If I Have Seen the Future of the Church, I Do Not Like it

by John Shelby Spong

There are people who think that Europe or North America are the most secular parts of the world But I would submit that this "honor" is held by New Zealand and Australia. Recent polls in New Zealand indicate that 84 percent of the population of this nation claims no affiliation with any organized religious body.  Specific estimates for Australia were not available, but educated guesses by competent observers suggest Australia is not significantly different.  So the reality is that a majority of the citizens of these nations has moved beyond the boundaries of the traditional religious frame of reference.  They are citizens of what Harvey Cox once called "The Secular City."  That, however, is only half of the problem.  The other half becomes obvious when one analyzes the make up of that decreasing minority who still do claim religious attachment.

They are overwhelmingly of the evangelical, fundamentalist Protestant or the conservative Roman Catholic tradition.  They are basically ghettoized religious enclaves out of touch with the world in which they live.

These religious bodies still utter claims about how evangelical and conservative Catholic churches are growing while remaining ignorant of what is really happening in the broader religious picture.  Almost inevitably these religious groups are fighting passionate rear guard actions over causes that have been overwhelmingly settled in the secular world. They still expend primary energy debating the fitness of women to serve in ordained capacities.

They seek to demonstrate, in opposition to everything we now know in the scientific world, that one's sexual orientation is a chosen and not a given way of life.  They appear to be dedicated to a simplistic view of Holy Scripture that assumes a literalness that has been abandoned by the academic world of scholarship for almost a century. In order to justify this mentality, they demonstrate a radical anti-intellectualism, which is marked by a defensiveness that  manifests itself in religious anger and paranoia about the causes of their increasing irrelevance.  They appear to believe  there is some organized conspiracy dedicated to their destruction.  They imagine these enemies to be enormously powerful and refer to them with capital letters, as "The Militant Feminists," "The Gay Lobby," or "The Secular Humanists."  They see themselves as a beleaguered minority battling for the truth of God, which they have confused with their distorted version of truth.  They have become unpleasant, unattractive and unappealing to the vast majority of their fellow citizens.  From such a faith community modern men and women have fled in droves.

As I lectured across these countries on my recent sabbatical study leave, I found an enormous spiritual hunger in the general population, but simultaneously a rising unwillingness to seek to satisfy that hunger in what has become the religious bodies of those nations.  Time after time I spoke to standing-room-only crowds in places as diverse as Hobart, Darwin, Brisbane, Toowoomba and Melbourne in Australia, and Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Napier and Palmerston North in New Zealand.  People came in those places to hear someone talk about God and Christ from a post-modern perspective.  They came in order to raise the very questions they had not been able to raise in their churches before they left them.  When they had tried to do so, they had received the response of a threatened authority system that could not listen.

They heard the cliches of antiquity that tried to settle all questions and disputes with the claim, "but the Bible says...." or "but the Church teaches....."

Representatives of this declining organized religious presence in both Australia and New Zealand took notice of the response I was receiving.  They did not, however, act as if they recognized that we were engaged in the same enterprise.  Instead, they saw me as one more enemy that they must discredit if their fragile hold on truth was to be maintained and so they behaved in ways that could only be described as rude and offensive.

At a public lecture held in Wellington's Victoria University, fundamentalist hecklers in the audience interrupted with hostile barbs.  My attempt to show how the story of the cross was constructed got characterized as "Are you saying that the gospel writers were liars?"  In Hawke's Bay I attempted to explain how the interpretation of the Christ experience grew from  Paul (48-62 C.E.) through the elaborate theological explanations found in the writings of The Fourth Gospel (95-100 C.E.), I was interrupted by the same mentality suggesting I might be the Anti-Christ.

In the heart of Wellington I delivered a series of addresses on four successive Tuesdays at midday.  The audience grew from 425 people on the first Tuesday to 550 people on the final day, necessitating the opening of a new auditorium with a public address system to handle the overflow.

At the first of these addresses a small group of evangelicals frantically tried to corner a few of the listeners after the lecture  to explain just why it was that I was wrong and thus not to be believed.  At the third of these lectures evangelicals who were in the overflow room talked back loudly to the speaker system until the wrath of those who had come to listen silenced them.  Walking out of that room at the end of the lecture, one of them passed an usher holding an alms basin.  To the glee of his evangelical supporters, he proceeded to slap that basin so hard the usher dropped it, scattering coins and bills all over the floor. On the last Tuesday when the crowd was the largest, evangelicals prepared a sixteen-page handout which they distributed as people departed, entitled, "Why Spong is Wrong!"  I was flattered by this attention, which certainly indicated that my message was being heard. This lectureship so engaged the Wellington public that a lead editorial in The Wellington Evening Post suggested that churches had been derelict in their duties by not bringing this knowledge about the Bible, readily available in the academy, to the attention of the people in the pews.  This editorial further suggested that religious people seemed to be engaged in a conspiracy of silence designed to keep their power intact.  When the lectureship was completed, two major stories were published on successive days in The Dominion, Wellington's morning paper, seeking to interpret the meaning of the phenomenom of the crowds as an expression of a spiritual hunger no longer being satisfied by organized religious bodies.  I doubt if the evangelical Protestants and conservative Roman Catholics were pleased. In other places across the United States and Canada I have seen manifestations of this closed- minded, threatened and uninformed religious mentality.  It was apparent in the attempts that were made to "doctor" the content of a religious debate conducted in Vancouver when that debate was later published in an evangelical magazine to make the  evangelical position look better than it did during the debate.  It was apparent when an evangelical bishop actually changed a tape recording of a debate on homosexuality, conducted at the Virginia Theological Seminary, to cover his inept and ill-informed performance.  It was obvious in an English evangelical newspaper just prior to our General Convention in July which ran a distorted attack on me for "closing urban churches" with their chief illustration being derived from the fire more than a decade ago that destroyed a congregation in Jersey City that had been dying for twenty years.

The reality is, however, that in the United States, Canada and England this mentality does not exhaust the meaning of religion.  There is still room in the Christian churches of these lands for differing points of view to find expression.  These western nations still have competent spokespersons for a Christianity that is engaging the issues of this modern world.  Christianity has not yet become totally identified with an evangelical fundamentalist or conservative Catholic point of view.  But the danger that we might be moving in that direction is present.  It has already occurred in parts of Australia, especially in Sydney, and in most of New Zealand.  If my experience in these two nations is accurate, a Christianity identified with right-wing fundamentalism will result in a massive exodus of thinking people from the churches of those lands. When the only voice of Christ that can be heard in the land is the voice of a strident anti-intellectual fundamentalism or semi-fundamentalism, thinking people depart from the Church.  That is a future scenario that I intend to resist with all of the power of my being.

So I return to my office as Bishop of Newark planning to be very public in proclaiming a Christ who is engaging the issues of the real world.  I will challenge  the ignorance that is rampant in our society in regard to biblical studies.  I will stand against the stereotypical prejudices still present in Christian churches against women, gays and lesbians.  I will seek to get the theological debate of our generation into the public arena so that this secular society will know that the voice of Christ is broad, deep, competent and not limited to the shrill sounds of those who think religion is a place where one can find security and avoid the tensions of the modern world. I call upon the Churches of this Diocese to join in this endeavor by adding adult educational opportunities to their life and I ask our clergy to be willing to dedicate  primary energy to this function.  Christian education for adults is not to be confused with teaching religious propaganda designed to shore up the religious answers of antiquity.  Christian education is an activity in which truth may be pursued come whence it may, cost what it will.

It is an endeavor in which the spiritual realities of human life may be honestly explored.

If we do not do this in a competent and intentional way and do it immediately, then we run the risk that what I saw of Christianity in parts of Australia and in New Zealand is indeed what the Church of the future will be like.  Such a Church will not be one in which Christianity, as I now know it, will ever be able to live.  The need is urgent.  The time is short.  The issues are clear.

Only your response remains to be determined.

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Last updated 1 December 1997