Carrying My Understanding of Christianity to France

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 31 July 2014 1 Comments
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Question

I've come to view Jesus much the way I view Elvis. I love the guy, but the fan clubs really freak me out. I think a lot of the times the mistake we make is confusing God and religion and thinking they're the same thing. What we have now is all the fundamentalist Christians who read the Bible and they skip right from the golden calf to Revelation - and then the "Left Behind" books and they kind of leave out the fact that Jesus was pretty much the most extremely liberal guy ever in history and literature or wherever your belief system locates him. You look at the character of Jesus and he scares the hell out of the conservatives even today. If Jesus came back today, you wouldn't be able to hear him talk over the sound of Christians calling him a socialist. Jesus was anti-wealth, anti-death penalty, anti-public prayer, never anti-gay, anti-abortion and never anti-premarital sex among other parameters.

 

Answer

Dear John,

Thank you for your letter. It is almost breathtaking in its scope. I can appreciate your point without necessarily agreeing with all the leaps you took to reach your refreshing conclusions. Let me try to respond.

There are certainly some comparisons to be made between Jesus and Elvis Presley. They both had devoted followers and one could even say that the followers of both were unable to accept the reality of their heroes’ deaths. They both spawned movements dedicated to keeping the memories that inspired many alive. Those two movements obviously distorted the memory of their heroes in many ways, not the least of which was turning the movements into profit-making institutions. Lest we get carried away with easy comparisons, however, there are also some vast differences. Elvis was primarily an entertainer. Jesus was prophetic in that he led people to new understandings of life and removed many of the barriers that so many impose on life’s potential. Jesus called people to wholeness and, according to the only records we have, lived out that wholeness even when being publicly executed. Elvis exhibited the hedonistic indulgences of a broken and distorted life. He died, excessively overweight, addicted to drugs and to alcohol. Those are pretty substantial differences.

The “Left Behind” books do in fact distort the Jesus story rather dramatically; so do the religious institutions that have been created to extend Jesus’ memory to future generations. I do not recognize Jesus frequently in the claims of those who purport to speak for him. Through the ages, the church in both its Catholic and Evangelical Protestant forms has been anti-Semitic, anti-Moslem, anti-women, anti-gay and racist. The Christian Church has carried out the Crusades, the Inquisition, endorsed slavery, resisted desegregation, advocated an inferior identity for women and people of color, called homosexual people deviant, evil and depraved, when the only “sin” of the homosexual was, we now know, to be born with a sexual orientation different from the majority.

What you, John, do not seem to understand, however, is that the Christian Church has also raised up within itself visionary voices that bear witness to unpopular truths that eventually have forced institutional change.

Abraham Lincoln, while never comfortable in church, read the Bible daily and that Bible informed his commitment to end slavery and to issue the “Emancipation Proclamation.” The Civil Rights movement was a movement led by Christian clergy of all denominations, first as courageous minority voices, but ultimately achieving a majority status. I remind you that Martin Luther King, Jr. was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and that his homiletical genius was born in a deep engagement with Holy Scripture. The church also inspired and raised up the voices of women from Mary Magdalene to Julian of Norwich to Joan of Arc to Dorothy Day to Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza to Nancy Wittig to Barbara Harris to Katharine Jefferts-Schori. These women first challenged and ultimately defeated institutional sexism. No, that battle is not over. Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians will not yet ordain women, but inevitably they will and sooner than their hierarchies now think! The Church of England has finally run out of delaying tactics and will open the bishop’s office to women very soon. There will be no turning back on this.

The battle for gay rights, gay acceptance and gay justice has been fought inside the structures of the Christian Church as well as outside it. Great pioneers like Fr. John J. McNeill in the Roman Catholic Church, Louie Crew and the Rev. Robert Williams, the Rev. Barry Stopfel, The Rev David Norgard, The Rev. Elizabeth Kaeton, The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, The Rt. Rev. Mary Glasspool, The Very Rev. Tracy Lind and countless others in the Episcopal Church have not only challenged, but in some cases, have overcome and defeated the homophobia of institutional Christianity.

The followers of Elvis Presley have never raised up minority voices to purge and to purify their movement.

The Bible asserts time and again that Christianity is called to be a minority movement, but always affecting the majority. We are told in the New Testament to be the leaven in the dough that causes the bread to rise, to be the salt in the soup that gives it flavor and to be the light in the darkness that will not be extinguished.

I am a Christian, not because I am proud of the history of institutional Christianity, but because I believe that minority Christian voices can and do purge institutional Christianity of its excesses and of its life-diminishing prejudices.

You seem to have some sense of who this revolutionary person called Jesus is that we Christians follow. I invite you to cease standing outside ecclesiastical structures as an external critic and to come inside, enter the trenches where the battles are being fought and there to make a difference. If you do you will know how shallow it is to compare the Elvis movement to the Jesus movement.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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