[Dialogue] spong 4/16 Pennsylvania

[KroegerD at aol.com]

April 16, 2008 
Who Are the People in  Pennsylvania Who Will Choose the Democratic Nominee?  

The somewhat blurred eyes of the nation's political stargazers are focused at 
 least until April 22 on the State of Pennsylvania. That is the date on which 
its  citizens will play a determinative role in choosing the potential 
President of  the United States. If Senator Clinton wins, she is still a viable 
candidate. On  the other hand, and depending on the other states that hold 
primaries between  now and June 1, Senator Obama could lose in Pennsylvania and still 
be the  ultimate winner. So the stakes are high, especially for Senator 
Clinton. In the  meantime, we are being treated to scenes in which Senator Obama 
displays his not  very effective style in bowling alleys and sips beer with 
potential voters in  local pubs and Senator Clinton likens herself to Rocky Balboa 
in her refusal to  stop her quest at the two-thirds mark. One wonders what 
these things have to do  with being president, but that is the nature of 
American politics.  
Pennsylvania is a magnificent and diverse state and will be a good testing  
ground in this election. It is anchored on both ends by great American cities.  
Philadelphia in the east was this nation's first capital and remains today a  
city of significant history. It is a major port, the home of an Ivy League  
university and the world famous Wharton School, whose MBA degree is widely  
regarded as America's most respected. It is also the site of the Liberty Bell  
and such athletic teams as the Phillies, the Eagles and the 76ers, all of whom  
have historically been bridesmaids more often than brides. On its western  
frontier stands Pittsburgh, once identified with the steel industry as the home  
of U.S. Steel Corp. It was also the business center for America's coal mining  
industry and was once best known for the coal dust that settled on the 
exteriors  of its buildings. That was Pittsburgh's past. Today it is a sparkling 
city  recently voted one of the best cities in America in which to live with its  
cultural life financed by the Mellon and Heinz family fortunes. Pittsburgh's  
athletic teams have had episodic success. There was the 1973 Super Bowl 
champion  Steelers with Terry Bradshaw and Mean Joe Greene anchoring the defensive 
line  known as the "Steel Curtain," or the more recent title in 2006 led by 
rookie  quarterback Ben Roethlisberger. In baseball the Pirates have had a 
fairly long  walk in the wilderness, but there are glowing memories of the great 
Roberto  Clemente and Bill Mazeroski's "walk off" home run to defeat the Yankees 
in the  7th game of the World Series in 1960.  
Between these two booming metropolitan centers are beautiful mountains, small 
 towns, the gracious capital city of Harrisburg and a string of superior 
small  colleges and universities like Franklin & Marshall, Lehigh, Lafayette,  
Muhlenberg and Bucknell. Pennsylvania also has strong Quaker roots, German  
roots, Amish roots and Pennsylvania Dutch settlements.  
In Pennsylvania elections, the urban majorities have to be large enough to  
offset the interior votes if the Democrats are to win and the opposite is the  
key to Republicans success.  
This pattern tends to drive the state toward political moderation. The  
formula for a successful Republican victory has been to nominate a moderate  
Republican who is not so liberal as to lose the heartland, yet liberal enough to  
cut into the urban vote. One thinks of Republican William Scranton, who became  
governor in 1962 and was the moderate Republican favorite for the Presidency 
in  1964 against Barry Goldwater, or of Republican Senator John Heinz, elected 
in  1976 and later tragically killed in an airplane crash. The strategy for a  
Democratic victory is to nominate a moderate Democrat, capable of carrying 
the  liberal urban vote yet competitive in the heartland. The two sitting 
senators in  Pennsylvania today fit that model exactly. They are moderate Republican 
Arlen  Specter and moderate Democrat Robert Casey. There has been an 
occasional  ideological and polarizing politician who has been successful, the right 
wing  Senator Rick Santorum (1994-2006) for instance, but this type of 
candidate does  not normally have a long shelf life in Pennsylvanian politics.  
It was that indomitable and sometimes irascible Democratic strategist James  
Carville who once described the State of Pennsylvania this way: "Between  
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is Alabama without blacks." What  
Carville was attempting to say by this was that the heartland of this state is  
religiously and politically very conservative. I understand the word  conservative 
when it is used about politics. It means dedicated to  individualism, small 
government, low taxes and balanced budgets. I do not,  however, understand this 
word when used in a religious context. There it tends  to mean pro-life and 
anti-abortion, but that seems to me to be asking the  government not to be 
small, but to be both large and invasive, hardly  conservative principles. 
Sometimes it means to be condemning of homosexuality,  but that prejudice is based on 
a definition of homosexuality that is no longer  operative in medical and 
scientific circles, so rather than being conservative,  it looks uninformed. 
Sometimes it means being opposed to evolution and  supporting a literal 
understanding of the scriptures. When the conservative  United States Supreme Court, on 
which seven of the nine sitting judges are  Republican appointees, has 
declared that the teaching of creation science or  intelligent design in the science 
classrooms of the nation's public schools  violates the constitution's 
guarantee of the separation of Church and State, I  have trouble knowing what 
"conservative" means when used to describe religion.  This is especially true when I 
go into Central Pennsylvania as a religious  spokesperson, for what I have 
experienced in that "conservative region" is  openness, receptiveness, a 
willingness to listen to and interact with new ideas  and above all wonderful and 
welcoming people.  
In the last several years, I have lectured in that midsection of Pennsylvania 
 between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh on many occasions. I have been several 
times  to Harrisburg, twice to Lancaster and Annville and once each to 
Bethlehem,  Allentown, Lewisburg and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. I have been invited to 
speak on  the campuses of Muhlenberg College, Lehigh University, Lebanon Valley 
College,  Bucknell University and at the Theological Seminary of the United 
Church of  Christ. I have spoken in churches, synagogues and lecture halls. I 
have led  clergy conferences and have gotten to know university chaplains in a 
variety of  settings. I have never felt anything other than the warmest of 
welcomes. Two of  Pennsylvania's schools, Lehigh and Muhlenberg, have conferred on 
me the honorary  Doctor of Humane Letters degree in recent years. I have not 
encountered the  atmosphere that James Carville described.  
I have addressed, in both public and private gatherings, the leaders of a  
group called HARP (Harrisburg Area Religious Progressives), an  
interdenominational gathering of those who want to explore theological frontiers  beyond that 
which their local churches are willing to travel. This movement was  born 
under the leadership of Michael Long, a gifted former pastor of the Harris  Street 
United Methodist Church in Harrisburg, who had the courage to recognize  that 
he needed to provide for the intellectual needs of those who have no desire  
to leave their respective churches, but who know that there is something more. 
 Mike Long has left the active pastorate for the life of an academic, 
teaching at  Elizabethtown College, and has since completed at least two award 
winning books,  one on the impact of Billy Graham on the American religious scene 
and the other  on the Civil Rights activity of a former UCLA football star, 
Jackie Robinson,  who made his name integrating major league baseball in 1947 with 
the pennant  winning Brooklyn Dodgers. When Mike Long accepted his teaching 
post, active lay  people in his church and beyond, like Sharon and Robert Herr 
and Rodger Clark,  have continued to nurture the movement. They represent 
Central Pennsylvania at  its finest.  
I also thought it was significant when the largely white Episcopal Diocese of 
 Central Pennsylvania, centered in Harrisburg, elected as its bishop a gifted 
 African-American priest, Nathan Baxter, the former Dean of the National  
Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and that America's leading church of the Moravian  
tradition in Bethlehem is being served by two spectacular pastors, one male 
and  one female. Those are not the marks of classic conservatism.  
Finally last summer, I attended a seminar held in Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania,  
where one of America's original "Chautauquas" is located. This seminar was on  
issues that face Christian churches today in the area of sexual ethics and  
sexual practices. There were perhaps 75 people at this morning session, most of 
 them residents of Central Pennsylvania. The seminar was led by the Rev. 
Darrell  Woomer, a Central Pennsylvania United Methodist Minister and former 
chaplain at  Lebanon Valley College. He was magnificent, sensitive and engaging and 
he called  the latent homophobia that resides in the church what it is. The 
people  responded in an open and accepting manner. I saw no evidence of what 
others have  characterized as right wing sexual bigotry. This is the Central 
Pennsylvania  that I know.  
To my delight, I have recently been invited to be a lecturer at the Mt.  
Gretna Chautauqua this summer. I am confident that I will meet the same  response. 
The people who gather in this Chautauqua setting seem to me to be  eager to 
explore issues openly in the light of the best knowledge available.  That is 
the mark of maturity and grace, not closed-minded religious fear.  
My love for Pennsylvania is such that I almost envy Senator Clinton and  
Senator Obama, who will criss-cross this state many times between now and April  
22. They will, I am sure, get to meet the kind of people I have known in  
Pennsylvania, and they will entrust their candidacies to the will of those  people. 
Fate and the peculiar American political process have placed  Pennsylvania in 
this unique place. I am quite willing to have the State of  Pennsylvania 
choose the nominee of the Democratic party and potentially the next  President of 
the United States. I invite James Carville to visit the State of  Pennsylvania 
once again to get an update.  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Louise Singleton from Denver, Colorado, writes:  
I have two Jewish daughters-in-law and four grandchildren being raised in the 
 Jewish tradition. In the delicate position of a grandparent, how can I help  
integrate our Christian and Jewish traditions — especially with the children? 
 
Dear Louise,  
You cannot. Let me say that as firmly, forcefully and kindly as possible.  
While you had the responsibility of being their mother, you raised your sons and 
 gave them your values. They are now grown men, married to the women of their 
 choice, and they have made a family decision on how to raise their children. 
You  have no responsibility in that arena, nor is it your place to "help 
integrate"  these two traditions.  
Your job is to love these children and not to interfere with the way your  
sons are raising them. The best thing you can do is to support your sons'  
decisions. Nothing else would be loving.  
I hope you do not experience this as harsh. The desire to have our  
grandchildren reflect our values is deep in all of us. However, the idea that  having 
part of your family raised in a different religion from your own is a  problem 
only for those who believe that their religion is the only true religion  and 
that there is some inherent duty to "save" family members by making sure  they 
are also introduced to the "true faith." That attitude, abandoned by most  
thinking people (still, however, in the rhetoric of both the Vatican and the  
Protestant Evangelicals) is the source of great family tension and frequent  
fractures.  
If you love and accept your sons' decision, your daughters-in-law's  
commitment to their belief and your grandchildren's religious path, you will in  fact 
be doing the Christlike thing. You are loving them unconditionally just as  
they are. You are enhancing their lives, affirming their being and telling them  
that nothing can separate them from you or from God's love. That is the 
pathway  for grandparents to walk. I hope for your sake and for the sake of family 
peace  and your grandchildren's future that you can do just that. They will 
honor you  for it.  
John Shelby Spong 



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