Can the Christian faith be rescued from the Fundamentalists?

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

John Shelby Spong is a liberal bishop in the Episcopal church and he has written a very good book called “The Sins Of Scripture” which attacks those fundamentalists who would reduce the Bible to a handful of passages that justify the hateful and reactionary policies they believe in. He has a passage on sexism in Christian history that is very good. It begins with this quote from Pat Robertson:

The Feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become Lesbians.

It is against these kinds of ravings that Spong writes:

One of the most sexist institutions in the Western world is the Christian church. Its sexism is deep, pervasive and quite destructive. What makes this negativity doubly tragic is that the Christian church has wrapped this evil inside the rhetoric of sweet piety. For centuries this overt prejudice against women has been called “the sacred tradition of the church.” It has been attributed to God and is an expression of the divine will from which there is supposedly no appeal. It has been justified by quotations from the Bible that the church calls the “Word of God” and for which excessive claims for truth have been made. In the Western world it is not easy to escape this systemic sexism. The church’s powerful influence has shaped the stereotypes, definitions and role models of what a woman is or can be that permeate not only the religious institutions but the whole culture of our civilization. It has set the limits within which women have been forced to operate. It has introduced responses of both violence and rejection when those limits have been transgressed. It has claimed that to oppose the church’s views on human sexuality, and especially the sexuality of a woman, is to oppose God, the Bible and human decency. For these reasons the emancipation of women has been a gift won by women and for women, in spite of consistent opposition of institutional forms of religion. It has been the specifically nonreligious, secular society that has been the champion and chief ally of women in their quest for equality.

No one can doubt the progress women have made toward full humanity in recent times. They won the right to vote in 1920 in the United States. They entered the cabinet of the president of the United States in 1932. They flocked to coeducational private and public universities following World War II. They entered the Supreme Court with a Ronald Reagan appointee, Sandra Day O’Connor, in 1981. Today in the United States there are woman governors, senators and representatives and their numbers are rising in all three categories. Women have been heads of state in Great Britain, Norway, Israel, Pakistan, India, Argentina, the Philippines and New Zealand. …

In almost every instance of this cultural redefinition process, however, the Christian church has been on the wrong side of the debate, bitterly resisting what the secular society has acted to empower. Even today as the progress of women in every walk of life continues at a lively and brisk pace, the leaders of the Christian church persist in pontificating about women, using archaic words to make indefensible pronouncements clearly belonging to a world that no longer exists. Many of us who still call ourselves Christians find these ecclesiastical spokespersons an embarrassment. If one has to cling to antiquated definitions of the past as the price of religious devotion, that price becomes too expensive.

Among the images from the church that modern women have to confront is a gathering of pious, all-male Roman Catholic Church leaders, clothed in their ecclesiastical dresses, pronouncing in the name of a God called “Father” what a woman can and cannot do with her own body. It should not be surprising how few women, including Roman Catholic women, either listen any longer to that message or care what their leaders say. Not to be outdone in irrelevance by the Roman Catholics, the Southern Baptist Convention – America’s largest Protestant decision-making body – recently added to the core teaching of that church the idea that a woman must be subject to her husband in all things, for that, convention leaders said, was God’s plan in creation. Women can be pastors, this convention states a year later in a tip of the hat to a changing reality that they cannot control, but they are not to be senior pastors, for that would require a man to be submissive to a woman, which is a power equation specifically ruled out, they claim, by the “Word Of God.”

Many traditions and beliefs pre-date liberalism and need to be rethought so as to fit into our modern world. The Christian faith is one such creed. The liberal tradition didn’t begin till 1688, before that the world was full of belief systems that insisted they needed to hold absolute power over the state. Most Americans nowadays have little trouble reconciling their faith with the reality of living in a liberal political order. Most Americans accept that the legitimacy of the government should be based on multi-party, freely contested elections. Most Americans support trial by jury, habeas corpus, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. In between 1688 and now, a great deal of intellectual work has been done to reinterpret the Christian faith so that it now works in a manner that was thought impossible before 1688: easily fitting in with a liberal political order. Lately, however, the most liberal factions of the Christian church have lost strength, while other factions, some opposed to modern tendencies, have gained strength. Spong’s work strikes me as doing a great deal to remind everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, that the Christian faith can, in fact, be reconciled to life within a political system such as ours.

John Shelby Spong has also written “Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism“, which I haven’t read yet.