Bishop John Spong's Bully Pulpit

Episcopal Bishop John Spong grew up in the same Charlotte, North Carolina neighborhood as evangelist Billy Graham. Spong recalls that the older kid down the street found Bob Jones University insufficiently conservative, so he transferred to an even more fundamentalist Bible college. Spong's ecclesiastical career took a different path. He has come to be known as one of the country's most liberal religious leaders, outspoken in his advocacy of women and gay people in church life and of rethinking traditional attitudes toward much of Christian theology.

There was no hint of iconoclasm in the young man who was drawn to a vocation in the church. He grew faint fasting before duty as an acolyte for Sunday Eucharist and was a stalwart of church youth groups. But Spong recalls that seeds of his attitudes were planted in his seminary classes, where he was exposed to creative theological thinking. As a pastor, he began to wonder (continued on page 126)Bishop Spong(continued from page 94) why newly minted clergy tend to "leave their class notes in their desk drawers" and resort to conventional bromides when facing congregations from the pulpit.

After seminary, Spong served as pastor of churches in North Carolina and Virginia. A fellow clergyman in Lynchburg, Virginia was Jerry Falwell. Spong recently retired as bishop of Newark, New Jersey, a position to which he was elected in 1976.

Spong's own class notes made it to print, even while he tended to such pastoral duties as conducting services, counseling members of his congregations and overseeing sports teams. His numerous books address topics such as prayer, the Ten Commandments, Easter and the future of Christianity. He wryly points out that it was the publication of Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality that made him a best-selling religious author.

He made headlines in the secular world when he ordained a gay man to the priesthood in 1989. As Spong says, "Religion and sex make a powerful story."

Spong's opinions and actions have raised the ire of many fellow bishops, irked at least one Archbishop of Canterbury and provoked death threats. He has also been hit over the head with a cane by one of his elderly female parishioners.

Contributing Editor Warren Kalbacker broke bread (baked by the bishop's wife, Christine) with the man many regard as the loose canon of the Episcopal Church.

Kalbacker reports, "Spong knows the literal meaning of 'bully pulpit,' but one-on-one he speaks in the soft tones of his native North Carolina. We talked for several hours about faith, morals, Jesus and the church. His energy never flagged, despite the confession that he had been up late the night before watching sports on TV."

[Q]Playboy: Church attendance in this country remains high, and Jesus gets more references in the media than many celebrities do. And yet you fear for the future of Christianity.

[A]Spong: There's an enormous spiritual hunger, a yearning after things that in the past we would have identified with religion. But at the same time there is a statistical decline in organized institutional church life. The mainline churches are all dying. They are empty on Sunday morning in urban areas. Every year people who claim to be Christians are a smaller percentage of the population. In the South there's another thing going on. Christianity, as it's traditionally talked about, no longer communicates to thinking people. In the 19th century you had Charles Darwin, in the 20th century Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Then you get Stephen Hawking and the world of astrophysics and microphysics and subatomic physics. All of those things challenge the traditional view that God is a being somewhere up in the sky who keeps record books on your behavior, who has heaven to reward you if you're good and hell to punish you if you're bad and who, according to tradition, intervenes constantly. You pray to this God and this God does a miracle and saves your grandmother. There are a lot of people who say they believe, but what we have today is people who believe in believing--not in a working faith. Look at society. Who today listens to the moral leadership of the church? Look at the Roman Catholic position on abortion. Take a poll of who has abortions and you find Roman Catholics have abortions as much as anybody else.

[Q]Playboy: Regardless of the constitutional separation of church and state, politicians in both of the major parties can't seem to refrain from publicly confessing their creeds or invoking the Lord's name. Do you think they'll ever stop?

[A]Spong: They're not going to do that. They all say "God bless America." It's very biblical. In the Bible, the Jewish people made sure that the God they worshiped was pro-Jewish and hated Egyptians, so he beat up on Egyptians regularly. Joshua stopped the sun in the sky so the Hebrews could kill Amorites because God really hated Amorites. That kind of tribal religion is deep in the psyche of every nation. Politicians are secular high priests. That was best illustrated when Ronald Reagan rose to greatness on two occasions. One was when the space shuttle went down with the schoolteacher and he presided over the nation's shock and grief. It was as if someone gave him another role to play. He was really great. The other was when he was shot and the nation was traumatized, and as they took him off, he said, "I hope my doctor is a Republican." He played those roles magnificently. And that's part of what a president does. There's something about the nation expecting that person to be symbolic of the people. That's why Watergate was so traumatic. The office had been violated. That's why Monica Lewinsky was difficult. Playboy: You've made headlines for advocating ordination of female and gay clergy and commitment rites for gay couples. But how have you managed to avoid a heresy trial on the more traditional charges of Arianism, which is denying the divinity of Christ, and Pelagianism, which rejects the doctrine of original sin. We suspect a good canon lawyer could have helped you beat the Arianism rap, but wouldn't you have had to do some hard time for Pelagianism?

[A]Spong: That's true. Pelagianism comes out of the fourth century. The church's dedication to original sin was a control tactic. If you were born into sin, if you were helpless and hopeless, you needed the grace of God--mediated only through the church--to be rescued. So it became in the church's vested interest to concentrate on that. The Christian myth says that in the beginning God created a perfect world and that God put perfect people in it and those people disobeyed God and fell into sin and got banished from the Garden. And then God had to send Abraham, Moses, the prophets and finally his son and he's put to death and his blood washes everybody clean. It's no longer operative. Charles Darwin said there never was a perfect world. Human beings emerged through 4.5 billion years of evolutionary history. And I've tried hard to defend the divinity of Christ on a different basis. I think the difference between Jesus and you is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. The old theology would have said he's different, God was his father, and he was virgin born and he walked out of the tomb and ascended to heaven because he was God. I suggest that Jesus' love was so total that people found God's presence in him. They had no other understanding of God. In that I see full humanity. In order to convince the world or the court that I'm a heretic, someone would have to define orthodoxy. It's always hard to determine orthodoxy inside the Anglican Church. Anglicans don't have an authority. The Anglican Church has no infallible scripture or infallible Pope, so we are always messing.

[Q]Playboy: Anglican bishops have expressed opinions on issues such as the sanitary arrangements of the wandering Israelites and even questioned the (continued on page 166) Bishop Spong (continued from page 126) basic tenets of Christianity. Why are they so inclined?

[A]Spong: The Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, said the Resurrection was a bone trick. He was trying to say that it has nothing to do with bones getting up and walking out of the grave. The Anglican Church didn't come into being over a doctrine or issue. There wasn't a 95 Theses on the door of the church. It was Henry VIII's sex life. The English Catholic Church declared itself independent of the Pope. So the Anglican Church came into being. But it was the church for the English people. Because the English people are everything from screaming fundamentalists to rigid Catholics, they had to devise a church that was broad enough to include all of them.

[Q]Playboy: Denominations get a lot of press when they issue resolutions demanding that "wives submit graciously to their husbands" or debate the role of gays in the church, or when their conventions dissolve into discord. Is it tough to find a route to spirituality and ethics through all the ecclesiastical politics?

[A]Spong: I think it is. The church has come through an interesting history and most people don't have any sense of it. We were a persecuted minority for the first 300 years--the church of the catacombs. And then Constantine made us an agent of the state. My sense is that Christianity would have survived if it hadn't been institutionalized. But it will not survive because it has been institutionalized. It has to be fighting its institutional thinking. But if religion is part of a person's security system--and I believe it is--then you can't be made secure if you're told there are many religions, or many ways, to reach God. That dissipates the power. So on the Catholic side you have to claim that your Pope is infallible. On the Protestant side you have to claim that your Bible is inerrant and you're the only ones who can interpret it properly. So there's an ultimate authority. Homosexuality is a sin. It is condemned by the Bible. Slavery is legitimized by the Bible. Opposing Galileo in having the sun go around the earth is legitimized by the Bible. The power of religion is to control behavior. The power of religion needs to be separated from the essence of Christianity.

[Q]Playboy: Somehow we get the feeling you're not going to tack a copy of the Ten Commandments to the wall.

[A]Spong: Politicians still put the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms. But all of the old codes come out of an era that had a different value system. The Ten Commandments say that God is a jealous God, that you can't have any other gods. It's a strange reflection of a polygamous background. The third commandment says you're not to take the name of the Lord in vain, and people think that means you're not supposed to cuss. It has nothing to do with cussing. It has to do with the way people drew contracts in a world without courts and lawyers. They would bargain to an agreement and would clasp each others' hands and swear in the name of the Lord that they would be true to their word. So if you broke your word, if you gave me nine cows instead of the 10 cows we bargained for, then you're taking the name of the Lord in vain. Now we do that through courts. Nobody I know today in the Christian world observes the Sabbath except the Seventh Day Adventists. We've all gotten away from the fifth commandment: Honor your parents. The only way older people could survive was that their children would take care of them. That's a great value, but we have different ways of doing that today--Social Security. The commandment about murder could never contemplate what we see in hospitals today where we have the technological means to keep people breathing long after they have died. There was no concept of private property when the Ten Commandments were given, so stealing was really violating the rules of the community, and a big element of it was kidnapping, because one of the things you did have was your children. The 10th commandment is a sexist commandment because it says women are property. It says you should not covet your neighbor's wife or his ox or his ass or anything else that's his.

[Q]Playboy: Volumes about spirituality, self-help and guardian angels fill the nation's bookstores. Are those the cookbooks for the spiritual hunger you speak about?

[A]Spong: They are. Human beings know they're mortal and may be living in a world that has no meaning, so they chronically try to find something eternal to be attached to. Religion was born to calm the fires of hysteria in the human breast. When religion begins to waver, as I think it's doing nowadays, then that hysteria comes up. You do all sorts of frantic things for some security. Remember the bunch of people who thought Halley's comet was going to come to take them away--Heaven's Gate? They got castrated, lined up their new Nikes and drank poison. There were the Branch Davidians in Waco and the crowd that drank Kool-Aid in Guyana with Jim Jones. Those are today's version of the snake handlers, religions of magic. In our day the knowledge available to the human mind has expanded so that we can't stand the division--we close our minds. We become fundamentalists, or we quote the Bible and say there's no debate about this: "God wrote it, I believe it." Or we say the Pope is infallible. And there are these people who wear these bracelets that read WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? That kind of magic religion has appeal, but ultimately we know it isn't going to work. No matter how hard we pray, people we love are going to die. That's the rule of life.

[Q]Playboy: Physicians sometimes prescribe exercise to counter depression and anxiety. Could the clergy offer a spiritual prescription to what has been termed a Prozac nation?

[A]Spong: If I go out on a corner and say Librium, Equanil, Prozac, people know the brand names. I see in this country the death of God and the rise of hysteria. The symbol of the rise of hysteria is that we are an addicted society. We can't start a day without caffeine. We are addicted to alcohol. We're addicted to smoking. We take tranquilizers in massive doses. And you add kids shooting each other in schools. Now, part of the trouble is that the old security system of God in the sky begins to lose its cachet. And people don't know where to find meaning. We have to help them recognize that spirituality doesn't start with telling everybody what a miserable, wretched sinner you are, how great God is that he's come down and rescued you. You've got to have a sense of the spirit or the divine that touches human life and calls it into becoming more deeply human. Instead of responding to tribal fears and hating everybody who's different from you, you can be more like the Jesus who can see people for what they are. The religion of the future--and I hope it's Christianity--will be focused on empowering people to be human.

[Q]Playboy: A woman we know visited the gift shop at a natural history museum. She bought a number of fossils and left them on the desk of her fundamentalist boss. Is this any way to relate to someone who literally believes the Book of Genesis' creation story?

[A]Spong: I don't think she's going to convert him, because she makes one crucial mistake. She thinks it's a rational argument. It is not rational. It's a real emotional security system that you're dealing with. When we can do radioactive measurement of metallic things to determine their age and we find all these fossils, the fundamentalists say God put the fossils in the earth to confuse you. But the world does change. The members of the Flat Earth Society are not very powerful today. What happens is that her boss will die and her boss' children will live in a different world. In the Thirties my mother had just begun to hear of Darwin and she interpreted that as "I descended from a monkey." That was her understanding of Darwin.

[Q]Playboy: You've predicted that there will be female Roman Catholic priests and eventually a woman pope. Any feel for when Catholics will find a woman celebrating Sunday Mass?

[A]Spong: There's no doubt it's going to come within 25 years, or they'll be the laughingstock of the Christian West. My sense is they can't afford not to. I think the church would blow up. I don't want the Roman church to blow up. It's too powerful and part of Christianity. But they can't treat women the way they do. You could get away with that in the 19th century, but already it's alienated a lot of women, and as the world goes along, it would be like trying to defend slavery in the 20th century. The consciousness of the world has changed, and to the degree that the Roman church is a Western church serving Europe and the U.S., it can't continue that way. They have nuns serving congregations. They have women doing everything except celebrating the Eucharist.

[Q]Playboy: Religions tend to mandate when people can--and mostly when they cannot--have sex. Why is it that so many sects have problems with sexual behavior?

[A]Spong: All religions have problems with sex. Sex is at the heart of people's identity and God is the symbol for ultimate meaning. These things are always intertwined. You will find that in the matriarchal days of human history, God was understood as the reproductive process and the earth mother. Temple prostitutes--male and female--were part of the fertility cults to service God. When you get into the Western religions, we're really antisexual. The Catholic tradition has defined the ideal woman as a virgin. That's a strange definition of a woman, but then you have to look at who does the defining--celibate priests. Part of that happened as Christianity moved out of the Jewish world into the Mediterranean world. The dominant thought form in the Mediterranean was Neoplatonism--soul is good, body is evil. Christianity got caught up in that and decided that if you really wanted to be a holy man you had to not be married, and the ideal woman becomes a virgin--not just a virgin but a virgin mother, which is a real trick. Well, we have separated sex from procreation. That's a brand-new thing. We have also separated puberty from marriage by 10 to 15 years. We ought to locate our thinking about sexuality in terms of the beauty and holiness of life, not in terms of some repressive system being imposed upon life.

[Q]Playboy: You've written that sex outside of marriage can be holy, provided the relationship has grown over time. Do you have something against consenting adults just spending a night together?

[A]Spong: I am a pretty conservative person. I believe the holiest relationship is a monogamous and faithful one, and that it's not just sex, it's that you invest so much of your life in the relationship and you give everything to that person. If you don't have that kind of commitment, you just use somebody for your own gratification. I would say that the ultimate good is a faithful monogamous relationship--homosexual or heterosexual, it doesn't matter--but a relationship where you take total responsibility for each member of the partnership. The other end is a promiscuous relationship for whatever thrill you can get. I regard that as immoral. I've long ago gotten over the idea of sex before marriage, because I can see commitment long before marriage. But I've also decided that my moral box is too narrow and I have to broaden it. I knew a man whose wife, when she was about 35, had a stroke that rendered her unable to have sex for the rest of her life. For the first four or five years he really felt like he owed it to his wife to be faithful. Then he found he was getting shorter and shorter with her and less loving and feeling sorry for himself. He became good friends with another woman, whose husband had died. It sort of went over the line and they had a sexual relationship for 10 years. The two came to talk to me about it because they lived in a society that says that's wrong. We talked about it openly. The woman was not making demands on him to leave his wife and marry her. They sustained each other and he was able to be a far more loving husband to his afflicted wife. I couldn't find anybody who was hurt. Then I got into an awareness of the gay situation. I talked to this young guy who told me he didn't even know the name of the first person with whom he'd had a sexual liaison. He said, "I'm 16 years old and I've been told all my life that what I am is evil. I grew up with my church and my family telling me that my body was evil and my desires were sinful and I couldn't believe that somebody could love me." And he said this man, his first partner, whose name he didn't even know, touched him in such a way that he made him feel valued. He said that was life-giving, not diminishing. I realized that my categories didn't fit. I still think that ultimately sex outside of love is wrong and that sex finds its most beautiful expression inside a faithful relationship, but everything in between has to be negotiated on the criterion of whether it enhances life or destroys life.

[Q]Playboy: Cutting-edge theological studies may be the order of the day in divinity school classrooms, but do you think individuals accept too readily the religions of their families?

[A]Spong: I don't think so. I watch people--all dressed up--come into churches on Easter and Christmas who never are there any other time. What that says is that while they haven't found a lot of meaning in this institution, they still yearn to find that meaning. Christmas and Easter are cultural holidays and so part of the culture is that you go to the midnight service Christmas Eve and you go to sunrise service on Easter morning. That doesn't strike me as strange, and it's probably helpful. It keeps them in touch. I have no intention of ever abandoning the Christian Church, and I don't agree with all of the ways it has expressed itself through history. But as long as the Christian Church can produce a Desmond Tutu in my generation, it's almost enough to keep me saying there's something there that's really valuable. That's what's important. And some of the ritual things that you do may well have lost their meaning, but there's something nostalgic and warm about doing them.

[Q]Playboy: The Episcopal Church has always been a small minority in America. Can you account for the over representation of Episcopalians in business, politics and country clubs?

[A]Spong: Absolutely. Scotch, not beer. We have fewer than 2 million people and we've had more Episcopalian presidents than any other kind. When I was a rector--and it's much more true in the South; it's not true in New Jersey--every church I served was the socially prominent church of that town. In Richmond there were 25 Episcopal churches in one town of 300,000. They went heavily into Episcopal parochial schools that constantly trained the children of the families. They came back and took over the family businesses.

[Q]Playboy: You founded a basketball league. You called radio play-by-play. Is there a little of Boys Town's Father Flanagan in every young pastor?

[A]Spong: I loved doing that. I did play-by-play in two cities. The basketball league was called the Holy Hoopsters, and we called our girls' league the Holy Hoopskirts. I've always loved sports. I've never been a particularly good athlete, but I was sports editor for a newspaper when I was a priest and I organized that league and then did the play-by-play for all the high school games--football, basketball and baseball. I could still do it. No hesitancy. I'm an absolutely devoted Yankees fan. I thought about writing George Steinbrenner about giving me an inning. I know the game backward and forward. I could pick up a microphone right now at Yankee Stadium and call that game and it would be a professional job.

[Q]Playboy: We understand some Christian congregations are switching from red to white communion wine because red stains are so difficult to remove from altar linen. Do you have a preference for one side of the wine list over the other?

[A]Spong: I don't really care. The symbol is that it is blood. The red made it a more appropriate symbol. A Jesus with white blood would be rather anemic. We ought to really question the idea that the Eucharist is a semicannibalistic feast where you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of God. That comes out of Jewish tradition of Yom Kippur when they would slaughter the lamb and sprinkle the blood of the lamb on the people. Then they would roast the lamb and eat it. And Passover, too. You roast the Paschal Lamb and it becomes the main course of the Passover celebration. Christianity was Jewish when it got started, and it incorporated these symbols. I don't find them very effective today. The symbol that we ought to emphasize is food itself as the sustenance of every community. You never have a friendship if you never eat together. An organized liturgy of the church around a common meal is a powerful thing.

[Q]Playboy: The Greek Orthodox and the Anglicans do vestments in a grand way. We understand you prefer something a little more casual on Sunday morning.

[A]Spong: A rochet and chimere. The rochet looks like a clown uniform. It's got great big puffy sleeves and ruffles. Then you put on the red chimere--a traditional low church vestment, a choir vestment, actually. I'm probably the last bishop to like it. Then you put a stole on top of that. What we did as a church was that we opted for royal images. The bishop's miter is a crown, and the cape is a royal coat, the chair the bishop sits on is called the throne, the house the bishop lives in is called the palace, he wears the big signet ring and the pectoral cross. My pectoral cross is jade from the South Island of New Zealand, but usually you see them with jewels all over. I resisted those royal vestments because I think a bishop is the servant of the people of God and when I wear the clothes of the king I find that my message and those clothes clash. But I must tell you, that's a losing fight. The bishops really love that stuff. I wore it if I had to go to my Anglo Catholic churches, but I always felt like a $3 bill. I have them hanging up in the closet and there may come a day when I have to put them on for some formal occasion. But it's not my thing.

[Q]Playboy: Lead us into an interpretation of temptation and sin.

[A]Spong: Sin is the incompleteness of human life. Incompleteness means you're caught in your self-centeredness. The Greek word is taken from the analogy of the bow and arrow, to aim at a target and to miss. It is not to be what you were created to be. Human beings are caught up in that because survival is our driving motive and if survival is the most important thing, you do whatever you need to do to survive, including kill. You're threatened by this person, so you're going to remove him from your life. Our tribal nationalism comes out of that. Our negativity toward gay and lesbian people is because they're a threat--they don't reproduce and they don't serve the survival needs of the whole community that well. Stealing is trying to get an advantage over your enemy. We are responsible. But I don't start out saying human life is fallen. I say human life is incomplete. We are still evolving. We don't need to be rescued by an invasive deity; we need to be empowered to become more fully human. The reason Jesus is the God presence for me is that I look at his life and he seems totally incapable of putting himself first. He gives his love all the time. To me that's the ultimate meaning of what God is. That's why I'm basically a conservative Christian. God in Christ is the affirmation of my religion.

[Q]Playboy: Liberal Christianity demands very little in terms of outward observance. Adherents can dance, drink and even skip church without fear of being shunned or excommunicated. Does the lack of rules make it somehow more difficult to follow this tradition?

[A]Spong: It was a lot easier when I was a child and we knew all the rules and could obey them. But my understanding of Christianity is that it causes you to grow up. You have to make decisions for yourself. I want to choose love instead of hatred because I think that's the way to God. The more profoundly I have this sense of God's reality, the less capable I am of describing it. It's a mystical experience. I have challenged the rules, but I think religion plays upon people who are journeying into the mystery. The church knows how to do guilt better than it does anything else. But the message that you're a miserable sinner and you can't do anything to save yourself and you need the rescuing act of God reduces our human life to a parody of what we are. It takes our humanity away. I don't want to be secure. I want to grasp the reality of radical human insecurity and know that I could still walk with God. I don't want a parent figure in the sky who will do my bidding. That's an immature, childlike religion as far as I'm concerned.

[Q]Playboy: You dispute the traditional view of the divinity of Jesus. What, then, is the religious utility of Christ?

[A]Spong: There is no other way for me into God except through the life of Jesus, but I would never say that's the only way for everybody. I'm not going to build barriers around God and tell God how God can act. There's something exhilarating about being human, and I think we ought not to sacrifice it to religion. My Jesus figure broke religious barriers. He broke dietary barriers. He embraced lepers. He allowed a menstruating woman to touch him. It's a right remarkable story. Jesus is the center of my God religion because when I look at him I see beyond the miracles and the magic. I see a full life. I see total love. I'm not interested in making Baptists and Roman Catholics into Episcopalians. I'm not interested in making Jews and Muslims into Christians. I'm interested in trying to transform the world so that every human being, gay and straight, male and female, rich and poor, has a better opportunity to live fully and to be whatever it is that God created them to be. My work for gay rights comes out of my understanding of God. It's not a liberal crusade. My creed is that I believe God is the source of life, the source of love and the ground of being. That's the way I would define God.

Original sin was a control tactic. If you were born into sin, you needed the grace of God to be rescued.

Heaven's Gate? They got castrated, lined up their new Nikes and drank poison.