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January 25, 2006
John Spong nails it again
Bishop Spong hits it right on the head. Here is a response from the Bishop to Niklas. He writes some very embarrassing questions, and Bishop Spong writes some very course and accurate truth. Thank God for the Retired Bishop of New Jersey!
best regards
Niklas from Sweden writes:
"Why are Americans so preoccupied with the abortion issue when other ways of protecting human life are ignored? For instance, the infant mortality rate is more than twice as high in the US compared to my country (Sweden). It's even higher than Cuba's. How embarrassing that should be for one of the wealthiest countries in the world! (I guess it must be related to poverty and the social model that the U.S. has embarked upon). Secondly, when you point this out to Americans, they just won't believe it; they think it's some kind of propaganda. Where does all this misdirected patriotism come from? Is it Christian to believe that God has a special relation to the United States? "
Dear Niklas,
America is a religiously schizophrenic nation. We have in our history been able to combine religion with the practices of slavery, segregation, lynching and violent racism. We have in the name of the God we claim to worship oppressed women, Jews and homosexuals. The public negativity about abortion, to which you have referred, is acted out against the background of an unwillingness to embrace the fact that millions of poor children in this land do not have access to health care. That is surely one more illustration of this schizophrenia. Religion is the way some of our citizens seek personal security. That kind of religion always demands conformity to stated religious values no matter how contradictory they might be in practice. This kind of religion always seeks to impose narrow definitions on the whole society. Although history reveals that this practice never works, whenever the levels of fear become high enough this nation seems to walk down this same old road again and again. Once the society discovers itself under this kind of pressure and feels close to being overwhelmed by this kind of religious mentality, there is always a revolution to restore balance. On three occasions, in 1896, 1900 and 1908, America turned back the evangelical presidential bids of Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. In 1988 this nation rebuked Pat Robertson's bid for the Republican nomination. There is also still present in the American psyche a deep reservoir of the ancient Puritanism out of which so many found their way to these shores. The puritan work ethic does proclaim that if you are poor, it is because you deserve it. This means that in this nation we are always engaged politically in a class warfare struggle. Class warfare is visible when conservative administrations like the present Bush presidency, lower taxes on the wealthy and simultaneously cut welfare and medical care for the poor. That is nothing but class warfare and the wealthy are winning. At the same time, when this nation passed legislation calling for a graduated income tax and created the Social Security Program, that represented victories in the class warfare struggle for the poor. While in the political propaganda that both sides mount in this struggle declares that everyone seeks 'fairness,' the fact is that the way we tolerate unfairness in America is by denying its existence. Then something like the hurricane in New Orleans rips of the facade of that untruth and makes us face anew that this is a class oriented society. Your letter, for which I thank you, will also raise consciousness, for most Americans do not travel outside this country frequently enough to have any sense of how we are viewed by the other nations of the world, so I appreciate your letter as one that holds up a mirror so that we can look at ourselves through your eyes. History reveals that these attitudes that you describe will pass away in time. It will take an aroused electorate, however. My sense is that there is at this moment a growing negativity about the road this nation is presently walking. It is being fueled by an increasingly unpopular and perhaps an unwinnable war in Iraq, the bulging national deficit, the issue of corruption with lobbyists in the Republican controlled congress and the administrative disasters in handling both the crisis in New Orleans and the introduction of the Medicare prescription drug plan. An aroused public is growing. The beneficiary of this dis-ease may not be the minority party; it might be a more moderate part of the present majority party. We will have to wait and see.
-- John Shelby Spong
| By jjtechno | 05:00 PM
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