[Dialogue] 1/13/11, Spong: Facing Hard Choices in the 21st Century. It’s Either Hogs or Hines!

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Facing Hard Choices in the 21st Century. It’s Either Hogs or Hines!
In the last half of the 19th century a country doctor named Edgar Hines lived with his family that included two sons, Edgar jr. and John Elbridge in Oconee County, South Carolina, near Clemson University.  Edgar Hines, Jr. went on to become an outstanding doctor.  John Elbridge Hines grew up to become the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church and probably the outstanding world leader in religion produced by the Episcopal Church in the 20th century.  Bishop Hines was graced with a unique ability to see issues as they emerged in the life of our society while they were still embryonic.  He then acted to address them before they became major crises and thus while action was still possible.  This prescience is what I believe is the unique gift of those who Christians have called prophets.  Prophets have never been predictors of the future, as biblical literalists like to contend.  They are, rather, the discoverers of the future as it is being born, because they know how to read the contemporary signs of the times.  Bishop Hines was this kind of prophet.  During the urban riots of the 1960’s in America, while typical politicians were calling for the imposition of “law and order,” John Hines was walking the streets of our erupting cities in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, Detroit, Cleveland and Newark, talking to the people who lived there, listening to the rage, the sense of hopelessness and despair that was fueling the outbreaks of violence and discovering how out-of-touch with these human issues the institutional forms of Christianity really were.  Then, in acts of powerful and courageous leadership, he called the Episcopal Church to re-order its priorities to put human need before institutional security; to recognize that Christian mission also meant empowering the powerless.  From his study of history John Hines demonstrated the profound lesson of human civilization, namely that powerless people are always exploited people.  This insight signaled to him that by empowering the powerless ones an effective blow against exploitation is being struck.  He illustrated this insight in Christian history by pointing to the treatment of the powerless ones, whether they were people of color, women or homosexuals, all of whom have been exploited not only by western people, but also by professing Christians.  John Hines laid these ideas before the church he headed and his church responded to his leadership with the boldest initiative I have ever known a religious institution to undertake.  They began to fund as a primary part of this church’s ministry a program that would give powerless people the power to determine their own future. Of course, it was controversial!  Of course, dislocation resulted!  Of course, establishment values and establishment people were threatened.  Yes and of course, they struck back, withholding their contributions, demanding that the church “stick to religion” and “quit its involvement in politics,” as if Christianity had ever in its history been a religion that tended to the “things of the spirit” and not to the call to give life to all and to give it abundantly.  It was probably the most glorious chapter in the history of the Episcopal Church.  Yes, our church lost members and it lost financial support, but it discovered its integrity and the realization dawned on us that the Church will die of boredom long before it dies of controversy.  John Hines was then and is now my ultimate ecclesiastical hero; he was and is my ultimate role model.  A photograph of him sits before me at my desk until this very moment.  It has been there for years.  He was the first person with whom I talked when I was elected Bishop of Newark in 1976.  I later worked to get his biography published so that his kind of leadership would never be forgotten.  The Biography was entitled Granite on Fire and was written by Ken Kesselus.  Until John Hines died, hardly a week went by that we did not talk on the phone.
I asked John Hines on one occasion to help me to understand how a lad could grow up in the little town of Seneca, South Carolina, known for its fundamentalism in religion and its conservatism in politics, and become a world leader in religion battling for the human rights of the victims of our culture’s prejudices.  He responded by telling me a story about his father, Dr. Edgar Hines, who, in addition to his private medical practice, had also been appointed the County Health Officer for Oconee County, South Carolina.
Dr. Hines, he said, became aware of the health risk to the people, caused by the fact that in that poor farming region, people kept hogs in their fenced-in backyards, where the ground water in the wells was susceptible to infiltration by diseases carried in the feces of the pigs, making an outbreak of cholera a distinct possibility. This impending danger caused him to propose to the county commissioners the passing of a county ordinance, which would require the housing of pigs to be located a sufficient number of yards away from human dwellings.  For the people of Oconee County, South Carolina, this was an unheard of and unappreciated interference on the part of government in the private lives of these farmers and they struck back with fury.  The county commissioners, far more responsive to the votes of these disturbed citizens than they were to the warnings of a country doctor, refused to pass such an ordinance. Dr. Hines then informed the commissioners that without such an ordinance, he could no longer be responsible for the health of the people and was thus prepared to offer his resignation.  This was no idle threat for doctors in the 19th century in rural South Carolina were scarce and replacing Dr. Hines would be almost impossible.  In the face of his threat, the county commissioners agreed to a reconsideration of their vote at the next official meeting.  It was the primary county-wide topic of conversation before the re-consideration meeting occurred.  The local newspaper trumpeted the debate with a headline on page one of the weekly paper “It’s either Hogs or Hines.” When the meeting was finally held, the hogs won by a 3-2 vote.  Dr Hines resigned.
Within six weeks, the daughter of the chairman of the county commissioners contracted cholera and died.  An outbreak of cholera spread throughout the county creating a major health crisis.  Shortly thereafter the Commissioners reversed their decision and pigs and humans were legally separated by a sufficient distance to minimize future epidemics.  It was from this childhood memory that Bishop Hines came to understand that the role of the prophet is to understand life so deeply that you can see a crisis before it develops and step out to meet or even to divert it while there is still time.
I though of this principle and of John Hines as well on two occasions recently.  One had to do with the debate on whether or not to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire as the law that inaugurated them called for them to do.   Over the next decade these tax benefits for the wealthiest 2% of our population will add more than a trillion new dollars to our national debt.  To sustain these tax benefits, the United States will inevitably have to borrow the money from either China or Saudi Arabia.  That reality raises to the level of the inevitable the fact that somewhere down the road this nation runs the risk of bankruptcy.  This in turn means that this momentary enrichment of the few will inevitably result in long term disaster for the entire nation.  To sweeten this irresponsible tax bill and thus to gain sufficient liberal support to pass the measure, additional tax benefits for unemployed people and a drop in payroll taxes for the middle class were also approved.  At the same time that this tax bill was being debated, a bi-partisan task force, headed by Democrat Erskine Bowles, the former chief of staff to President Clinton and Republican Alan K. Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming and a major party leader, were confronting the Administration and the Congress with the impending fiscal disaster facing this nation if the skyrocketing deficit is not brought under control.  Their bi-partisan report called for a radical revamping of America’s tax structure, closing all of the loopholes, which are used primarily by the rich to lower their tax obligations.  This would mean, if adopted, ending many exemptions that are “sacred cows” like mortgage interest and charitable contributions.  It would mean the lengthening of the years one must work to be eligible for social security; as well as tempering the amount of social security the very wealthy are allowed to receive.  It would mean cutting defense spending that still represents an out-of-bounds percentage of the national budget.  The report of this commission could not get enough votes from its own members to require Congress to take up their proposals.  Please note that the vote to require Congress to take up this report did not require that they pass any of its provisions, but only that a consideration of this report and its recommendations would be forced on our elected officials.
The second occasion in which John Hines insight came to my mind occurred when I continued to hear right wing people condemn climate change warnings as something coming from “neo-fascist environmentalists.”  They maintain that climate change, which they continue to call “global warming,” is a myth that can be dismissed with every winter storm.  At the same time, the melting of the Arctic ice cap has not only threatened the polar bears with extinction, but has set off international competition for the oil that might become accessible if new passageways through the Arctic are opened up.  At the other end of our planet in Antarctica, a New York Times feature in December warned of the decline and possible extinction of its penguin population whose food supply has been disrupted by the melting ice caps.  The choice the leaders of this nation face today is between doing only what we are now doing for the sake of immediate profits or to face the reality of the coming environmental crisis and to act responsibly to divert it.
Our way of life is at stake in the out-of-control national debt.  The life of our planet is at stake in the environmental crisis. Yet no alarm bells are being sounded nationally.  Dr. Edgar Hines, where are you now that the nation and the world, not just the people of Oconee County, S.C., need you?   Where is your successor in our country today?
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Michael, an Anglican priest from the United Kingdom writes:
Question:
As an ordained member of the Church of England, I do not think that Jesus is the founder of Christianity or that he intended to create the institution called “the Church.” My study, including the reading of your books, leads me to the conclusion that he sought to reform Judaism, to call people to share his experience of the God presence, an experience that helps people to know abundant life. (I’m still trying to find my way there!) The challenge then, for me as a clergyperson, is whether I simply bring comfort to the dying – individuals, congregations, the church – or a somewhat ill formed vision of the resurrection experience beyond, but not instead of death.
Your words to me the first time we met in England were “be of good courage, Mike, they can only kill you.” Whether you realized it or not, there was a great truth in those words. If I choose to challenge the “domination system” of the church then I know because of my personal vulnerabilities it could “kill me.” If I don’t, then suppressing that challenge is creating as dis-ease within me, which will cause me to wither away into the shadow of my being. At this point in time Buddhism (without a deity) seems to be a healthier and a better option. The wisdom teaching of Jesus and the Buddha feed my soul in equal measure. I would prefer to sit in a meditation hall than most church buildings.

Answer:
Dear Michael,
Thank you for your letter. I would like to use your letter, with your identity blurred, to address your issues publicly. Let me say first that you might be surprised to learn that you are not alone. The themes you raise in your letter come to me from many ordained people in many Christian traditions. The first thing all of us must see and accept is that God is clearly not a Christian and Christianity has no ultimate hold on the truth of God. Such claims represent little more than institutional power claims. If the people of your congregation could hear what you are really saying more of them would agree with you than you now imagine. Many lay people do not bring these issues up because they do not want to upset their pastor and they do not believe that any alternatives will be forthcoming. There would, however, be a few whose hold on a phony religious security system is so fragile that they would be threatened and as usual they would be loud and negative. A church run to keep the weakest and most immature of its members happy, however, will never be a church that is able to lead anyone into the reality of today’s world. Some of our clergy, bishops and institutional leaders, including those who sit on the thrones of the Vatican and Canterbury, need to embrace that reality, to recognize its truth and to respond appropriately.
I have great admiration for you, Michael, and believe the church would be much less viable without you and people like you. We can change Christianity, but only from the inside. The question is can those of us who see the need for change survive the struggle it will require?
My best.
John Shelby Spong





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