[Oe List ...] Spong, 1/22/09: Lessons from the Obama Inauguration

Thu Jan 22 14:00:24 EST 2009

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Thursday January 22, 2009 

Lessons From the Obama Inauguration

In the days before the inauguration of President Obama, I happened to be reading a biography of the English abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759 and 1833), written by Eric Metaxas. The timing was fortuitous. Both illustrated for me how consciousness always changes, and revealed the role that institutional religion plays in betraying its principles and delaying the birth of a new human vision in the service of its own interests. Then I understood why institutional Christianity is not an effective change agent and why religious leadership normally comes from the fringes, the edges or the marginalized. This is true whether the issue be slavery, segregation, racism, feminism or homophobia. Ecclesiastical leaders protect not truth but institutional self-interest, which they seek to elevate above moral principles. This perception is so consistent that one can literally change the real names of the players and still observe that the process follows a set script, using delaying tactics, projections and disguising guilt as if it were a virtue. I start this analysis by looking at slavery through the eyes of Wilberforce.
White Europeans who had participated in slavery always sought to perfume it by pointing out that that they were not the first to engage in20this practice, as if that somehow freed them of their complicity. Slavery has in fact been practiced in some form throughout most of human history. Originally slavery was not based on race as the earliest slaves tended to be civilian populations and military personnel conquered in warfare. The ownership of slaves has been historically a mark of social distinction, a sign of wealth. All ancient kings had slaves. The Pope has owned slaves. The scriptures of both the Jews and the Christians legitimized this institution. In the Torah the Jews were told they must not enslave their own people, but could take slaves from neighboring countries. Slavery was such an accepted social institution in the early church that Paul addressed only the abuse of slaves, never the evil of the institution itself. 

Arab traders appear to have been the first to find profit in black, human cargo. Those profits rose to new heights when the European colonial nations began to open up rich farming land in the New World, far enough away for the consciences of Christian Europeans not to be bothered. Cheap slave labor made Europe the Arabs' best customer. In time the Europeans decided that they could cut out the Arab middleman and cut costs even more, so European slave ships became standard practice. This set up the traditional cultural conflict between profits and ethics. So long as the slavery was across the sea, profits were always the winner, thus slavery was sanctioned in far away colonial lands, like America and the West Indies.
0ASlavery was also justified on the basis of 17th and 18th century assumptions that people of color in general, and black African people in particular, were inferior creatures who needed to be governed and directed by the superior Caucasians. Western scientists actually endorsed these conclusions and carried out sophisticated studies of such secondary racial characteristics as the flatness of African noses, the thickness of African lips and the operation of the sweat glands of tropical people to make their case for black human inferiority. Slavery was sold to the "Christian world" as a humane practice in which white people offered the benefits of civilization to the Africans as an act of kind paternalism. That was, of course, little more than conscience-soothing propaganda, but it kept the forces of moral repugnance at bay.

The way the practice of slavery was carried out, however, was never humane. The people who were defined as "black cargo" were chained together and forced into the hull of the slave ship for the Atlantic passage. On most slave ships the lure of profit mandated that every inch of space be utilized. There was normally not sufficient space for the slaves even to lie down. Food was scarce and of poor quality. Malnutrition and diarrhea were common. The slaves were forced to relieve their kidneys and bowels in public troughs, while still manacled to one another. These troughs were emptied infrequently, making odors stifling and infections common. Only when the loss of life became so high, exceeding 25 pe
rcent on each ship, and thus began to affect profits, were any of these practices modified. It was also discovered that the sailors were not immune from the spread of these infections. It was thus self-interest, not moral principles, that the Christian slave traders claimed to believe that served to improve the lot of the slaves over time. 

William Wilberforce, both a Member of Parliament and a lay evangelical Christian deeply touched by the preaching of John Wesley, began his abolition campaign by making known the full horror of the treatment slaves endured, from their kidnapping to their lives under their slave masters in the New World. By appealing to the human conscience in this way, he raised support for this cause about which he was single minded, but he also raised the ire of those whose financial well-being was put in jeopardy by the threat of abolition. Typical of the human battles in which profits are threatened by principles, a counteroffensive was undertaken by those who were called "moderates." These were the people who wanted to get rid of the abuses of slavery but not of the institution itself. Rather than abolish slavery, they wanted only to abolish the evil treatment of the slaves. Thus these "moderates" actually served to soothe the Western conscience sufficiently to allow slavery to continue to live for decades more. That is the way it has always been and perhaps always will be in the rising consciousness of a changing world. These "moderates" did not understand that moderation in support
 of an immoral principle is always a vice. It is never a virtue. It only serves to help people to pretend that a vice can be made virtuous. The same thing has happened in every great social upheaval.

I recall well the time more than 50 years ago when segregation was called "inherently unequal" by a 9-0 vote in a 1954 decision of America's Supreme Court, which ordered segregation to be dismantled "with all deliberate speed." In that moment, "religious moderates" appeared all over the South to serve the purpose of postponing as long as possible the dismantling of the segregated world. Like the slave traders of old, these "religious moderates" recognized that their "businesses" would lose substantially in people and financial resources if integration were forced on those not emotionally prepared to accept it, so they sought to temper the pain with delaying tactics. I recall my own bishop in North Carolina, a highly respected and godly man named Edwin Anderson Penick, who assumed the mantle of leadership in the church in this "crisis" by seeking a "middle way." Bishop Penick proposed the path of "gradualism." Integration was to be accomplished, he asserted, in order to justify his claim to moral leadership, but at a pace slow enough to allow the racism, so deep in white people, time to adjust without sacrificing their financial support for what he called "the mission and unity" of the church. It was the sensitivity of the prejudiced white people, not justice for the black people, that was ultimately to be s
erved by this tactic. It did not occur to the good bishop that both the mission and the unity were already sacrificed by these tactics. How can a church have a mission limited to one group of people or have unity by excluding others deemed unacceptable? "The people of North Carolina are not ready," he said "to see black boys and white girls socializing together." That was not true. The black people were ready to be treated as human beings. Many young southerners were also ready. It was those who supported the church financially and those who were locked in their cultural white racism who were not ready. Prejudice, however, had blinded this bishop to reality and so his moral leadership was a clear casualty of his "moderation." 

Now, move forward another 50 years and watch the Christian Church wrestling with the prejudice of homophobia, based on the ignorant and now totally dismissed idea that homosexuality is something people choose, either because they are mentally sick or morally depraved. When that definition was obliterated by new and undebatable knowledge it became glaringly obvious that the way religious institutions treat gay and lesbian people is as immoral as the way we once treated slaves. Instead of facing that reality openly, however, the church has followed the pattern of the ages and created a "moderate position." It was best articulated by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. The destruction of homophobia was a threat to the unity of the church, he proclaimed, trying to allow th
e virtue of unity to balance the vice of prejudice, a position that is always morally corrupt. So this pathetic leader wasted his leadership in an effort to validate the prejudices of the uninformed, and in the process what he actually did was to give to those still bound by their homophobia the "Good Housekeeping seal of approval." Archbishop Williams, like "moderates" in every moral crisis in our history, should recognize that moderation has no place in a debate when a moral principle is at stake. William Wilberforce saw that clearly. So did the civil rights leaders in a later generation. So do those who have today called the Christian Church to face the sin of homophobic ignorance. It was through those eyes that I watched the inauguration and listened to the words of President Obama. 

When Barack Obama was sworn in as President of the United States, two things happened simultaneously and subliminally. First, in his identity as an Afro-American he demonstrated that racism was finally no longer an acceptable way for any American to live. Second, in his invitation to the openly gay Episcopal Bishop, Gene Robinson, to offer a prayer at the inaugural ceremony, he declared that homophobia is no longer an acceptable alternative for either the church or the society. That is what leadership does. There is no moderate position on evil. I hope the Archbishop of Canterbury took notice. 

–John Shelby Spong  

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

George M. Wade, via=2
0the Internet, writes: 
I have been an avid reader of your works for a few years. I also read other prominent Christian leaders' works as well. As a Christian, settling issues such as the literary forms of the Bible, or the possibilities of different, broader interpretive methods poses a difficulty for me (your use of the Midrash tradition, for example — is this widely accepted in credible academic circles?). An example is in Timothy Keller's book The Reason for God. In his chapter on the reality of the resurrection, he has an approach to the Bible that I noted was different from yours. I noticed that his main scholarly source was a fellow named N. T. Wright. In particular, his interpretation of Paul's I Cor. 15:3-6 relies on this source for some key points that are at variance with the interpretation found in your book Resurrection: Myth or Reality? In that book you relied on some points from a scholar named Reginald Fuller. Since the two of you vary on the possibility of the literalness of this passage, I wonder if the different scholarship is the reason. Is it possible that Keller is right in saying that the most current scholarship is a good deal more friendly to a literal approach? He does do that and uses N. T. Wright on several points to shore this up. I find Keller to be open minded about quite a lot, and so would not group him in the same intellectual category as Pat Robertson. So about this whole scholarship and faith issues: what gives? What is the relationship between20scholarship and belief? I ask this because I have found myself able to worship with those who hold to a naï,ve and wooden-headed literal interpretation of the Bible…so long as worship doesn't involve more than one or two critical questions.

Dear George,

Thanks for your letter. First, let me say there is no such thing as conservative or liberal scholarship. There is only competent scholarship. A scholar's task is to find truth; if that is not the goal of one's study then it is not scholarship, but propaganda in defense of preconceived ideas.

N. T. (Tom) Wright is currently the Anglican Bishop of Durham in the U.K. He is a popular writer among evangelicals. He has an encyclopedic mind for biblical material. He is, however, using scholarship to shore up evangelical positions, and I regard evangelicals as little more than sophisticated fundamentalists or fundamentalists with the perfume or smokescreen of credibility.

I know of no primary scholar who quotes N. T. Wright. That is not a crime or a sin. I know of no primary scholar who quotes me. I am primarily a communicator, but I do work with the material of primary critical scholars. N T. Wright seeks to defend both the literal virgin birth and the physical nature of the resurrection. I do not believe that Paul was in that camp. I think that is to read Paul through the eyes of Luke and John, both of whom wrote 40 years or so after Paul died.

A careful reading of Paul will show that his understanding of Jesus' resurrec
tion is not resuscitation at all but God's raising him into the eternity of God. Paul's Hebrew antecedents are Enoch, Moses and Elijah, all of whom either escaped death or had mysterious departures or raisings into God. Enoch was thought to have written a book describing exactly what heaven was like and Moses and Elijah were able to appear out of heaven to Jesus in the story of the transfiguration.

Long before the gospels were written, the Pauline Corpus says, "If you then be raised with the Christ, seek those things which are above where Christ sits at the right hand of the Father." I submit that this is a resurrection text not an ascension text, since no story of Jesus' ascension would be written for about 40 years.

N. T. Wright seems to me to struggle to keep modern Christians from the necessary hard work of rethinking the Jesus story in light of the knowledge of the world of the 21st century, which is of course quite different from the world of the first century in which the Jesus experience was first articulated. When you literalize the vocabulary of the first century as Wright tends to do, you reduce the Christian story to virtual nonsense. I do not want to base anything I do on the naïve interpretations of a sophisticated fundamentalist, which is what I experience Tom Wright to be.

–John Shelby Spong 

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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