[Dialogue] spong 8/28 High Noon at Saddleback

[KroegerD at aol.com]

August 28, 2008 
High Noon at Saddleback  

CNN's top political reporter, John King, was almost breathless announcing  
again and again that this was the first time the candidates for president had  
been together since they clinched the nomination. As a matter of fact that was  
not true, since they attended and even sat together at Tim Russert's funeral  
several weeks ago. Even at this highly hyped event the two candidates were  
barely together. They appeared separately to answer questions from Rick Warren, 
 the pastor of the Saddleback Church. By a flip of the coin, Senator Obama 
went  first. Pastor Warren assured the audience that Senator McCain was in a 
"cone of  silence," and could not listen to the questions in advance. That also 
proved to  be not true. Senator McCain was in fact in his car in a motorcade 
when Senator  Obama was being interviewed. He had access to radio and phone 
contact with his  aides. One wonders why Rick Warren was uninformed.  
The purpose of this CNN exclusive was to allow the two candidates to appear  
before an evangelical audience to answer questions that seem important to that 
 constituency, which some estimate to be 20% of the electorate. The questions 
 were framed in the evangelical style, touching their hot button issues:  
abortion, stem cell research and homosexual marriage. One wonders what those  
issues have to do with a failed war in Iraq, the city of New Orleans still  
devastated, an economy reeling, gasoline prices skyrocketing and a national  
deficit that places the financial well being of this nation into the hands of  the 
Chinese, who hold the majority of our debt. Evangelicals, however, never  seen 
to move far beyond their religious prejudices.  
After listening to this two-hour forum, in which each candidate answered  
similar if not identical questions, two things were obvious. One is that neither  
Senator Obama nor Senator McCain will ever be confused with either a 
theologian  or a biblical scholar. Both seemed to pander to their audience, Senator 
Obama by  saying that "Jesus died for my sins" and Senator McCain by asserting 
that Jesus  had "saved" him. I suspect that if Rick Warren had asked either 
candidate what  those words meant, both would have turned glassy eyed. Words like 
"he died for  my sins" and "he saved me" are evangelical mantras that are 
based on the  biblical myth of a perfect creation followed by the human fall into 
sinfulness.  These words are all but nonsensical in a post- Darwinian world, 
where we realize  that none of us has fallen from perfection since we never 
had it, but all of us  are rather evolving into something we have never been.  
These "pious" answers rise out of the "substitutionary atonement theology" of 
 4th century Augustinian Christianity, which suggests that Jesus absorbed on 
the  cross the punishment that we deserved. This strange idea makes Jesus the 
victim  of a God who is not able to forgive the wayward human race unless 
provided with  a human sacrifice and a blood offering. It is gory and bankrupt 
theology, yet  the hymns and liturgies of the church continually re-enforce it.  
This theology is the primary source of the guilt in which the church  
constantly wallows. On the Catholic side, the mass is the liturgical reenactment  of 
the moment Jesus died on the cross, for which we are to blame. On the  
Protestant evangelical side, it finds expression in the denigration of human  life 
that God had to save at so great a cost. The words of America's favorite  hymn 
state that God's grace is amazing only because it saves "wretches" like me.   
If it is true that Jesus died for my sins, then to be "washed in his blood"  
is the definition of salvation. If the mass is the reenactment of the moment  
Jesus paid the price for the fall, then drinking his blood in the Eucharist  
restores me to oneness with God. That is the theory in its popular Catholic and 
 Protestant forms. This theology is designed to confront sinners with the 
fact  that they caused Jesus' death. What Paul called "the glorious liberty of 
the  children of God" has been transformed by this theology into a religion of  
behavior control. Guilt is a great manipulator, and the church has achieved 
its  power not by enhancing life but by promoting guilt, which inevitably turns 
the  church into one of the most manipulative institutions in history.  
Charles Darwin dealt this mentality a death blow 149 years ago, in 1859, by  
redefining our origins. Our problem is not some mythological fall, he said, it 
 is that we have not yet evolved into full humanity. Traditional Christians 
have  not yet gotten the message, since the religious establishment has been 
unable to  extricate itself from this dated theology. Now our presidential 
candidates are  parroting these clichés of yesterday for the sake of the religious 
vote  tomorrow.  
Both candidates agreed that evil exists. It was a dumb question. Is there  
anyone who seriously argues that evil is not real? The issue is how does one  
deal with it. Here the difference between the two candidates was very clear.  
Senator McCain was black and white: Evil exists and it is our job to "defeat"  
it. McCain identified evil with 9/11, Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda and Islamic  
fundamentalism. His presumption, unspoken but obvious, was that evil is anything  
or anyone who is our enemy. That is a dangerous idea born out of the tribal  
religion of yesterday, when God was believed to have a chosen people and 
anyone  who was the enemy of the chosen people was defined as evil. McCain's God 
would  be like the God of Israel, who hated everyone the chosen people hated. 
That is  why God sent plagues on the Egyptians, murdered the first born male in 
every  Egyptian household on the night of the Passover, stopped the sun in the 
sky to  allow Joshua more daylight to annihilate the Amorites and ordered 
Saul to commit  genocide against the Amalekites. Evil in Senator McCain's view of 
reality is  always something other or external to us. Senator Obama, on the 
other hand, did  look within and he saw the gray areas of life. "A lot of evil 
is perpetrated  based on the claim that we are trying to confront evil," he 
said. Perhaps he was  aware that this is what Jesus' parable of the wheat and 
the tares was all about.  Wheat and tares grow together. You cannot root out the 
tares without destroying  the wheat. They must grow together until the 
harvest because they are two sides  of the same coin. In the same way, good and evil 
are part of each of us. Of  course the attack on the United States on 
September 11, 2001, was evil. There is  no dispute there, but so was the killing 
hostility toward Muslims perpetrated by  the Christian West, beginning in the 
Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th  centuries, and including the conquest of 
Muslim nations by the Western powers  until the present day. Recall that following 
World War I the heads of state of  the Western Allies divided up the old 
Ottoman Empire and the Arab people into  controllable countries that we could 
dominate and exploit to satisfy our  unquenchable thirst for oil. Of course Saddam 
Hussein was both evil and a terror  to many of his people, but we need to 
remember that he was "our guy" whom we  armed to the teeth when he invaded Iran 
with our blessing in September of 1980.  Iran was our enemy during the Carter 
(1976-1980) and Reagan (1980-1988)  administrations. Evil was surely also 
present in the behavior of Saddam's  conquerors and found expression at Abu Ghraib, 
in Guantanamo and in the secret  torture chambers run by the CIA around the 
world. Good and evil are inextricably  bound up together. Confronting evil is 
not possible as long as we locate evil  only outside ourselves or beyond the 
institutions and activities of our world.  
Human beings out of our evolutionary past are survival-oriented people. As  
such we have a tendency to demonize any person or thing that threatens our  
survival. Senator McCain and so many religious people so clearly do not  
understand that. However, people will resonate with McCain's answer for it feeds  our 
fears and makes us feel virtuous when we identify evil with those who wish  us 
harm.  
The Arizona senator would thus not be likely to see evil in the rampant  
homophobia that emerges out of both the Vatican and evangelical Christianity,  
which is bent on denying equal protection to all under the Constitution. In a  
response to Rick Warren about abortion, McCain adopted the tired and naïve  
argument that he would not appoint judges who would "legislate from the bench."  
Perhaps he doesn't know the history of that phrase. It grew out of the Supreme  
Court's unanimous decision in 1954 that segregation was inherently unequal. 
That  was not legislating, as the southerners claimed as they tried to make 
their  racism sound acceptable; it was interpreting the Constitution accurately. 
A  constitutional democracy does not legislate and vote on basic human rights, 
it  protects them. It is a not a democracy, but a "mobocracy" that subjects 
the  basic rights of its citizens to the legislative process and thus to what 
John  Stuart Mill called "the tyranny of the majority."  
The clearest distinction between the two presumptive nominees came when each  
was asked to define what it means to be rich and thus to identify those on 
whom  tax increases might reasonably be expected to bring the budget into 
balance.  Senator Obama replied that those making over $250,000 a year will see a 
tax  increase under his presidency. Those making under $150,000 a year will see 
a tax  decrease. Presumably those making between $150,000 and $250,000 a year 
will see  neither a tax decrease nor a tax increase. Senator McCain defined 
rich as those  making over $5,000,000 a year.  
Both of these candidates are millionaires, but Obama's wealth pales beside  
that of Senator McCain and his wife, whose fortune is well over the $100 
million  dollar figure. It is not a sin to be wealthy, unless of course it blinds 
your  ability to see the poor who are also citizens. Less than one tenth of one  
percent of our population will ever see that $5,000,000 figure. The concern 
in  this election is that Senator McCain might not be able to see the 99.99% of 
our  population for whom $5,000,000 is as rare as winning the lottery. Now 
the  question is, will people vote their economic vested interests or their 
fears?  Time alone will tell.

– John Shelby Spong 
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Bob Reinhold from St. Louis, Missouri,  
If the point of the Christian faith is for people to be whole, what does that 
 mean? Can people be whole and still be against gays and lesbians? Can people 
be  whole while distancing themselves from poverty and the poor?  
Dear Doris,  
Your questions get to the heart of my understanding of the Christian gospels. 
 When I use the word "whole," I am trying to put substance into the fourth  
gospel's definition of Jesus' purpose, "I have come that you might have life 
and  have it abundantly." My thinking is informed by the struggle to survive 
that I  believe is implanted in every living thing but that comes into  
self-consciousness and choice only in human beings. Plants turn to the sunlight,  
conscious animals respond to a threat to their survival with the instinct of  fight 
or flight, but self-conscious creatures install survival as their highest  
value and thus become overtly self-centered. If survival is my primary goal, I  
judge every person and every deed by the effect that person or deed has on my  
ability to survive, so I engage in the constant act of enhancing my survival  
ability by diminishing that of others. The self-centered nature of human life 
 was in early Christian history understood as the product of "the fall" from 
our  original perfection and was called "original sin." So long as my primary 
agenda  is survival, I cannot be whole. I am not free. I am not able to live 
for others,  to love beyond my boundaries or to discover the freedom just to 
be. So, in order  to become human, in order to become whole, human life must 
transcend its  survival mentality. Wholeness is thus a synonym for being fully 
human, which I  define as transcending survival in the cause of being.  
With that definition I find it impossible to combine wholeness with any other 
 human emotion that is "against," to use your word, the "being" of another. I 
 regard "being" to be a description of the "givens" of a person's life, such 
as  race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation. The whole person cannot be  
against the being of homosexual beings, but the whole person can oppose any  
behavior pattern of either homosexual persons or heterosexual persons that  
diminishes the life of another, which seems to me to include any forced sexual  
act, all promiscuity, pimping, prostitution, any act of child abuse, etc. I 
see  no evidence that suggests that the proclivity to diminish another through 
sexual  behavior is any more prevalent in homosexual persons than it is in 
heterosexual  people. This is an act of personal decision making.  
When you move to the issue of distancing yourself from poverty and the poor,  
personal decision making is joined with corporate action of both the state 
and  larger communities. I do not see how an individual can make work on poverty 
 successful without the action of the state other than as a witness in the 
public  arena raising consciousness and by the act of simplifying your own 
personal  lifestyle. A better leveling of the society between the rich and the poor 
can be  accomplished by taxation politics, by which I mean graduated income 
taxes,  inheritance taxes and, to a much lesser degree, taxes on consumption, 
though  that is the most regressive tax of all. Yet a government that taxes too 
heavily  destroys initiative and the entrepreneurial talent that builds 
wealth for all.  So a balance must be found. In recent years, our society has 
widened the gap  between wealth and poverty to dangerous proportions. We have 
expanded the  percentage of the tax on the income of the poor and the middle class 
while  lowering the percentage of tax on the income paid by the wealthy. We 
have  expanded the multiple between the CEO's salary and a worker's salary by 
some  5000% in the last 20 years. This gap widened during the eight years of 
President  Clinton and galloped out of all boundaries during the eight years of 
President  George Bush.  
An aroused populace is one way to address this issue. Self interest also  
requires that the economic and political system of a nation must serve the  
vested interest of all the people if it wants to survive. I do not believe that  
any nation or even the stability of the world will survive if half of its people 
 are starving when the other half are dieting. So on this issue, personal and 
 corporate action must coalesce.  
Thank you for your question.




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