[Dialogue] The bishop on Crosswalk America

[KroegerD at aol.com]

September 20, 2006 
Why Did They Do It? Crosswalk  America Revisited  
In early September, I looked out from the pulpit of the historic Foundry  
United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., preparing to address a group of  
foot-weary people who had just completed a twenty-five hundred mile, five  
million-step walk across America. I admired their energy and their dedication. I  
was in awe of their willingness to make this effort. I was aware of and shared  
their stated purpose: raising the consciousness of the people of our nation to 
 the critical issues that face the American religious establishment in the 
year  2006.  
Because I had identified so closely with their cause, my wife Christine, and  
I joined them on the last two days, walking the final ten miles from Silver  
Spring, Maryland, to the corner of 16th and P Streets in the heart of  
Washington. Ten miles is, however, not twenty-five hundred! So I still wondered  why 
sane people would do what they had done. On that last leg of the journey I  
sought to interview those who had walked every step of the way. In my address to 
 them at Foundry United Methodist Church I reflected on what they had told 
me.  
"There are," one of them said, "many people, who care deeply for what they  
understand the Christian faith to be, so they resent the way that Christianity  
has been used in some parts of this nation as either a negative force or as a 
 cult of prosperity. Someone needed to focus the nation's attention on those  
concerns. We walked to do just that."  
Another said: "We were tired of seeing the levels of religious anger and  
intolerance in the life of our society. We walked to make this religious anger  
visible and to counter it."  
"In parts of the world," others said, "Christians act as if there is only one 
 truth, one understanding of God and one way to salvation. Those claims are  
expressions of idolatry since they assume that the human mind can actually  
reduce the mystery and wonder of God to words in human creeds. We walked to  
demonstrate the folly of such a claim."  
This group also sought to raise the consciousness of Christians to the fact  
that the struggle for equality and justice for all people is not a tangential  
item on the ecclesiastical agenda, which can be debated at what might be 
called  "institutional leisure." Inclusion, they said, is an issue so deep at the 
heart  of what it means to be Christian that those who oppose it are 
forfeiting the  last shred of the church's integrity. One cannot debate the 
undebatable.  
I came to see that these walkers even walked for me. In my own career-long  
struggle to win equality for those whom both the Church and society seek to  
marginalize, I have known the wrath of the religious mentality that believes  
change is always wrong. When I ordained an open and partnered gay man to the  
priesthood of my church in 1989, my Presiding Bishop issued a letter of  
'disassociation' from my action and from me. I wondered what that meant. Did he  
disassociate himself, and presumably the church he headed, because I was not  able 
to disassociate myself from one I viewed as a child of God? (Fourteen years  
later my church elected and ordained a gay bishop.) Anger is not unknown among 
 those who claim to be Christians. Most of my hate mail and all of my death  
threats have come from Bible quoting, true-believing Christians. By walking  
against that kind of Christianity, this group walked for me.  
Many people are surprised when they hear it said that there are enormous  
levels of anger historically associated with Christianity. They only have to  
look, however, at the violence of the religious wars that swept across Europe at  
the time of the Reformation, as Catholics and Protestants alike tried to 
impose  their understanding of God on the other. The tensions and violence in 
Ireland  today have their roots in that earlier conflict. If that is not 
sufficient data  by itself then perhaps we should look at the Crusades that marked the 
11th, 12th  and 13th centuries of the Christian era. Those violent wars were 
little more  than Vatican-led acts of terror designed to kill those who were 
defined by the  Christian West as "infidels!" Is that very different from the 
terror of Osama  Bin Laden and Al Qaeda who have attacked those of us in the 
Christian West, whom  they define as "infidels" to the Muslim Middle East?" We 
could look at other  dark chapters of Christian history, such as the 
Inquisition, the religious  persecution of those who perceived God in different ways. We 
could look at the  treatment given to Galileo, Darwin and others, who 
challenged the prevailing  religious view of how the universe was understood. For 
their efforts many were  arrested, tried, excommunicated, tortured and even burned 
at the stake. To warn  this nation that those attitudes are alive again in 
religious circles was  another purpose for which this group of people walked.  
This group walked to force clergy to look at the levels of anger and violence 
 that flow out of their own preaching, year-by-year, sometimes 
Sunday-by-Sunday.  They walked to raise awareness to the fact that these clergy, who love to 
 describe the presumed fate of those who reject the preacher's message, and 
those  churches, which regularly state that those who do not accept the 
authority of  the "true church" are bound for hell, represent expressions of little 
more than  human anger being projected onto God.  
These walkers across America took their five million plus steps to challenge  
some parts of the Christian world to explain just why it is that they 
continue  to resist the legitimate quests of women for equality and for the ability 
to  make decisions that affect their own bodies without the condemnation of a  
heavily-male dominated government or a heavily-male dominated ecclesiastical  
hierarchy. They walked to call to the attention of the citizens of this land 
the  fact that the vast majority of the hostile rhetoric spoken and the hostile 
 action taken in the cause of an entrenched and uninformed homophobia 
originates  today primarily in religious circles: first in the Vatican itself and 
next in  the pulpits of fundamentalist preachers like Pat Robinson, Jerry 
Falwell, James  Kennedy, Franklin Graham, Oral Roberts and Albert Mohler.  
They walked to sensitize this nation to the fact that the Bible Belt of  
America, the heart of the Religious Right, is also the region where slavery was  
practiced, where segregation was defended and where homophobia today is 
rampant.  One sometimes wonders what Bible is read in the Bible Belt and what kind of 
 religion is practiced by the Religious Right. Perhaps these believers skip 
the  texts in which Jesus embraces the lepers and the outcasts or that reveal 
the  fact that Jesus had female disciples. They do not notice that Jesus stood  
between the woman taken in adultery and her accusers. Does the Bible not tell 
us  that the disciples of Jesus are to be known by their love? Whence comes 
this  anger of religious judgment, this defining religious hostility in our 
day? Do  they think that Jesus said, "Come unto me, some of ye" instead of "Come 
unto me  all of ye?" Do they not sing at their altar calls, "Just as I am 
without one  plea, O Lamb of God, I come?" Does any aspect of our being make some 
of us less  God's children, and therefore less welcomed, less affirmed or less 
eligible, for  any position the Church has to offer?  
They walked to force people to ask just why it was, when the power and  
influence of the Christian Church went into a precipitous and steep decline  during 
the 20th century as secularity grew in popularity, that three great  freedom 
movements that enhanced the humanity of those long diminished by the  
Christian west finally emerged. One was the emancipation of women from the  
stereotypes of yesterday, the second was the breaking of the back of segregation  and 
racism that diminished people of color and the third was the movement for  the 
full inclusion of homosexual people, who had long been imprisoned in their  
closets of fear and out of which they now came in droves to claim a new dignity.  
If Christianity is about the message of Jesus to help people have life more  
abundantly then why were these three movements that obviously brought life,  
freedom and equality to so many, not accomplished while Christianity held far  
greater power? Why were they largely the accomplishments of the secular 
spirit?  Why was the resistance to each of these movements located principally 
inside  organized Christianity? How is it possible that Christianity has evolved 
into  the kinds of expressions that today embarrass so many of us, who still 
believe  in and pledge our ultimate allegiance to this Christ figure?  
While most of us only wondered about these things, however, the Rev. Dr. Eric 
 Elnes and Rebecca Glenn, together with their supporters, organized  
CrosswalkAmerica. In preparation they published a document called: "The Phoenix  
Affirmations,"* a list of twelve principles, based on a Christianity of love and  
inclusion and then they announced their plans to walk across America to raise  
the peoples' awareness of this different understanding of Christianity that  
counters the public face of the Religious Right, which still acts as if there 
is  no Christian voice but its own. The Phoenix Affirmations call on Christians 
to  love God in all of God's expressions, to love our neighbors, including 
our  neighbors who call God by a different name and even our neighbors who use 
the  literal texts of the Bible as a weapon with which to attack the objects of 
their  prejudice, and finally to love ourselves, just as we are, male, 
female, black,  white, brown, gay, straight, transgender, bisexual, learned and 
unlearned,  left-handed and right-handed, indeed in all of the rich variety of the 
human  family. We are to stand as one against any religious system that 
encourages  self-hatred, that manipulates through guilt, or that presents God as a 
punishing  parent who delights in our groveling before the throne of grace.  
There is a different way to tell the Christ story from the one that seems to  
permeate the American media today. These people walked to hold up that 
different  way before this country. We hope that Christians everywhere will heed the 
 message of this movement. If that happens, CrossWalkAmerica will have been a 
 great success.  
John Shelby Spong  
* The full text of the Phoenix Affirmation is available at: 
_www.CrossWalkAmerica.org._ (http://www.crosswalkamerica.org/)  Dr. Eric  Elnes' book entitled 
"THE PHOENIX AFFIRMATIONS: A New Vision for the Future of  Christianity," 
published by Jossey-Bass, is available at bookstores. His book on  the walk itself 
will be out in six months.  
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 
Dear Friends:  
To start the question and answer feature of this column this week I want to  
share with you the words from a bulletin defining the way the members of the  
Unity Church of Wichita, Kansas see themselves: "We are a Bible based Church 
for  thinking people. We are culturally Christian, radically inclusive, and  
spiritually unlimited." Occasionally some one gets it right. Another church  
announced on its sign: "God is our refuse and our strength:" I hope not! JSS  
Chaplain Joy Smith writes:  
In your opinion, what bottom-line factor best distinguishes Christianity from 
 other world religions? Am I right in believing the "Golden Rule" and the 
message  of loving God and loving others are both present in all world religions  
(although worded differently, of course)?  
Dear Chaplain Joy,  
The task of every religion is to answer life's perennial and existential  
questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What does life mean? What is my destiny?  
Because those are questions only asked by fully self-conscious creatures,  
religion is a specifically human enterprise. In the broadest sense I don't  believe 
it is possible to be human and not be inquisitive about life's meaning,  and 
therefore not in some sense religious.  
I suppose practitioners of every faith tradition can tell you what is unique  
about their own spiritual journey. When you compare your religion with one 
you  do not practice, it is hard not to be pejorative about one that is not your 
own.  So I think you would be well served to ask Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, 
Hindus as  well as Christians to talk about what distinguishes their faith. Even 
when you  talk to Christians, you will get Roman Catholic, Protestant, 
liberal,  fundamentalist, evangelical ideas that will hardly be identical.  
Having said that, the thing that distinguishes the Christian community to me  
is the Jesus story of a life fully lived for others, a love wastefully shared 
 with others and a picture of one who has the courage to be all that he was  
created to be.  
His life expands my life. His love frees me to love and his being gives me  
the courage to be. That is why I join in the central Christian affirmation of  
seeing God in the full humanity of Jesus.  
John Shelby Spong 
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