[Dialogue] 7/28/11, Spong: The Tragedy in Norway and Its Meaning
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Elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jul 28 11:01:16 EDT 2011
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The Tragedy in Norway and Its Meaning
My heart aches for Norway. I have visited that country where I lectured
in a large Lutheran Church in downtown Oslo and admired some of Norway’s
most creative clergy. I have also felt the reaction of Norway’s
ecclesiastically conservative Christian leaders who seem to believe that preserving
yesterday’s truth, not engaging the world, is their deepest commitment. Like
most of Scandinavia, Norway is predominantly a secular state, but the
Lutheran Church is still a part of its cultural heritage. It was in the
National Lutheran Cathedral of Oslo that the King and Queen, the Prime Minister
and a grieving nation gathered on Sunday last to mourn, to reflect, to
seek to comprehend and to find a pathway into their suddenly darkened future.
Time alone will tell us whether Norway’s tragedy is simply the grotesque
act of a mad man, or an overt sign of a cultural sickness that hangs over
all of us. The signs of that sickness are referenced in Anders Behring
Breivik’s “Manifesto,” but all of them also appear to be issues that are
present throughout the developed world. My goal in this column is to seek to
understand these signs and to place them into a larger context.
The now confessed perpetrator of this Norwegian horror can certainly be
classified as a mentally deranged man. In the ancient language of religion,
he is one who is possessed by “demons” that have taken over his rational
faculties. Mr. Breivik’s insanity is revealed in that he gave in to his
demons, but the content of his fears is present today all over the developed
world. He wrote about his conviction that the world in which he once felt
comfortable is now being taken away from him, causing him to experience a
loss of power and security. The issues he identified as signs of this
included immigration, Islam and the economic downturn that is lowering his
standard of living. All three are world-wide issues that need to be examined.
Immigration is a major fear the world over. There is hardly a developed
nation that is not wrestling with immigration issues. In Europe with the
creation of the Common Market, immigration barriers that once separated the
various nations have been lowered dramatically and people are now free to
seek opportunities anywhere in the European Union. Germany now has a strong
Turkish minority; France, a Libyan and Northern African minority, and the
UK, an Indian/Pakistani minority. Tensions over the presence of these “
foreign” elements, their values and their threat are real in each nation.
Immigration in turn weakens the homogeneity of each of these formerly tribal
populations. In the United States, the immigration issue is focused on
the porous Mexican border with increasingly strident laws being passed in
state after state to stop the illegal flow. In Australia and New Zealand the
European population is constantly threatened by what they perceive to be a
rising tide of Asian and Pacific Island people, who seek to reclaim their
“European-occupied” lands. As the world grows smaller and more
inter-connected, the inability to escape the pressures created by those who are
classified as “different” raises very deep feelings of xenophobia, in which
the “different ones” are defined quite specifically as the enemy.
Xenophobia is a primitive survival-related fear among human beings. It is
universally present and expresses itself in things like prejudice, racism,
persecution and extreme nationalism. None of us escapes our xenophobic origins.
Mr. Breivik’s immigration fear is widely shared.
The second aspect of the demons that appear to afflict Mr. Breivik has to
do with religion. He sees immigration, modest as it is in Norway, to be
also a threat to his religious convictions. He defines his nation as a “
Christian” nation and feels that the arrival of Muslims in his land is a
direct challenge to all that he values. Mr. Breivik has not yet been
identified with a particular Christian worshipping community, but his “Manifesto”
makes it clear that he sees “Christian Europe” under siege from Islam and
he has used the ancient language of the Crusades in which to shape his
fears.
A look at the nature of religion in its various forms reveals an
omni-present dark side, which becomes overt and obvious when that religious system
begins to make the exclusive claim that it alone possesses “the truth.”
This is the mentality that causes “true believers” to define those who are
outside its definition of faith as “infidels” and even to judge them
worthy of death. The presence in one’s world of another viable religion always
challenges these primitive religious claims that “our” system alone
possesses the only valid doorway to God. To keep that security-providing myth
intact, those with different ideas must be persecuted, jailed, killed or
driven away. Anti-Semitism in the West, including the Holocaust in
Christian Germany, is nothing less than a manifestation of this fear. Mr. Breivik’
s hatred of Islam is quite similar.
An even deeper religious threat is experienced from those who are
religious “insiders,” but who dare to see this “truth” from a different
perspective. They are then called “heretics.” Burning a religious opponent at
the stake is a highly irrational act, but it has been done in the name of God
and of “true religion” on too many occasions to count. This bizarre
behavior only indicates the depth of the threat that those who believe that
they hold “established truth” feel when a challenge arises. It also shows
the extent to which religious leaders will go to create the illusion that “
certainty” is their own possession. Only in this context do such religious
claims as the infallibility of the Pope and the inerrancy of the words of
scripture become understandable. Both claims are dismissed in
intellectual circles as laughingly absurd, but this very irrationality helps us to
understand the bizarre behavior of religious fanatics, even insane persons.
The last major element in helping to make sense of the rising tide of
anger in the Western world, but which seems to have reached insane levels in
Norway’s recent killer, is found in the rampant anxiety that destabilizes
borderline people everywhere when one adds an economic dimension and its
subsequent fears to the already volatile mix. Economic security is built on
the ability to provide for those you love and it rests on steady employment,
home ownership and health care protection. When these factors weaken, fear
inevitably rises. If one can find a target that appears to have caused
this plight then rage is focused. Popular targets include those who look
different and those whose religion and values are different.
When fears fasten on a symbolic target, the potential for a killing fury
is present. Sometimes symbolic victims are thought of as necessary to
kill. This is a pathology that has clearly crossed the boundary of sanity, but
the elements that make up this latent anxiety are real and they are known
and experienced, if we are honest, in all of us.
So while I grieve for the victims in the Norwegian tragedy, I also look at
my nation and I see tides of irrational anger rising in all directions. I
see lines being drawn in the sand. I see scape-goating and blame games
being played. I see a national political system that is dysfunctional. I
see religion being used to justify violence as abortion doctors are killed
and gay and lesbian people are victimized. I see racism as an active
element in the visceral anti-President Obama mentality that so motivates right
wing extremists. I see immigration exacerbating our most primitive
emotions, causing embarrassing laws to be passed in some states. I listen to
unbelievable levels of hostile rhetoric directed toward the government of
the United States I see the tension between the rich and the poor growing.
I watch angry demonstrations in Wisconsin, Ohio and Minnesota. I listen
to the political debate on whether hedge fund operators, who make billions
of dollars a year, should pay a higher income tax rate, which would bring
them up to the same rate that secretaries and truck drivers now pay. I see
political operatives who refuse to close corporate loopholes for
multi-national businesses, while seeking cuts in essential services to the poor,
like Medicaid, child support and tuition scholarships. I see a nation
motivated by greed, by an attitude of “let me get mine” with no regard for the
social consequences. I see an increasing despair among our people who
wonder about whether our government can either be fair or even solve urgent and
pressing problems. These things all build the tensions that boil over in
some to motivate insane acts of fury. Throughout history these things
have also been the prelude to revolutions. One has only to penetrate the
mind of an insane killer in Norway or to look at the history of France before
the French Revolution to see a vision of what happens in a society when
fear becomes rampant and when the normal ways to redress that anxiety no
longer work or are perceived to work no longer. Then one has only to look at
the history of France since that revolution to see how long it takes a
society to recover from a self-imposed trauma.
We live in a dangerous world. Ours is an increasingly interdependent
world, a world in which human differences are inescapable. No one can hide
today inside a tribal enclosure. Ours is also a world in which yesterday’s
religious verities are fading and nothing has yet emerged to replace them.
It is a world in which the economic downturn is destroying our social
fabric; a world in which leaders vie not to solve the problems, but to gain
political advantage over their opponents. It is in this kind of world that
all of us live and in which the unbalanced among us break, externalizing
their demons and then attacking them with cold-blooded killing fury.
Yes, Anders Behring Bievik is insane and in the service of that insanity
many lives were lost and many others were broken. My message is that our
world, I believe, is teetering on the edge of cultural insanity and unless
those fears are addressed quickly more violence can be expected from the
right and from the left, from religions that are historically quite capable
of violence and from those whose anger may be displaced, but it is none the
less real.
Today, I weep for Norway. Unless things change quickly tomorrow I may be
weeping for America and ultimately for the world.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online _here_
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Question & Answer
Madelyn & Jack Bolt from Michigan, via the Internet, write:
Question:
Have you read the recent book by Rob Bell “Love Wins,” containing his
thoughts on heaven and hell? He is a pastor in the Grand Rapids, Michigan,
area.
Answer:
Dear Madelyn and Jack,
Yes I have read about Rob Bell’s book “Love Wins” and welcome his voice
to the current debate. The debate is, however, not on his ideas expressed
in that book. Those ideas are in fact already in the mainstream in
religious academic circles. The debate is on the reception he has received from
the Evangelical base of American fundamentalism, which thought he was one
of them and who now discover he has moved out of their narrow definition.
He is being vigorously attacked there because he has grown beyond the
limits that fundamentalists can tolerate. That too will pass for this
evangelical thought process is dying despite the hysteria that its own rigor mortis
is creating. The idea that anyone can claim that God cannot or will not
be understood outside a narrow, imperialistic frame of reference based on
the idea that everyone who does not accept that point of view is doomed to
eternal punishment, is so weird and so absurd that it is not worthy of
debate. So I leave that to the Pat Robertsons and the Albert Mohlers of the
world. The fact is that people like them speak only to their narrow
constituency and generally offend everyone else. They make loud political noise,
but I refuse to believe that the average American does not recognize this
mentality for what it is – a limited response from limited people. I have
no objections to fundamentalists having strange opinions. I do object when
they try to impose their opinions with various coercive threats on
everyone else. The Tea Party Republicans seem to me to be infected with this
same sickness. We will simply have to live through it. They are the
21stCentury version of the “Know Nothing Party” of the 19th Century. These types
of responses always overstep and self destruct so I am content to let them
do so.
~John Shelby Spong
Announcements
A Special Announcement from Bishop Spong’s Publisher
John Shelby Spong – John A. T. Robinson Lectureship Created in the UK
The Very Reverend Peter Francis, Warden and Dean of the Gladstone Library
in Hawarden, United Kingdom recently announced the formation of an annual
lectureship on progressive theology to begin in 2013. This lectureship
will be named the John Shelby Spong-John A. T. Robinson Lectureship, honoring
two of the Anglican Communion’s best known progressive bishops. Bishop
Spong, who was elected a Fellow of the Gladstone Library by the Board of
Trustees some years ago, has been a guest lecturer at the Library regularly
over the last twelve years. Bishop Robinson, who died in 1983 and who was
Bishop Spong’s mentor and friend, has by the action of his family donated
all of his extensive collection of personal and theological books to the
Gladstone Library. Other notable Church of England theologians who have
placed their books in the care of this Library include Professor Don Cupitt of
Cambridge University and Dr. Eric James, the official biographer of John A.
T. Robinson.
The Gladstone Library has become a powerful force in the task of
re-thinking Christianity for a new century and affirming the work of the Anglican
Communion’s pioneer thinkers.
Funds to endow this lectureship will be solicited beginning in 2012. With
the announcement made at the end of Bishop Spong’s last conference there
this summer a sum of 5000 pounds was raised in pledges from the conference
attendees alone.
For further information contact Peter Francis, The Gladstone Library, St.
Deiniol’s Church Lane, Hawarden, Flintshire CH5 3DF United Kingdom.
Further Announcements from the Publisher
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