[Dialogue] Spong 6/4/08 High School Political Pfreference survey

[KroegerD at aol.com]

June 4, 2008 
Note: This column is based on the research of a student who is just  
completing the tenth grade at George Marshall High School in Falls Church,  Virginia, 
a relatively influential and affluent suburb in the metropolitan  Washington, 
D.C. area. The student's name is John Lanier Hylton. He is my  grandson. He 
challenged me to write a column on teenage issues and what engages  the hearts 
and minds of 16, 17 and 18 year olds, whose voices don't seem to  count in 
shaping the policies of this nation, even while politics comes at them  in heavy 
concentrations during an election season from radio, television,  newspapers 
and adult conversations. What are their concerns, passions,  questions? What 
kind of a world do they think they are inheriting from their  parents? John felt 
that we ought to know.  
John is a concerned teenager with rather high levels of political interest  
and knowledge. I had dinner with him on one occasion when our other guests were 
 a married couple, both of whom were born in Pakistan, but who are now 
American  citizens practicing medicine in New Jersey. He is a surgeon and she is a  
pathologist. This dinner came shortly after the assassination of Benazir 
Bhutto  and the conversation was about what her death meant to the politics of 
Pakistan  and to the foreign policy of the United States and thus to American 
politics as  well. John's insights and his quest for knowledge made him a vital 
part of that  conversation.  
So I accepted his challenge. The bargain was that if he would devise a method 
 of polling his fellow students for their ideas, he and I would do the column 
 together, with John being its co-author. John got the permission of the  
necessary authorities including his teacher, Mrs. Gannaway , to devise the  
questionnaire, carry out the poll, collate the results and see what conclusion  we 
could draw from our data. The following is our joint effort. While we tried  
to keep partisanship out of both the survey and the conclusions, I think it is  
fair for my readers to know that John wears a counter on his arm that ticks 
off  the seconds, minutes, hours and days until January 20, 2009, when a new  
president will enter the White House.  
John Shelby Spong  
What Does the High School Generation Today Think About Politics in 2008? 
By John Lanier Hylton and John Shelby Spong 
We do not pretend that George Marshall High School in Falls Church, Virginia, 
 is necessarily representative of all people in the 16-18 year age bracket, 
but  we do believe that our findings reflect some very interesting data. George 
 Marshall High, like so many suburban schools across America, is a majority 
white  school serving middle class to upper middle class families. There is, 
however,  in this student body a significant minority of African-American 
students,  Asian-American students, American Hispanic students and even Middle  
Eastern-American students. All are, however, integrated into a single student  
body and most of them are only barely conscious of race or ethnicity, certainly  
not like their parents and grandparents were when they were teenagers. The 
only  America these students have ever known is a racially and ethnically diverse 
 America. Most of them appear to be surprised at the lingering prejudices 
that  they perceive still to be present in the adult population. While American  
politicians still debate, with great emotion and even anxiety, the issue of  
immigration, the students of this high school barely placed it in their top 
five  concerns. They seemed to recognize that everyone in America is an 
immigrant,  including those called Native Americans who appear to have been only the 
first  of many migrant people who would call this land home when they came 
across the  Bering Straits from Asia some 20,000 plus years ago. Students from both 
their  anthropology and their history classes know that no primates, human or 
 otherwise, are native to this hemisphere.  
Like their adult counterparts, the Iraq War and the economy topped the  
students' list of concerns, but these teenagers indicated that the war in Iraq  was 
their primary issue while polls indicate that by a wide margin it is the  
economy that is the overwhelming issue with this year's voting Americans. We  
suspect that this might be because adults, for the most part, pay the bills and  
they see the price at the pump and the inflation in grocery prices more 
quickly  than students do, and these students identify by age with those who are 
fighting  and dying in Iraq. For the students global warming was third, 
reflecting the  rising generation's deep concern about our common environment. These 
issues were  followed by health care, and only then did immigration appear. 
Women's rights,  gay marriage and abortion each got a bare mention.  
For the sake of accuracy in evaluating these data our readers need to know  
that our poll took place after the primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky, won 
 by Senator Clinton, and the primary in Oregon, won by Senator Obama. It also 
 occurred before the Democratic National Committee met to allocate the 
disputed  votes of Florida and Michigan and before the primaries in Puerto Rico, 
South  Dakota and Montana that would end the primary season. At this time Senator 
John  McCain was the presumptive Republican nominee and Senator Obama was the 
almost  certain Democratic nominee. That context may have shaped some of 
their answers.  
We wanted to allow these students the fullest range of self-expression by  
asking a totally open ended question. We posed it this way: "If you could name  
the next president of the United States, who would it be?" The results were, 
we  believe, revealing. Senator Obama got almost 75% of all the votes; Senator  
McCain got just a little over 3 % and Senator Clinton less than 1%. It was  
interesting to note who else appeared on their list. These were their "dream"  
candidates, picked from outside the boundaries of realistic political 
thinking,  which is what our questionnaire was designed to encourage. Among their 
mentioned  favorites were: Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, former Vice President 
Al Gore  of Tennessee, Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, Mayor Rudy Giuliani of 
New York and  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California. Some students chose 
to range far  beyond the boundaries of expectations to name their favorite 
public figures, so  other names included in their choices for president were 
Oprah Winfrey, Matt  Lauer, Glenn Beck, Howard Stern, Chuck Norris and Stephen 
Colbert. One vote said  "Not McCain," another "Franklin D. Roosevelt." We were 
surprised that anyone in  this age group even remembered FDR. Two classmates 
cast their vote for the  poll-taker, John Lanier Hylton, though he is innocent 
of being one of them,  since in an effort to be totally fair, he refrained from 
voting at all.  
The issues these students hope the new president will address include world  
peace, alternative energy sources, education, poverty, taxes, North Korea, 
stem  cell research, the Israeli/Palestine conflict, the national debt, the 
problems  of illegal drugs and the issues facing the pharmaceutical industry, 
including  drug pricing, testing and the side effects that seem to plague a drug 
that has  been cleared by the FDA for public use, resulting in constant 
litigation..  
When these students were asked why they thought their particular choice for  
president would be best for the country, one could feel their hopes finding  
expression. Supporters of Senator Obama based their support of him on their  
conviction that he would, better than the other possibilities, pull America out  
of Iraq with no conditions and set up environmentally friendly programs that  
will encourage greenness. They believed that he had "good ideas," would 
develop  universal health care, not build fences across the Mexican border and 
allow  civil unions if not gay marriages. John McCain's supporters saw him as one 
who  would pull us out of Iraq slowly as conditions either improved or when 
victory  was won. They also believed he was honest. It was Governor Arnold 
Schwarzenegger  who appealed most to one because, if necessary "he would rule with 
an iron  fist." Others expressed the hope that their ideal candidate would 
"stop  unnecessary vaccinations" and "legalize marijuana." Several commented that 
they  preferred a president committed to negotiations with foreign countries 
rather  than attempting to dominate them militarily, which probably reflects 
what they  certainly see as the failure of the war in Iraq.  
What conclusions can we draw from this limited data? One is that Senator  
Obama has captured the imagination of the students in Falls Church just as he  
has with young people across America. Another is that government encroachment on 
 civil liberties seems a much bigger concern to these late adolescents than 
it is  for adults or that maybe a libertarian strain is running deeper in 
tomorrow's  generation than it does in today's. Teenagers are sensitive to the need 
to  protect what they feel are their "zones of privacy" and the limited 
rights they  believe they have in dealing with parents or other authority figures 
at school.  The great teenage passion to be liked by their peers may also have 
influenced  the importance these students gave to their perception of how the 
United States  is viewed abroad. One student linked libertarianism with her 
perception of  America's current low status in world opinion when she wrote with 
an exclamation  mark: "stop violating people's rights to preserve national 
security!" Probably  the most hopeful sign turned up by this survey became 
evident when we looked at  how these 10th, 11th and 12th grade students graded 
their own level of  involvement in the coming election. On a ten point scale they 
averaged out at  6.3. It that reflects how many of today's teenagers will 
actually vote when they  reach voting age, then it should be expected that they 
will cast ballots in much  greater percentages than the adult population has 
done in recent years.  
We offer these interpretations of the data received in our poll for all to  
consider and we thank the students at George Marshall High School in Falls  
Church, Virginia, for assisting us in this study.  
John Lanier Hylton and John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Larry Hester from Denver, Colorado, writes:  
You recently suggested that the split in Christianity today is between those  
who assert yesterday's religious explanations and those who find no meaning 
in  yesterday's religious explanations and give up on religion altogether. If 
that  is so, is Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great, a message from  
the religiously disillusioned? If so how do those religious people who defend  
the past deal with that book?  
Dear Larry,  
If I understand your question correctly, let me begin with three declarative  
statements: 

1. Religion must always be questioned
2. Theism can be  abandoned without abandoning God
3. Christopher Hitchens' book is a real  asset to the current debate. 

Now just let me put some flesh on each of  those statements.  
Since human beings are creatures of both time and space, and since we know  
from the work of Albert Einstein that time and space are relative categories  
that expand and contract in relation to each other, then we must conclude that  
any statement made by anyone, who is bound by time and space, will never be  
absolute. There are no propositional statements, secular or religious, that 
are  exempt from this principle. Words reduce all human experiences to 
relativity.  That is why every religious formula must be questioned; that is why no 
word of  any book is inerrant; that is why no proclamation of any ecclesiastical 
leader  is infallible; and finally, that is why no religious system or 
institution can  ever claim to possess the true faith. Religion is a journey into the 
mystery of  God. It is not a system of beliefs and creeds and when it becomes 
that, it  always becomes idolatrous and begins to die.  
Theism is not God. It is a human definition of God that assumes that God is a 
 being, perhaps the "Supreme Being," supernatural in power, dwelling outside 
the  world (usually thought of as above the sky), who periodically invades the 
world  in miraculous ways to answer human prayers or to effect the divine 
will.  
It is my sense that this definition of God has been mortally wounded by the  
successive blows of Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and 
Albert  Einstein, just to name a few. I do not believe, however, that this means 
that  God has been mortally wounded even if the theistic definition of God has 
been.  
Suppose God is not defined as "a being," but is simply experienced as a  
power, a presence. Then describing that experience is quite different from  
claiming to know who or what God is. Then the question is, "Are we delusional or  is 
this experience real?" I think God is real and I believe we are in the  
process of defining our God experience in a new way that will replace the dying  
theistic definition of the past.  
Finally, Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great, is a  description of 
the theistic God of the past who is dying. The theistic God  certainly appears 
in the Bible and is guilty of many things that are genuinely  immoral, like 
killing the firstborn male in every Egyptian household, stopping  the sun in the 
sky to allow more time for Joshua to slaughter the Amorites and  ordering 
genocide against the Amalekites through the prophet Samuel. Christians  need to 
remember that it has been the theistic God who has been responsible for  the 
development of such things as anti-Semitism, the Inquisition, and the  
oppression of people of color, women and homosexual persons. This deity has also  been 
perceived as justifying war, fighting crusades and creating slavery. Let us  
agree with Christopher Hitchens that this God is not great. We need to 
challenge  Christopher Hitchens' assumption, however, that this is the only way we can 
 think about or conceptualize God.  
I think of the God experience as the power of life, love and being flowing  
through the universe and coming to consciousness in human self-awareness alone. 
 I therefore feel that by living fully, loving wastefully and being all that 
I  can be I can make the God experience visible. I also believe that it is my  
Christian vocation to build a world where all people have a better chance to  
live, love and to be. It is when I do these two things, I believe, that I am  
engaging in the essence of worship. John Shelby Spong 



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