[Dialogue] 1/05/12, Spong: The Monolithic Conservatism of the American Heartland Is Not So Monolithic!

Thu Jan 5 11:55:46 EST 2012

Ellie, Randy et. al.

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From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net [mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Ellie Stock
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 11:17
To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net; OE at wedgeblade.net
Subject: [Dialogue] 1/05/12, Spong: The Monolithic Conservatism of the American Heartland Is Not So Monolithic!

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The Monolithic Conservatism of the American Heartland Is Not So Monolithic!

There are times when one’s perceptions are challenged and one’s stereotypical prejudices are shattered.  This happened to me in recent days when I fulfilled invitations to speak in three cities that one thinks of as traditional, heartland cities.  They were Birmingham, Alabama, Tupelo, Mississippi, and Kansas City, Missouri.  I share with my readers these experiences and my own response of being surprised by joy.

I went to Birmingham under the auspices of an organization called SPAFER, which stands for South Points Association for Exploring Religion.  The brainchild of a Presbyterian minister named Ken Forbes, this organization was designed to allow people in the Bible Belt of the South to encounter a non-fundamentalist version of Christianity.  In some ways, it is obviously a counter-cultural movement.  At its beginning the traditional religious voices of the South responded to SPAFER by denouncing this movement and s separating themselves from it, portraying it as “heretical,” perhaps, they hinted with great concern, even “communist.”  I have been the featured speaker at SPAFER events on two previous occasions beginning in 2002.  On one of these earlier events the Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, fearful I suspect of “guilt by association,” took pains to tell the media that I was not in Alabama under the auspices of the Episcopal Church.  I was also invited to be a guest on a morning television talk show in which the co-hosts, who were husband and wife, were consistently rude and derogatory in their interview, which prompted me to ask them whether they were always this rude to their invited guests or if I was somehow being singled out for this special honor?  Religious rudeness seems to be thought of as a virtue in conservative or fundamentalistic circles and it always stems from an assumption that truth is something they and they alone possess.

The reality was, however, that crowds of people attended those lectures, making me aware that there is a silent, non-fundamentalist minority of some significance in the Bible Belt of the South, hungry for meaning and integrity in their understanding of Christianity.  They cannot find this in their local churches so they sink into passive silence.  Perhaps, because of their silence, this audience is simply not in the consciousness of the traditional clergy.

On this year’s trip, the audience was not as large, but it was still substantial.  Its slightly diminished size can be accounted for, at least in part, by the fact that we were competing with the football game between number-one ranked Louisiana State University and number-two ranked University of Alabama.  If not apparent in a larger attendance, there were, nonetheless, other signs signaling that a new breeze was blowing in the South.  Many of the people who attended were social and economic leaders in the community.  The Southside Baptist Church, a magnificent structure in downtown Birmingham, asked for the privilege of hosting the lectureship.  The leadership of SPAFER, which originally was an Alabama only organization, has moved into other Southern cities in what they call “Roadhouse Communities,” that is, groups of ten to twenty people, meeting on a monthly basis, to explore their faith in ways that their churches would not allow them to do.  The questions following the lecture where consistently thoughtful and were posed, not to counter some perceived threat to their religion’s security, but to clarify, to expand or to open new approaches.  I left Birmingham feeling that a shift in consciousness in the deep South was well underway.  One additional sign of that shift was visible in the huge levels of discomfort that these mainstream Alabama citizens now seemed to have with the “Arizona-type” anti-immigration laws recently passed by the legislature of Alabama and signed by the governor.  One native Alabaman said to me in a letter that Alabama “seems not to be able to function without a visible victim.  First, it was the African-Americans, then it was the homosexuals and now it is the brown-skinned Mexican immigrants.” Yet the over-reaction present in that anti-immigration legislation is now bringing wide spread economic pain to all segments of the society including un-harvested crops in the fields of Alabama farmers, something that those who pushed for the passage of these laws simply did not anticipate. Amendment and/or repeal of these laws is now obviously under discussion.

We went next to Tupelo, Mississippi.  The Tupelo lecture was housed in something called the Link Centre, which is directed by a Harvard graduate named Melanie Deas.  It was held at 2:00 pm on a Sunday afternoon, hardly a prime time for a church going occasion.  Yet there were almost a hundred people in attendance and a significant number of them were young people.  In this lecture, I spoke quite specifically to the fears inside organized religion in America about both homosexuality and evolution.  This gathering included some quite openly-gay people.  I asked them whether they were seeing a shift away from the homophobic hostility that has long marked the cultural atmosphere in the deep South, spread as it is by evangelical and conservative Catholic churches. They said “Yes,” and gave content to this answer by saying: “Now, it is OK to be gay in Mississippi, but you are not supposed to talk about it.”  As strange as that sounded to me, it is in fact a rather significant shift over the last 20 years.

The hot topic among the people we met at a social event, housed in the home of one of Tupelo’s most prominent citizens, was, however, not the gay issue, but the state-wide referendum that had been placed on the November ballot to declare that human life began the moment the egg was fertilized.  This law, if passed, would in fact ban abortion in all circumstances in Mississippi.  We learned at that gathering that every candidate for public office, both Democrat and Republican, had endorsed this proposition, including Haley Barbour, the popular Republican governor.  In fact, there had been no local or statewide political leader who had opposed it. All of the vocal religious voices were also loud in their support, leading to the general assumption that it would pass by a wide margin.  They were, however, destined to discover that even in Mississippi, there is a silent vote of which no one seemed to be aware and this measure was defeated by a substantial majority, embarrassing both the political and religious establishment.  Mississippi, thought to be the most anti-abortion state in the nation, was in fact not in favor of this draconian measure. Monolithic Mississippi was not so monolithic after all.

Next, we went to Lee’s Summit, Missouri, to do an event for the Unity Movement at its national headquarters, a truly beautiful campus.  Unity had bought three tables at a Kansas City Interfaith luncheon and Christine and I were invited to join their delegation at this event.  There were some 500 people present at this elegant luncheon, including a significant part of the Kansas City social and political establishment.  The Mistress of Ceremonies for this event was a popular, local Kansas City Television News anchor.  The blessing of God before the meal was offered by representatives of 14 different religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Wicca, Sufi and Baha’i.  Two highly- esteemed recognition awards were handed out, one to an individual and one to an institution, for effective work in contributing to the task of building “an interfaith atmosphere of respect” that makes Kansas City “a welcoming center to all people.”   The honored woman was Donna Ziegenhorn, who, in her attempt to build interfaith understanding, had produced a highly-acclaimed film entitled The Hindu and the Cowboy that had taken its message of interfaith respect to countless numbers of school children and adults across that city.  The honored institution was no less that the prestigious Kansas City Public Library, which had sponsored classes, designed to build mutual respect and religious tolerance into being saluted as community values.  A spokesperson for the library, Crosby Kemper, received the award on behalf of the library.  He told the assembled people of his own personal journey into interfaith understanding.  He happened to be, not only a practicing Episcopalian, but a direct descendant of one of the great missionary bishops of the Episcopal Church in the West, the Rt. Rev. Jackson Kemper.  Mr. Kemper is also a highly respected attorney and a recognized leader of the city.

Kansas City, I learned, has dedicated great energy particularly since the 9/11/2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, to foster an atmosphere of respect and tolerance among the diverse religious communities of that city.  It had been done not with a guilt message or with repression, but by educating its citizens to enable them to recognize the beauty and integrity found in every religious tradition.  I was deeply moved by the commitment of this city in the heartland of America to this cause and I immediately revised my own assessment of the status of both religion and sensitivity in the Midwest.

The world is changing.  A Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham hosts an event that pushes the edges of Christianity; the people of Mississippi defeat a right wing attempt to trample on the rights of women’s freedom to make decisions for themselves without political interference, and 500 people, including some of the movers and shakers in Kansas City, gather to extol the beauty of interfaith respect and to proclaim themselves a city of welcome to all.  This country is coming to a new consciousness.  For many the pace seems pitifully slow, but the reality is that it is coming and heightened consciousness always moves inexorably in a single forward direction.  The monolithic behavior of the past is not nearly as monolithic as I once thought.

~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online  <http://tcpc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=589a069b09&e=db34daa597> here.

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John Shelby Spong, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark emeritus

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Question & Answer

Stephen, via the Internet, writes:

Question:

I am often disheartened by the mind set of some Christians—the mentality of which I used to be part—that they alone seem to possess the truth.  It becomes impossible then to discuss Christianity or have any sort of theological discussion “beyond theism.”  With all of the variations of Christianity telling them that believing these doctrines – the Virgin Birth, the resurrection, etc, is a prerequisite to being a disciple, how does one go about asking questions about God without offending or frightening the “truth bearers?”

Answer:

Dear Stephen,

Anyone who believes that he or she possesses in some creed, in the Bible or in the doctrinal and dogmatic teaching of a particular Church the ultimate truth of God reveals himself or herself to be little more than a frightened, insecure, uninformed person.  One cannot engage such a person in serious dialogue for there is nothing to be gained by the endeavor.  It is therefore a waste of time. One does not argue rationally against the irrational claims of biblical inerrancy or papal infallibility!!

The idea that any person, any church or any religious tradition could ever embody the ultimate mystery of God is little more that hysterical idolatry.  Those who hold that point of view have to defend it at all times and against all comers or else seek to validate it by imposing it on others.  Much of our conversion and missionary activity is little more than the product of an attitude that leads to bigotry, religious persecution, inquisitions and religious wars.  If the biblical axiom that one judges behavior by the fruit it produces is accurate, then this religious attitude can hardly be anything other than evil.  Because claims of absolute certainty are normally wrapped up in religious language does not make them virtues.  Religious imperialism is no more virtuous that political imperialism.

So you need to broaden your experience of religious people from those who possess the truth to those who seek the truth.  This means that you seek the company of those who know that the holy God cannot be reduced to a set of human words and those who understand that “graven images” can be created not only out of gold and silver, but also out of nothing less than human words.

~John Shelby Spong

  _____  

Register by Monday, January 9, for early bird discount!

Westar Institute

Spring Meeting
March 21–24, 2012
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 <http://tcpc.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=2ba9e7dca7&e=db34daa597> Register for the Religious Literacy Seminar

All in the Family
A Conversation about Marriage, Family, and Sexuality

Featuring

  <http://johnshelbyspong.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Spong_Westar_2012.jpg> 

John Shelby Spong, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark emeritus

Workshop- Thursday, March 22
Shifting the Christian Paradigm from Salvation and Atonement to Life and Wholeness

Interview - Friday evening, March 23
A Conversation with Jack Spong about Marriage, Family, Sexuality

Panel - Saturday morning, March 24
Westar Fellows on the Legacy of John Shelby Spong

  _____  

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