I feel I must begin my post with a disclaimer: I love Bishop John Shelby Spong. His books have done much to help reclaim the Bible and Christianity from the religious right who have sought to turn a religion based on compassion and concern for the neighbor into a self-serving, dogmatic, and often just plain mean form of religion. Bishop Spong is an acquaintance of mine and was kind enough to offer an endorsement for my book Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians.
So, I admit up front that I have a bias toward the good bishop, but I will strive to not let my own personal connections cloud my take on his latest work — A Manifesto! — in which Bishop Spong quite eloquently spells out why he’s done arguing over whether or not gays and lesbians should be fully welcomed within not just the church but society.
He writes:
The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women?
As a lesbian, it’s hard to not feel this victory lap is a bit premature. I still can’t marry my partner in 44 states, we can be discriminated in housing, fired from our jobs simply for being gay, and there is still no federal hate crime law increasing punishment for those who may attack or kill us just because we are gay. If my partner dies, I cannot collect her Social Security, and inheritance taxes will probably force me to sell our house and other property just to pay the government when she’s gone. Yes, I do believe these things will be rectified in time, but I often wonder if it will be in my lifetime. I wish I could be as confident as Spong.
I do, however, agree that the gay and lesbian community should stop wasting its time debating those who say we’re sick or sinful. Much biblical scholarship has been done to refute literal, fundamentalist readings of the six or seven passages that seem to condemn gays and lesbians. No matter what the religious right says, the Bible is far from clear in its condemnation of homosexuality in all its forms. All sexual acts condemned are those that use or abuse another or break covenant with another – committed gay and lesbian relationships are never condemned by the Bible.
In his manifesto, Spong takes the time to call out some of those on the religious right who feel that discrimination against gays and lesbians is proscribed in the Bible – what they consider to be the literal “Word of God.”
I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.
Falwell, of course, is not longer around to offer any opinions, but Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is still around to make a response:
Bishop Spong clearly hopes that his new manifesto will bring all debate over homosexuality to an end. Not hardly. While the bishop’s manifesto is written in the language of bravado, it actually represents an intellectual posture of surrender.
What Mohler fails to understand is that Bishop Spong’s manifesto is not a surrender at all. Instead, it is a bold statement that the “debate” about homosexuality is moving into a new phase – just as past debates over other “sins” that were so biblically clear in the past moved into new phases of “debate.” At one time it was seen as God’s will that people should own slaves, or that people of different races should be forbidden to marry one another, or that people of other races should be separated or considered inferior or inherently “sinful” because of the color of their skin, or that women should be liberated and not owned by their husbands.
In each of these battles, the tone, tenor, and objectives of the debates changed over the course of time. Let us take interracial marriage as an example. In 1948, California became the first state to overturn a state ban on interracial marriages. At that time 30 of the 48 states had bans on interracial marriage. By 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage in the Loving v. Virginia case, 16 states still had bans on the books.
The judge that had sentenced Richard and Mildred Loving to jail for daring to marry outside their race used the Bible for his reasoning:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races show that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
According to a Gallup poll taken a year after the Supreme Court’s ruling, some 72 percent of people agreed with that judge that interracial marriage was wrong. Over the years though, those numbers began to move in the other direction until in 1991, only 41 percent would agree that interracial marriage is wrong.
What changed in those years was the conversation. Biblical justifications for keeping people from marrying outside of their race began to wane as more and more interracial couples married and the sun still rose in the East and set in the West. Life went on as normal. Even those who had adamantly opposed interracial relationships, like the religiously conservative Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, repealed their prohibitions against interracial dating. In 1989, the Southern Baptist convention passed a resolution on race in which they vowed to “repent of any past bigotry and pray for those who are still caught in its clutches.”
The “debate” over interracial marriage, and the racism that undergirded its ban, did not end – but the conversation changed from one where blacks were condemned from the Bible as inherently evil and sinful to how best to battle those who still clung to those kind of backward ideas. This is the direction that the conversation on homosexuality is now taking, and Spong is boldly points this out.
He refuses to “debate” people like Mohler on whether or not homosexuality is a sin. That question really has been settled – it is not a sin. Those who continue to cling to that belief are just as wed to their outdated ideas as Louisiana justice of the peace Keith Bardwell who recently refused to do his job and grant a marriage license to a mixed-race couple. One day, we’ll be just as horrified at all the JPs who have denied gays and lesbians marriage licenses as we are at the story coming from Louisiana. This is where our conversation on homosexuality is headed.
What is most telling in Mohler’s response, however, is that in his inability to defend his position, he personally attacks Spong, accusing him of embracing “almost every imaginable heresy” and rejecting “any claim that the Bible is the Word of God.”
This denies Spong’s own words. Writing in his book The Sins of Scripture, Spong is clear:
“I am a Christian, a deeply committed, believing Christian. I am not even a disillusioned former Christian, as some of my biblical scholar friends now identify themselves.”
Spong, contrary to Mohler’s assertion, is a defender of the Bible’s authority. His books, far from tearing down the Bible, seeks to give readers “a new way to read and to listen to this ancient narrative […] I want to present a different portrait of Jesus, not as a mythical hero, not even as a divine invader of humanity, but as a God presence, a new dimension, even a new vision, of what human life was meant to be.”
Mohler’s personal attacks would be no surprise to Bishop Spong, and he doesn’t have to violate his manifesto to answer him. It’s right there on page 24 of Sins of Scripture:
“The constant attack of these right wing voices on Christian scholarship is a clear tip-off that they cannot face reality. When people cannot deal with the message, the ancient and still regularly practiced tactic is to shoot the messenger.”
The religious right will continue to shoot at those delivering the good news to gay and lesbian captives, but the battle lines are shifting and the Mohlers of the world will soon take their rightful place beside the Keith Bardwells of the world.
Just as the battles against racism and sexism continue unabated, even as minorities and women win civil rights and make advances in both church and societal leadership roles, the battle against homophobia is just beginning in earnest. Spong’s declaration of victory is no surrender — it is an acknowledgment that once again God’s all-encompassing grace has surpassed man’s small-minded obsession with constantly dividing the world into “us” and “them.”
