[Oe List ...] 2/24/11, Spong: Should this Column Deal with Political Issues?

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Should this Column Deal with Political Issues?
I value the letters I receive from my readers.  They often offer me new perspectives, bringing to my attention new facts that contribute significantly to my understanding or challenge my conclusions.  Frequently these letters express appreciation for insights that I have been able to give them.  The most appreciative letters come from two major sources: first, from those who are struggling to build or to rebuild their religious frame of reference in the light of knowledge available to those of us living in the 21st century, and, second, from those who share in my attempts to apply insights gained from my faith commitment to the social, political and economic realities of our day.  Indeed, the columns that elicit the most positive feedback are those that some would call “political.”  The recent column on the role of Texas oil money in American politics, for example, received record positive mail; as did my column more than a year ago entitled “My Manifesto” on my stated refusal to debate any longer the issue of homosexuality.  Since I, along with the vast majority of the medical and scientific community, no longer believe that there is any rational basis on which to discriminate against homosexual people, I do not want to dignify continuing ignorance with a willingness to debate what is no longer debatable.  I do not debate whether the earth is flat or whether slavery is moral either.
Despite these realities, I still get letters from readers complaining about the “political” columns.  One reader seems to write every time a column comes out on a theme that is not specifically religious.  I have ignored those letters for almost a year but they keep coming from the same source and so I have decided to respond to this limited but consistent criticism.
This person professes to be thrilled with my columns and books on religion.  Indeed, he tells me that he delights in sending many of these columns to friends to share with them this new religious point of view.  He seems, however, to resent any column with which he disagrees.  His comments run the gamut of the things I have absorbed all of my professional life from one-dimensional conservatives.  He argues that he does not subscribe to my column to get “political analysis,” of which, he claims, he can get all he wants from newspapers, radio and television.  I find that a fascinating idea!  I would argue that none of these media outlets offers a view of political events from the unique perspective of faith.  Nor are any of them expressions of “objective” political reporting as he seems to think.   An editorial in the New York Times and another in the Houston Chronicle, for example, will reveal radically different political perspectives.  Listening to televised commentaries on the proposed budget of the Obama administration from conservative commentators on Fox News and from liberal commentators on MSNBC will do the same.  These spokespersons on both sides of these issues are all legitimate participants in the American debate, some may be more informed than others, but each sees reality through the lens of his or her own priorities and prejudices.  I make no claim to do otherwise.  My perspective is that I am a Christian, who believes I must examine political and economic decisions in the light of those values.  The basis upon which I make political and economic judgments is that I believe every person, rich and poor, Anglo-Saxon and African, Hispanic and Asian, male and female, gay and straight must to be treated with the dignity of being a child of God.  They should not, therefore, have their sense of infinite worth compromised by the insensitive decisions of elected officials, whose primary goal is to be reelected.  I accept as the purpose of Jesus and thus of his disciples, a category in which I include myself, that the Christ task is to enhance human life.  The Fourth Gospel quotes Jesus as saying that his purpose is to bring abundant life to all.  I do not see how one can bring abundant life or enhance present life if racism, masquerading as “States’ Rights,” is allowed to linger; if economic decisions are made to balance the nation’s budget on the backs of the poor, while just having passed an extension of tax cuts for the very wealthy top one percent of America’s earners.  I do not believe that life can be enhanced if this nation allows the gap between the rich and the poor to continue to expand.  I do not believe that life is enhanced if wars are entered into on the basis of deliberately falsified statements about weapons of mass destruction and in which thousands of America’s young people are killed.  I do not believe that, in the interest of enhancing the wealth of the oil industry, our sons and daughters lives ought to be put at risk.  I do not see how the lives of gay and lesbian people can be enhanced by allowing uninformed and homophobic people to place their prejudices into the law or state constitutions.  Yet all of these things have occurred in the recent life of our nation by decisions made in the political arena.  I have no intention of abdicating my responsibility both as a commentator and a citizen to speak in and to that arena.  To stay outside the debate is to do little more than to create a vacuum that will be filled by the Sarah Palins, the Glen Becks and the Sean Hannitys of the world.  I require no one to agree with me.  My opinions are certainly not infallible.  My thinking has changed dramatically over the years and I hope will continue to do so as “new occasions teach new duties and time makes ancient good uncouth,” to quote the poet James Russell Lowell.
The second implication in these letters is that because my professional field is religion, I have no right or competence to speak to political issues.  Jimmy Carter’s field of expertise was engineering and peanut farming.  He offered his unique life’s experience to lead first the State of Georgia and later the United States.  George W. Bush had done some oil drilling and headed a baseball team.  Did those backgrounds render them incapable of speaking or acting on political issues?  The majority of American people did not think so.  Both American and world politics have actually been life studies of mine.  At the drop of a hat I can discuss the major political issues with which every president of the United States has had to deal, including the little known ones like Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Rutherford B. Hayes.  I have had very close members of my family deeply involved in politics.  One of them, my first cousin, William B. Spong, Jr., defeated the Byrd machine in Virginia in 1966 to wrest the United States Senate seat from A. Willis Robertson, the ultra-conservative father of TV evangelist Pat Robertson.  He lost that seat in 1972 running as an incumbent Democrat on a national ticket headed by George McGovern.  I study every presidential election to determine what it says about where our nation is at that moment in its history.  I have attended, as a political reporter, the nominating conventions of both of our major political parties.  I have been interviewed on national television a number of times and have debated Pat Buchanan on Crossfire and William F. Buckley on Firing Line. I am a lot of things, but a political novice is not one of them!
I am also amused when receiving these letters that anyone thinks they have a right to determine the content of this weekly column.  It would not occur to me to tell Bill O’Reilly or Rachel Madow what their subject matter should be.  Sometimes the letters I receive are little more than hostile and rude rants.  I received one recently that read. “Put it all the way to Hell, Sir!  I am interested in your spiritual take, not in your stance on political matters.  I may have to unsubscribe unless you get back to spirituality and back off from political B.S.  Does your new content have anything to do with your new “carrier/sponsor?” To this reader I am eager to say first, that the content of this column has been consistent for all of its life. The column’s title, begun nine years ago, is “Bishop Spong on the News and the Christian Faith.”  No publisher has ever asked or tried to edit my content.  Second, spirituality however you define it, is not divorced from life.  Third, I am amazed that a reader feels that, since he or she might not agree with a particular column, he or she has a right to attack me personally or to attempt to coerce me into abiding by his or her wishes by threatening to “unsubscribe” to this column.  Readers are, of course, free to disagree with anything I write or to unsubscribe at any time.  They are not free, however, to dictate to me what the content of my column should be.
The idea that religion is a separate activity from politics always feels strange to me, coming as it does normally from a right-wing mentality.  If anyone wonders why this seems so strange, all that person has to do is to examine the content of Christianity.  It is a radical movement!  In Christ, says St. Paul, all tribal identities fade away.  One can hardly be an uncritical super-patriot and be a Christian.  Christianity calls us to love our enemies.  That makes support for wars of aggression difficult.  Christianity calls us to deal with the poor in a sensitive manner even if it raises our taxes.  A member of Congress who opposes the current version of health care bill, which covers forty million previously uninsured Americans, has an obligation to offer a bill spelling out an alternative way to cover these uninsured.  Otherwise, honesty demands that there be a public admission that he or she does not really care about the issue of forty million people without health care because they cannot see beyond their own needs.  I mean by this to suggest that I believe political tactics can always be debated, but I do not see how Christians can fail to agree on the goal of universal health care coverage for all our citizens.  Politics is the arena in which public issues are decided.  I intend therefore to be a participant in the political arena because “faith without works is dead” to quote the New Testament book of James.
I treasure the privilege I have to be in dialogue with my readers.  I will explore the Christian faith in depth each week and I will speak to public issues from that perspective wherever those issues arise.  The growing number of subscribers indicates to me that they are happy to be in this dialogue.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Jeffrey Blydenburgh via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I am interested in hearing your reflections on the proposed Anglican Communion covenant. I have read it through once and have not totally digested its meanings. My overall view is that it seems like a lot of rules to keep unruly Anglicans/Christians/ Episcopalians in line. The simple covenant would seem to be yours: Live life fully, love wastefully and be all that you can be. Help me here. I look forward to hearing your comments. 

Answer:
Dear Jeffrey, 

I think you hit it on the head. I see the proposed Anglican Covenant as little more than a document designed to assure conformity to yesterday’s understanding of reality. I have great affection for my Anglican heritage, but the Anglican Communion is about as relevant to the world today as the British Empire! In fact, the Anglican Communion is the last vestige of that empire. It is a way that the English pretend, at least ecclesiastically, that they still control the world. 

The genius of the Anglican Communion to me is that it has no authoritative Pope and no literal Bible. That means we move like an amoeba shooting out a pseudopod here and then there. The result of that is that the Anglican Communion does not now and never has moved in lockstep. I value that! Any instrument that would try to move us in a different, more institutionally organized direction will, in my opinion, destroy the effectiveness of our witness. I wonder why churches cannot admit that the truth of God is not anyone’s or any institution’s possession. They all pretend in some way that they are the “one, true church.” Anglicanism challenges this idolatry by daring to walk through history as a loosely organized collection of national churches each trying to be faithful to God in its own context and in its own time. I wonder why that is not seen as a virtue. 

The agenda for the Covenant comes primarily from the more homophobic elements of our church in the third world and their somewhat archaic allies in the evangelical wings of the Anglican Church in the developed world. The “Covenant” represents the pitiable attempt on the part of the Archbishop of Canterbury to find a place amid the conflicts of our day, where he can stand with integrity without having to put himself on the line against the bible quoting homophobia of those who think that unity can ever trump truth. These right wing religious zealots are on the wrong side of history and in the attempt to impose a “Covenant” on the Anglican Communion are trying to build a religious Maginot Line to hold back the future. I think it will fail but, if it by some chance succeeds, I think the Anglican Communion will die. 

Thank you for your letter. 

John Shelby Spong 






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