Even before Bishop John Shelby Spong began speaking Wednesday, he had already received two thunderous peals of applause from the crowd in jam-packed 150 Columbia. Upon finishing, he received two prolonged standing ovations.
An internationally renowned and reviled religious scholar and a retired Episcopal bishop from Newark, N.J., Spong discussed what he called the negative effects fundamentalist religion has had on the world and the potential that religion holds.
In a North Carolinian drawl, Spong said Evangelical Christianity and conservative wings of Catholicism have risen in America, leading the country into a religious revival of “tribal religion” that exploits fear to gain power. Tribal religion presumes that its believers are God’s chosen people and that unbelievers are heathens rejected by God. Spong said the religious right and other groups in the world today and throughout history use this cruel God to dehumanize their enemies and to justify murder.
The same religious outlook has caused 16 different fundamentalist Christians to threaten to kill him, he said.
The Bush administration caters to this ideology by opposing gay marriage, abortion rights and stem-cell research, while supporting intelligent design and preemptive war, he said.
Many passages of the Bible advocate outmoded tribal religion, he said, and show a vengeful, angry God who helps individuals slaughter enemies and commit genocide. Spong said this ideology has been used by Sept. 11 terrorists, Nazis, Israelis, Palestinians, Crusaders and those who murder people outside abortion clinics.
“It’s not surprising that people can quote the Bible to justify any terror or any prejudice that they’re engaged in,” Spong said.
Spong said in the Bible Belt region of the nation’s southern and midwest states, people go to church and read the Bible more often, but they enslaved blacks for generations and practiced segregation for generations more. Spong said the Bible Belt states boast the nation’s highest rates for divorce, spousal abuse, adultery and abortion. Spong said these states execute more people than every other nation in the world combined. The region also supports the war in Iraq at the highest rate in the nation and shows hostility toward gays and lesbians.
“Tribalism will kill the human race if we don’t transcend it,” he said.
Spong said God loves people no matter who they are. Only when people learn to love each other and themselves will they become truly human, he said.
“You cannot worship God until you love your enemies,” he said, adding that prayer cannot be “adult letters to a Santa Claus God.”
Spong said those who lost family members in the Sept. 11 attacks cannot be fully human until they love Osama bin Laden. Those who lost family members in the Holocaust cannot be fully human until they love Adolf Hitler. Blacks can never be fully human until they love Ku Klux Klan members and vice versa, he said.
“God’s call is to be fully human, to live and to love and to be and to try and build a better world,” he said. “God is not a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or Hindu or a Buddhist.”
English professor and director of the Oregon Humanities Center Steven Shankman said the Kritikos Professorship in the Humanities lecture aims to “bring people in who really go against the grain.”
“For him, faith is not something that should come out of fear but out of love,” Shankman said.
Dan Burbach, a 2005 University graduate, said Spong offered a universal viewpoint on the direction that the fundamentalist church has taken believers. A former member of the Episcopal Campus Ministry, Burbach said he knew people who would strongly oppose Spong’s beliefs but that Spong articulated himself well and made good points.
Bishop pushes love in religion, not fear
Daily Emerald
May 25, 2006
Matt Nicholson
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