TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Bishop Spong's official site
• Article on Bishop Spong
• About A Pebble In My Shoe: The Life And Times Of John Shelby Spong
• Bishop Spong's bio

E-mail a friend

Tavis: John Shelby Spong is a noted theologian and author who served for nearly 25 years as the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey. His most recent best seller is 'The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Text of Hate to Reveal the God of Love.' Recently here in Los Angeles, a play about his life premiered, called 'A Pebble in My Shoe: the Life and Times of John Shelby Spong.' Bishop Spong, nice to have you back on the program.

John Shelby Spong: Thank you, Tavis. Good to be with you.

Tavis: Glad to have you. That must have been some kind of moment, to be sitting in the audience, I suspect right near the front, right near the stage, watching your life being revealed and portrayed.

Spong: It was - amazingly emotional. Some scenes that were pretty heavy scenes, the death of my first wife, for example, I was not really emotionally prepared for what I was going to experience. It was like reliving the event all over again and in living color.

Tavis: This - calls for you to be a little immodest. How does one have one's life turned into a play? How did this come about? Tell me the story.

Spong: Well I think it's because I wrote my autobiography, called 'Living,' - not called 'Living in Sin,' my autobiography called, "Here I Stand.' And the only reason you write an autobiography, which is an ultimate act of egocentricity it seems to me, is that your life sort of reflects the transition that other people have gone through. I was raised in the South and I was raised thinking that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. And that women were inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it.

And that other religious were okay to be hated, especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. And of course homosexuals were considered either mentally sick or morally depraved, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. And in some sense I have had to walk through all of those revolutions to come to the place where I have been honored by the KKK by being named public enemy number one in Edgecombe County, North Carolina. If you cut your life small enough, you can be a very big fish in that pond.

And I have done dialogues with Rabbis around this country, and have I written books that have opened, I hope, the relationship between Jews and Christians. And I've championed the rights of women, primarily as the father of four daughters. You cannot champion, not - treat women that way if you've got, I'm told...

Tavis: You couldn't avoid that one, could you?

Spong: Yeah, I've told my friends in the Roman Catholic Church that that church is never going to get its head right about women until their priests begin to have daughters. And that's another revolution. And then of course the - great big revolution that's tearing the church apart today, is whether or not gay and lesbian people are to be fully welcomed into the life of the church, just as they are.

And so the - revolutions that I have lived through have been the transitions that so many people that were raised in my era have had to go through, and that's where the play comes from.

Tavis: Let me ask how one who is born in that part of the country at a time when you were born, when so much of what you just articulated was in fact believed by folk in the church or outside of the church. It was just the way people believed in that region of the country. How does one grow out of that?

Spong: Is it not easy, and it is sort of step by step, Tavis. I remember when I was just a very young child, between three and four, that my mother and father who had taught me that I must say yes sir, and no sir, yes ma'am, no ma'am every time I addressed an adult. And when I did that to an elderly black man, my father punished me for saying sir to a black man. Now I remember, and I couldn't have been years old, I remember saying, 'There's something wrong here.'

You know, they haven't told me all the facts. I did what I was told to do to elderly people, this man had white hair, and yet there was something else going on that I didn't understand. I remember the first time I went to - I was invited, three members from my school were invited to a segregated black school in Charlotte to be part of a patriotic assembly right after World War II had begun. And I went into that assembly; it's the first time I ever realized that schools were segregated.

Because we didn't - think that there were no black children in our schools. It just was the way it was. I went into that school and there was just hundreds of little black children. And the first thing we did was to stand up and bow our heads and say the Lord's Prayer, that was legal in the public schools of North Carolina in the 1940's. And I suddenly realized that here we were, black people and white people, saying the same prayer to the same God.

And yet we were told we couldn't worship together. My church, when I grew up, my church--if black people had come to that church, they would have been arrested and told to leave. It was that kind of situation.

Tavis: Let me ask you - to compare and contrast, if you will, to juxtapose, if you will, between what the church was so wrong about then, and what the church is so wrong about - today? Put another way, what bothers you about Christian fundamentalism today?

Spong: What bothers me more than anything else is that I see the Bible, my Bible and my faith tradition, being used to justify things like amending the Constitution to ban homosexual marriage. Justifying the war in Iraq; justifying keeping people alive, like the Terri Schiavo case. The Bible is quoted in all of those areas. And Tavis, underneath that, what is going on in the South, is still a very deep, not very latent racism.

The reason the religious right is so powerful in the South is if you analyze the religious right, it is nothing but the George Wallace vote of yesterday. Now talking about family values and anti-homosexual, instead of anti-black, but it is the same crowd of people. And I think it is time to wake up. I resent more than anything else the fact that I live in a country where my President uses my religion to justify what I believe are intolerable acts toward other people. And especially people that are marginalized in this society.

Tavis: There are people, with respect, all due respect, there are people who take exception, who resent, to use your word, the comparison made between anti-black and anti-homosexual. Every time this issue comes up, black folk all of a sudden become the litmus test; the black struggle becomes the litmus test. People have no choice in choosing to be black, it is what you are. There is still great debate, as you well know, about whether homosexuals choose to be that way or are born that way.

But what say to you as a person obviously who is not black, about that comparison that people like yourself continue to make between what the right is doing now, with an anti-homosexual agenda, and what they did then with an anti-black agenda? How do you respond to those black folk who are offended by that comparison?

Spong: Well, I'm sorry they are offended, because I think what we have really got to do is make common cause every time a person is discriminated against - according to his or her being.

Tavis: And we're talking about the fundamentalist church and certainly Christians in this country. There are people who obviously, as you well know, being a theologian, I'm not, who'd respond that if homosexuality is sin, not unlike lying and cheating and stealing, as human beings, we choose to engage in those sins. Why can't we choose to engage in the sin of homosexuality, if it's all sin?

Spong: Well, no, I think that is the wrong way to treat the problem. We are sexual beings. That's the first thing. And some of us, the vast majority of us, are oriented toward the opposite sex, but some part of the population is always oriented towards their own sex. They have been. Homosexuality is present in the animal kingdom. It's part of the natural world. The issue is, what do you - how do you live it out?

And I would argue that gay and lesbian people ought to have the right to live it out in the same sort of sanctity that I have the right to live out my sexuality with my wife in a faithful, monogamous marriage. And so I would - champion the rights of gay and lesbian people to form permanent, monogamous, faithful unions. And I would hope that the state would make them legal and I would hope that the Christian church would pronounce its blessing.

The alternative is not sexlessness. I think that's what the religious right doesn't understand. The alternative is sexual promiscuity. And if you didn't - if you and I did not have heterosexual marriage as a legal option, we would have heterosexuality promiscuity. I think that - just is a fact that we've got to look at.

Tavis: How do you respond to folk with regard to this issue and other issues that have made you prominent enough to have a play done about your life, but at the same time, prominent enough to have people who have a real problem with you because your views are so disparate from theirs on some fundamental American issues? How have you navigated to this point in your life with that kind of animosity that your views have created in certain places and certain circles?

Spong: Well, it - has been an interesting life, and I would not want to miss any part of it if I had to do it all over again. But I would say that there is just a process of living where you begin to make some decisions. The heart of what I understand the Christian faith to be about, would be captured in Jesus' words, 'I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it abundantly,' so that anything that denigrates the life of a person on the basis of something they are, cannot possibly be right.

Whether that is race or gender or sexual orientation, or even - religious traditions, the idea that we Christians sort a look down our noses at the other great religious traditions of the world, that have produced holy people. There is something wrong with that. I travel my route; I have no problem with allowing others to travel their route. If we arrive in the holiness of God, it seems to me we all arrive in the same place.

Tavis: I guess the flip side is though, to your earlier point, that you have folk who call themselves compassionate conservatives, like the President, who have put their religion out there. It is that faith that allows them to pick certain people for Supreme Court positions.

That same faith that you have that allows them to engage in a war in Iraq. That same faith that allows them to respond or not respond to these people of color after Hurricane Katrina, how is it that that same faith allows you to see it one way, and them to see it another way, which many of us have a problem with?

Spong: Well, if you look back at the Biblical story, and when I wrote this book on the sins of scripture, I tried to show how the Bible has been used over and over again to denigrate children, to denigrate women, to denigrate people of color, to denigrate homosexual people, to denigrate other religions. Tavis, if you're spending your life putting somebody else down, how can it possibly enhance their life and make them more capable of loving and living and being?

And it seems to me that's what the job of the Christian faith is. I don't mind people have a different point of view from mine. What I do mind is when they say this is the only way to be a Christian. That if you are not this kind of Christian, if you don't oppose abortion, if you don't oppose homosexuality, then you can't be a Christian. That's where I draw the line.

Tavis: But - aren't there, maybe those aren't the issues, and maybe they are. But if in fact you are anything, if you are a Christian, if you are a Buddhist - whatever you might be, I assume that we belong to these things, we are part of these things because we agree to the tenets of what those faiths teach us. So there has to be some set of rules? There has to be some standards.

Spong: Yes, but recognize that Christianity is 2,000 years old, 2,100 years old, and that during the course of those 2,100 years we have had enormous shifts in what the emphasis has been. Christianity has supported slavery; the Popes have owned slaves in Christian history. Christianity supported the denigration of women. Christianity has supported the oppression of gay and lesbian people.

We have burned so many gay and lesbian people at the stake that we call them faggots, which is the name of the little stick used to ignite the fires. You can't be proud of that as part of your Christian tradition. And what I'm trying to do is to get people to look at the Christian faith as a life affirming tradition, not something that will denigrate their humanity, that call them into the fullness of their being. That is what the Jesus story is about to me.

Tavis: The most recent best selling book from John Shelby Spong is again 'The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Text of Hate to Reveal the God of Love.' The play, "Pebble in my Shoe,' here in Los Angeles. Might this thing tour the country?

Spong: It might. But that's a early to determine.

Tavis: Well, I'm sure that, if it gets to area, your region, you'll want to check out 'Pebble in My Shoe: The Life and Times of One John Shelby Spong.' Nice have you here, Bishop.

Spong: Wonderful to be with you. Thank you.

Tavis: Good to see you. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching, and keep the faith.