[Dialogue] Spong on Oklahoma and Fundies

[KroegerD@aol.com]

April 5, 2006 
Oklahoma! A State in  Transition

When we hear the name of America’s 46th state, many images fill our minds.  “
Oklahoma” was the first of Rogers and Hammerstein’s ten Broadway musicals,  
putting the name of this state on the lips of Americans everywhere. We can 
still  sing it: “Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain,” 
followed by  the poignant words that resonate with our own sense of homeland: “We 
know we  belong to the land and the land we belong to is grand!” Some of us can 
still  envision Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones playing the leads in the 
widescreen  Hollywood version of this play. 
Older generations might recall Oklahoma as the setting of the dust bowl  
depicted so vividly in John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” It was  
emblazoned on the nation’s conscience, the poverty of American farmers during  the 
great depression. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 and was made  
into a motion picture, starring Henry Fonda in 1940 that won two Oscars. The  
word “Okie,” describing uneducated, poverty-stricken tenant farmers, who lived  
at subsistence levels, entered our vocabulary in that motion picture. It was 
not  a popular association for locals, but the word is now worn as a badge of 
honor  by Oklahoma citizens. 
Sports-minded fans might have their first association with Oklahoma be the  
memory of the national championship Sooners of the University of Oklahoma in 
the  heyday of their power under coach Bud Wilkinson. They will remember titanic 
 struggles between the Sooners and the Longhorns of the University of Texas, 
the  Cornhuskers of the University of Nebraska and their state rival from 
Stillwater,  the Cowboys of Oklahoma State. 
Living in the shadows created by those two large universities, there is  
another group of smaller, religiously oriented schools like Oklahoma Baptist  
University, Oklahoma Christian University and, of course, Oral Roberts  
University, that give Oklahoma its particular flavor. This state is a deeply  pious, 
overwhelmingly Protestant and overtly fundamentalistic place. Some 77% of  its 
citizens claim membership in various evangelical and “Bible based” churches.  
Religious words are commonplace in everyday conversation and in the public  
media. 
The most indelible association with Oklahoma in most of our minds today,  
however, is tied to an act of terror that occurred between 9:01 a.m. and 9:03  
a.m. on April 19, 1995. The day had just begun in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal  
Building in Oklahoma City, both for adult workers and for pre-schoolers in the 
 daycare center. Employees had barely removed their coats; mothers and 
fathers  had just dropped off their children, kissing them good bye and watching 
them run  to meet their teachers and classmates. No one was contemplating the 
possibility  that a deeply disturbed veteran of the first Gulf War, Timothy 
McVeigh, would  chose to mark the anniversary of the destruction of the Branch 
Davidians in  Waco, Texas on April 19, 1993, by parking a truck loaded with 
explosives  adjacent to the Murrah building. Parents were still within hearing 
distance when  the explosion ripped through the building. Smoke and fire engulfed 
the city and  168 people including 32 children were dead. 
Fear, rage and enormous grief engulfed the State of Oklahoma, and our nation. 
 This tragedy was at that time the worst terrorist attack on any part of this 
 country in our history. There were high levels of xenophobic suspicion and 
wild  public speculation that gripped people in the immediate aftermath. “It 
had been  done by Muslim fanatics,” some said. McVeigh turned out to be very 
white and  working in sympathy with an organization that grew out of the Seventh 
Day  Adventists Sect of Christian fundamentalism. President Clinton talked 
about the  amount of hatred that talk radio hosts were pouring into the 
consciousness of  America, citing in particular a recent program in which G. Gordon 
Liddy had  instructed his audience to shoot government agents in the head, since 
they now  wore bullet proof vests. Trying to embrace this tragedy as a nation, 
fear turned  first into anger, then grief and finally resolve. 
Recently I had the privilege of doing a series of lectures in Oklahoma City  
and took advantage of that opportunity to visit the memorial built on the site 
 of this destruction. It was deeply moving. The chain link fence that had 
been  erected around the explosion had been left as part of the memorial and 
people  had placed on it flowers, ribbons, messages, prayers and even Teddy bears. 
On  the grass covered site where the building once stood, 168 chairs, 32  
child-sized, made of bronze and stone have been erected, each bearing the name  
of one of the victims. A reflecting pool lies between the bookend monuments at  
each end of the site. Flowers have been tastefully planted to beautify the 
area  and a museum has been opened next door to keep the memory of that day 
forever  alive. To visit this place is to recognize that peace has descended on a 
spot  where terror, rage and death had once seemed to be unremitting. 
Across the street from this memorial is St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church,  
which was also badly damaged on that infamous day. When this church was 
rebuilt  its people added a life-size sculpture of Jesus to their courtyard at the 
base  of which are the words “And Jesus wept.” 
April 19, 1995 scarred deeply the souls of the citizens of Oklahoma City. The 
 subsequent trials of McVeigh and his accomplices kept these gaping wounds 
open  for years afterwards. The healing process is unfinished in the lives of 
many.  For some, I’m sure, the shadows will never lift and the wounds will never 
heal,  but life will go on. 
Events like this change the nature of a community and stamp it with an  
indelible image. It has happened many times before in human history. I think of  
Selma, Alabama, forever identified with the civil rights march, Commissioner  
Bull Connor, fire hoses and snarling dogs. I think of Dallas, the Texas School  
Board Depository, the grassy knoll and an assassinated John F. Kennedy. I 
recall  that during the week before that assassination, United Nations Ambassador 
Adlai  Stevenson had been spat on in Dallas by an angry crowd in direct 
response to a  vituperative newspaper editorial that was off the wall in terms of 
legitimate  political discourse. I think of Munich, the city in which Prime 
Minister Neville  Chamberlain, thought that by sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Adolf 
Hitler, he  could achieve “peace in our time.” I think of London under the 
air bombardment  of the Luftwaffe, and hearing reporter Edward R. Murrow 
beginning his nightly  news program with the words “This is London.” 
How is Oklahoma City coping? I can only share my anecdotal experience, but I  
found it a most exciting and responsive place in which to lecture. On the 
first  night we went to dinner in an upscale restaurant named “Junior’s” 
featuring  Oklahoma beef and for dessert a house specialty called Brandy Ice. Sitting 
 around that table was Jeff Hamilton, who had once been in the state 
legislature,  but who is now working as a minister in a Christian church dedicated to 
building  an interfaith alliance to bring together Christians, Jews, Muslims, 
Buddhist and  Hindus, all of whom are represented today in the population of 
Oklahoma City.  Next to him was Nettie Bunn Williams, an organist and music 
director from that  same church who has used the medium of music to bring blacks 
and whites together  in that city. Another guest was Patrick McAndrew, a 
minister serving a small  Unity church in that city who dreams huge dreams about 
what human life can be  and what church can mean and who, with his congregation, 
acts out those dreams  daily in his small corner in that city. I listened as 
they told me stories of  transformation. 
The next day I delivered two lectures to a packed house at the well known  
Mayflower Congregational Church of Oklahoma City, served for the past 18 years  
by the Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers, an articulate and courageous clergyman whose  
ministry, expressed not only through that church but through a regular column in 
 the Oklahoma Gazette and his teaching at Oklahoma City University, has made 
him  a national figure. His book, “Why the Christian Right is Wrong: A Minister
’s  Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future,” will be 
published  in May, 2006, by Jossey/Bass. The book tour that will accompany that 
 publication, run by the renowned firm of DeChant and Hughes of Chicago, will 
 make his name a household word in America. In the audience for those 
lectures  that day was Lance Moody, the wife of the Episcopal Bishop of Oklahoma, who 
 supported her husband as he put his life and career on the line by affirming 
the  choice of Gene Robinson, the gay bishop elected by the Episcopalians of 
New  Hampshire. Everywhere I looked I saw integrity and dedication that moved 
me  deeply. 
Oklahoma is still part of the Bible Belt of the South. Right wing  
fundamentalism is still rampant. In national elections this has been a red state  since 
1968 when it left the “solid democratic South” to vote for Richard Nixon  and 
has remained in that column ever since. In 2004 George W. Bush carried it  
with a 65% majority. John Kerry never bothered to contest for Oklahoma’s voters, 
 regarding it as hopeless. Its two senators are right wing Republicans. Its 
local  radio stations are filled with fundamentalistic, religious programming. 
These realities, however, do not tell the whole story of Oklahoma. I now know 
 that this state has within its ‘body politic’ the leavening presence of  
visionary leaders working to bind up wounds, to dispel prejudice and ignorance,  
to expand hope and to create a new humanity. They are actively countering the 
 religious mentality of intolerance that grips so much of our nation. I 
returned  from this trip deeply pleased that I had had this chance to meet these 
people. I  would go back to Oklahoma in a minute simply for the opportunity to 
be in their  presence once again. They have within themselves the stuff of 
which heroes are  made.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
I’m not sure of the difference between Fundamentalists and Evangelicals. Are  
they the same or different in political activism and social concerns? I think 
of  Albert Mohler as a fundamentalist because he is so narrow, while Tony 
Campolo  and Jim Wallis call themselves evangelicals and there is a world of 
difference  between them and Mohler. Campolo and Wallis seem to concentrate on 
living by the  teaching of Jesus, rather than on theology.Dear Pat,  
It would be better if you would ask a fundamentalist and an evangelical to  
draw this distinction. You are correct between Albert Mohler who heads the  
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and Jim Wallis, the  
editor of Sojourners Magazine, there is a great gulf. Yet they would overlap in  
places. 
Neither evangelicals nor fundamentalists have yet discovered the critical  
biblical scholarship that has graced the western world for at least the last 200 
 years. When I last was on a television program with Albert Mohler, it was  
painfully obvious that he was not in touch with any of the contemporary 
biblical  scholarship of the past century. Both camps seem to me to operate with  
pre-modern images of the universe as well as God. Evangelicals and  
fundamentalists like to call themselves conservative Christians, as if there is  something 
called conservative or liberal scholarship. There isn’t. There is just  
competent and incompetent scholarship. To call ignorance ‘conservative’ is a  
clever ploy, since conservatism is a legitimate political perspective, but that  
word does not translate well into religious categories. My sense is that the  
difference between those who call themselves “conservative” Christians and 
those  they call “liberal” Christians is more about being open or closed to 
ongoing  truth than it is about anything else. J. B. Phillips once wrote a book 
entitled,  “Your God is Too Small.” That is the peril into which I fear both 
evangelicals  and fundamentalists fall. Deep down I find that almost every person 
seeks  security in some form of literalism or unchanging certainty, both in 
religion  and politics. I find little difference between those politicians who 
talk about  ‘strict construction of the constitution’ and those preachers who 
talk about the  Bible as ‘the inerrant word of God.’ Perhaps it is fair to 
say that evangelicals  draw the line at what must be viewed literally a tiny 
bit more loosely than do  fundamentalists. The difference, however, is very, 
very small. For example some  people are literal about Adam and Eve; some about 
the Virgin Birth; and some  about the physical Resurrection. I do not believe 
that any prepositional  statement about God can be literally true. I think 
people should take the Bible  seriously but never literally. Literalism is finally 
and always idolatry.  Someday, all Christians will recognize that. 
John Shelby Spong 
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