[Dialogue] 9/23/10, Spong: China Revisited, Part III

Thu Sep 23 11:43:10 CDT 2010

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Thursday September 23, 2010 

China Revisited, Part III

There are no Gideon Bibles in the hotel rooms of modern China. There are not even books expressing the beauty of Buddhism, Taoism or the writings of Confucius. There is not even the last will and testament of Conrad Hilton! The emphasis of this nation is almost totally on material well being. I experienced religion in China as almost non-existent at best, still viewed with hostility at worst. In our time in this ancient land, I saw only two pagodas and both were places for tourists to visit and not places in which people might worship. I saw no Buddhist temples and no statues of Buddha to which human yearnings might be expressed. The only Buddhas I saw were in the tourist shops and they were icons of the fat Buddha, the laughing Buddha. One Chinese guide referred to obese American tourist s as having "Buddha bellies" and told us that the purpose of the statues of the fat Buddha was that by rubbing the Buddha's belly one could have good luck. That was as close to a religious motif as I experienced. In Thailand several years ago, Buddhist monks in their distinctive orange garb were a familiar public sight and occupied an honored position in the culture's fabric. During the latter stages of the Vietnam War, the public immolation of Buddhist monks was a powerful, intense and effective protest against that war and became a world wide story.
In all of the lectures and briefings heard while in China, religion was mentioned only once and that was pejoratively. The Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation, we were told, has served only the purpose of keeping people content with their then dismal status, since Buddhism promised that by being content with their lot now, they would gain for themselves a more favorable status in the next incarnation. Religion, they said, had been nothing more than a tool of the wealthy with which to control and to pacify the masses. It was an opiate for the people, which they were eager to erase from their memories.
>From time to time an allusion to religion would come up tangentially. In a presentation on China's "one child per family" policy, the government, we were told, made birth control devices, principally the contraceptive pill and condoms, universally and freely available without any protest from any religious source. In the discussion about determining the health and sex of the unborn, we were told that abortion for either a defective fetus or an unwanted gender was both government-sponsored and freely available. Once again, there was no debate, we were told, from any religious source. We also learned from background reading that during the implementation and enforcement of this one child per family policy, forced sterilization of women was widespread. When second pregnancies occurred, forced abortions were ruthlessly carried out even in the third trimester or at near term. The state's right to control the population of the people was not treated differently from its cont rolling the use of the land or engineering the growth of cattle or sheep. The goals might well be laudatory but the tactics used were frequently a violation of the most basic of human freedoms.
I met one person who admitted to being a Buddhist only to amend that statement quickly by saying "I was raised as a Buddhist." When asked what she meant, she replied, "Buddhism is an internal thing. It is no longer an external religion. No one attends a Buddhist temple or participates in Buddhist worship." The closest thing to a cultural religious celebration, she said, was the observance of the Chinese New Year. It appeared that religion had become so benign that no government energy was needed to oppose its influence. I found China to be the most secular, post-religious culture I have ever encountered.
On an earlier trip to China in 1988, I had actually felt encouraged by what I saw of the Chinese Christian movement. It was small and statistically irrelevant as a force in China's burgeoning population, but it seemed to me to possess integrity since it had shed its ties to western powers, abandoned western denominational structures and was well on its way to becoming indigenously Chinese. In that year I preached in a packed Chinese Christian church in Shanghai and visited a theological seminary where candidates for ordination were being trained. During its enforced exile, Chinese Christianity had become primarily a lay-led, largely non-institutional movement. On this trip, however, I saw no evidence of its presence. I am aware of the Vatican's continuing struggle over who has the right to name China's Catholic leaders, but while that might be a big issue in Rome it is not significant in China. The government officially is not anti-religious, but it is anti-any outside authority being imposed on anything Chinese.
Two things came to my mind as I tried to understand China's emerging future. One was a reference in Colleen McCullough's Australian novel, The Thorn Birds, in which she described the attitude of outback sheep herders toward their flocks. Australian outback ranches would contain literally thousands of acres and tens of thousands of sheep. The flocks were indeed so numerous that one individual sheep seemed to be of little value. The process of castrating the lambs to ensure their use for eating needed to be done quickly and efficiently so these herders would accomplish this task simply by biting off the animal's testicles and spitting them out. She compared this to the way pet dogs were treated in New York City where, in their scarcity, they were dressed for the weather, fed a healthy diet and cared for by a host of veterinarians. Her point was that great numbers of animals create an attitude in which no individual animal was valued while scarcity causes pets to b e treated with almost excessive pampering and caring. Perhaps the same thing is true in regard to human beings. In the west, that has only recently begun to be aware of overpopulation, the individual and individual rights have generally been respected. In a massive population like China's current 1.3 billion people individual rights can no longer be protected if they are in conflict with the needs of the whole society. Maybe it is inevitable that with overpopulation, individual rights will always be sacrificed for the well being of the whole. If that is so, the human rights violations visible in China today are simply the prelude to what the whole world faces if human population continues to expand uncontrollably, as it has done in the last century. It is a scary, even a sobering thought, but I suspect a real one.
The other image that came to my mind was the famous kitchen debate that took place in 1959 in Moscow between Vice President Richard Nixon of the United States and Communist Party General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. The debate was about which system, capitalism or communism, could produce the higher standard of living for its people. It was conducted at a World's Fair that had all the most modern kitchen, labor-saving devices on display. It was also basically a materialistic debate. The goal was for each leader to tout the material splendor that provided "the good life" for the majority of its citizens. America's ingenuity was at that time clearly superior to that of the leading nation in the communist world. Certainly, at that time, the average American standard of living clearly topped that of the Soviet Union. Even then, however, the material wealth in the west was unevenly distributed. In the richest land in the world, people at the edges were still homeless and still hungry and literally millions had no health care. In the Soviet Union, the wealth at the top was clearly capped, but the poverty at the bottom was also being addressed. What worried me in that debate, however, was that free enterprise capitalism was being advocated only for its ability to create material wealth. China has today combined communist control with market capitalism to create the most dramatic rise in the standard of living of a major nation that I have ever witnessed. They might even demonstrate in time that total state control of market forces for the benefit of the people might well win the contest for material plenty. What I saw in China would never convince me, however, that the sacrifice of human freedom for material plenty represented a superior system.
It is the deepest principles of my religion that for me stand as the front line of defense against the violation of human dignity. Is self-conscious human life holy? I think it is. Is self-conscious human life made more deeply and fully human by the experience of being loved and infinitely valued? I think it is. Is the call of self-conscious human life to be all that each of us can be an ultimate value around which society must be organized? I think it is. I do not know how else the dignity of human life will ever be preserved if producing material plenty for all is the only and ultimate value affirmed by any government or any economic system. Human value rests, I believe, on a definition of human life as of infinite worth. I do not believe that value is one that can be sacrificed in the achievement of economic plenty. It is also not achievable unless the political and economic system contains a dedication to the idea of the sacredness of life.
Free enterprise capitalism has its faults. It is propelled far too often by greed and ignores the plight of the poor. It shares its wealth with the masses too unfairly, but it nonetheless does not allow the individual to be totally dehumanized by the state and treated only as a cog in a great economic wheel. It still salutes individual rights grounded in a religious definition of what it means to be human. I will fight to maintain that value even as I fight to make the economic system of the west more fair and more compassionate. If we compete with the communist world only on the basis of which system can create the most wealth, China may very well win that contest in the future. Indeed today China finances America's way of life by being the primary holder of America's debt. Yet the value, the sacredness of human life, is so central and so important to me that it should trump economic plenty every time. It is that which I believe that only a religious understanding of life can ultimately provide. This is why I am a Christian. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Deanna MacKinnon from Hamilton, Ontario, writes:
What advice would you give to a person who is experiencing a health crisis (from which he or she may not recover) with regard to involving God in his/her recovery or death?

Dear Deanna,
Before I could give advice to one that you describe, I would need to know so much more. What is the disease? What is the prognosis? What is the religious background of the person? What are the resources — personal, family, spiritual and emotional — with which they deal with the life and death issue? There is no one–size–fits–all panacea for facing either pain or mortality.
All of us, however, have to do it at some point in our lives. Some do it with great courage and integrity, while others need great help and support. Most of us do not know which way it will be for us until we actually face it ourselves. What is important in the pastoral relationship is the trust that exists between the person in crisis and the one who is privileged to be pastor. There are no quick fixes. There are only long term relationships and growing understandings.
I hope the person about whom you write can find a trusted friend or a skillful pastor who can walk with him or her into this critical moment in life. Ultimately, each of us enters this world and departs from this world alone, but we are born into a family and we can walk with loved ones up to the moment of death. We are blessed when a loving family receives us at birth and when loving friends, partners, spouses or family can walk the last mile with us.
Live well.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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