Bishop
John Shelby Spong
At
the Metropolitain Community Church, Brisbane,
Australia. 24th June 2001.
Interview, for
community radio program Queer Radio on
4ZZZfm, recorded by John Frame prior to the
On Saturday 23rd June 2001 Bishop Spong
had addressed a large group in Brisbane City's Albert Street Uniting Church.
After that session he specifically asked if there was a local MCC congregation, because that is where
he preferred to share their Sunday service. He said he wanted to speak directly
to a group of Australian gay and lesbian Christians and to apologise
for the recent homophobic outbursts by conservative Australian religious
leaders.
You can hear this entire 8 minute 30 second interview as a 16mb mp3
at: http://www.queerradio.org/John_Shelby_Spong_24June2001_x_John_Frame_for_4ZZZ.mp3
(256kps 2 channel mono)
Transcript by
John Frame 24th June 2001:
John Frame:
Bishop John
Shelby Spong, you’re here visiting
Bishop John Shelby Spong:
I think that’s right. I think
Jesus is rather controversial – remember they put him to death for his witness.
I don’t understand how one can
be a Christian and discriminate against anybody – and yet in the history of the
Church we’ve discriminated against people of colour;
we’ve discriminated against mentally-ill people; we’ve discriminated against
left handed people; we’ve discriminated against women and we’re still
discriminating against gay and lesbian people, and my hope is that we can
strike a blow for freedom and not allow that to happen. That is not in touch
with who the God I meet in Jesus is.
And I must say that when I
come to
And when I hear homophobic
statements coming out of my own Church, the Anglican Church - particularly in
the archdiocese of
So I want to come to a gay
community and say that there’s another part of the Anglican Church that is not
tied up in that homophobia – that accepts the words that Jesus spoke that
invite everybody to come unto him just as they are - and that’s a witness that
I hope to make.
It does make you controversial
in those closed and conservative Church circles.
JF:
It’s been
suggested to me that the number of people within the Catholic Church and the
Anglican Church who won’t accept gay men or lesbians as part of their
community, is actually quite small – and that there’s an encouragement for
those to stay with their Churches and weather it out. Would you encourage that?
BJSP:
Well, I think you always do
better to work from within than from outside, and I think that’s the only way
institutions ever change. The fact is that there are a large number of gay
people in the priesthood of the Catholic and Anglican Church – many of them
closeted and many of them quite homophobic in their public stances. I find that
intolerable, but I still think that’s one of the things that we have to do: -
I’m not in favour of "outing" people, I
think people have the right to announce who they are, in whatever way they
wish. But I must tell you that when people use their closets as a place to
attack other gay and lesbian people, I think that they are treading on very
thin ice.
JF:
You’ve recently released a book as well, and
that’s part of the reason you are here: –What’s that book particularly
aimed at?
BJSP:
The book is entitled
"Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and
Equality" and it’s basically an autobiography. It’s my personal story.
I grew up in an evangelical Anglican church, in the southern part of the United
States and that church taught me that segregation was the Will of God. It
taught me that women were second class citizens, who couldn’t be priests or
bishops. It taught me that Jewish people were evil and all other religions were
not to be respected – only Christianity was a respectable religion. And it
taught me that homosexual people were evil, or mentally sick, and needed to be
cured or converted.
Now that’s what Christianity
looked like to me when I was a child, and it was interesting that every time
one of these prejudices was being discussed, the Bible was quoted to prove that
the prejudice was right. So you have to fight against this attitude, and then
you have to fight against the Bible being quoted to support these prejudices.
The story of my life is the
story of how I came out of a segregated world to the honour
of being named “Public Enemy #1” by the Ku Klux Klan in Edgecombe County, North
Carolina – not a big venue, but it was a powerful venue. And I know what it
means to have my children threatened at night by KKK calls: they were gonna rape my daughters the next day, and that sort of
thing. I know what death threats are all about.
And I also came from being a
very "male chauvinist" to supporting women in every area of the Church’s
life, and I’m very proud that my branch of the Anglican Church today has nine
women bishops and more than 50% of our future clergy, studying for the
priesthood today are women. So that battle is over.
And I’m very proud that I’ve
led my Church into a new understanding of Jewish-Christian relations and I hope
into a better understanding of how to appreciate Buddhists and Hindus and
Moslems and all the great religions of the world.
When I retired as the Bishop
of Newark, just last year, 35 of my clergy were out-of-the-closet gay and
lesbian priests, 31 of them lived openly with their partners – and I’ve yet to
have a complaint. And I think we’ve won that battle too, in the
I ordained the first gay man -
who was open and honest about being a gay man - and who lived openly with a
partner, in 1989. There was enormous negative reaction around the world, but we
set about to change the attitude and we’ve changed that attitude. There are gay
clergy who are very open in the
We have gay clergy all over
the Church today, but they’re not all honest, and I would bet that in the
history of the Christian faith, more than fifty per cent of all the ordained
people – popes, cardinals, archbishops, priests, pastors – I would bet that
more than fifty per cent of them have been gay men.
JF:
That could be
an indication also of those people being caring and nurturing, perhaps.
BJSP:
I think that they’ve made an
enormous contribution to the life of the Church and I think that the Church
ought to honour that and wake up, and stop
denigrating it. We still have groups, connected with churches,
that say they are in the business of changing gay people – so that they
will become heterosexual. There’s not a bit of scientific data to support that
point of view, and I think that’s fraudulent. I think that what they’re really
doing is trading on the prejudices and the fears of people.
You know, when you grow up gay
in our society, you grow up knowing that you are looked down upon by the
society, condemned by the society, feared by the society. And so the desire to
be someone who’s not going to be looked down on, beat up, feared or whatever is
powerful and for a church to play on that!
You know, we used to tie the
left hands of little children behind their backs, so they’d grow up to be
normal right-handed people. We didn’t understand the variety of humanity.
That’s what the Church needs to recognise, and I
think the time has come for us to say that those organisations
need to be scrutinised by authorities, so that their
claims can be validated or dismissed. I see no evidence that gay and lesbian
people can be changed or ought to be changed. It’s part of God’s creation. We
don’t try to change left-handed people anymore; we ought not to try to change
homosexual people.
I remember when a program was
being done on me, in the United States by "Sixty Minutes”, that this
woman – one of my critics – was being interviewed, and it was really funny. She
said that all homosexuals ought to submit themselves to Jesus and be cured. The
person interviewing her said: "Do you think you could be changed into
being a homosexual?" I don’t think she’d ever confronted that question
before, and so she looked like a deer caught in somebody’s headlights, and she
sort of twisted in the wind there for a minute… and tried to change the
subject. But you know it’s that sort of irrationality - prejudice is always
irrational.
JF:
Thank you
very much Bishop Spong.
BJSP:
It’s a pleasure to be with
you.
.