genie of fear back into the bottle of certain religion was the driving new
agenda.

Next week I will return to this subject and trace the rising insecurity
especially among this South's rural white population for that is where the
heart of the evangelical vote is located.


-- John Shelby Spong


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Question And Answer With John Shelby Spong
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Lee from Elko, Nevada, asks:

What part did the oral tradition play in the development of the New
Testament?

Dear Lee,

The oral tradition is the only way that the stories of Jesus could have
lived between his death in 30 C.E. (approximately) and the writing of the
Gospels between 70 C.E. and 100 C.E. This means that everything we know
about Jesus lived for 40 to 70 years in oral transmission before it was
written down. The real questions are where was this tradition preserved, by
whom and in what context?


Dick Kroeger
65 Stubbs Bay Road
Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126