John Shelby Spong Quotes
Jerry Falwell says, on Pat Robertson's program, that the reason we got attacked on 9/11 is that we were accommodating the ACLU and abortion and homosexuals and feminists in America, so God smacked us down.
Spong, John Shelby. The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love. HarperSanFrancisco, 2005.
While Jones and Falwell were both fundamentalist, conservative Christians, Jones was very concerned that the Falwell propensity for being active in partisan politics would undermine Christian duty and faith as political compromises are always made and alliances require not attacking or criticizing political allies. Jones wanted Christians to be comfortable attacking the Republicans when they were morally deficient just as well as Democrats. He thought that Falwell’s approach was tempting for Christians but would undermine and destroy the integrity of Christians in America. Hence Falwell was dangerous.
Reading this quotation, one would think that it was uttered in the early 21st century when the Christian Fundamentalists drove Christian liberals out of many of the evangelical churches and out of the Republican Party. However, this process and conflict has been ongoing for almost a century. This quotation was made in 1922.
This quotation is very surprising to most people who are not familiar with the history of the struggle regarding abortion in America. In the early days of the family planning movement and when abortion rights were first advocated in America, the proponents were almost all Republicans. At the time, the Republican Party consisted of economic conservatives and social liberals—“Rockefeller Republicans they would later be called. At the same time the Democratic Party was aligned very differently. The Southern Conservatives and fundamentalist Protestants of the Bible Belt were all Democrats. Most Roman Catholics were Democrats. Intellectuals at the time tended to side with the Democrats on economic issues and with the Republicans on social issues. In the 1960s the Republicans went after the racist resentment in the South over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Southern Democrats of the Solid South switched to the Republican Party, and many liberal republicans, reacting to their party now being the party of the the anti equality racists, became Republicans. The Southern Democrats then pushed out the moderate Republicans who were the social liberals.
The power of the Catholic hierarchy on the politicians had waned and the laws against contraception and divorce were being relaxed to the chagrin of the Archbishop who described the change as a curse upon the country. However, Ireland then was the only industrial democracy in the world where contraceptives were illegal and divorce impossible. Three years later contraceptives were made legal by prescription and a train full made the journey from Belfast in more modern Northern Ireland to the South. See {639627}.
John Shelby "Jack" Spong is a retired American bishop of the Episcopal Church. From 1979 to 2000, he was the Bishop of Newark, New Jersey. A liberal Christian theologian, religion commentator and author, he calls for a fundamental rethinking of Christian belief away from theism and traditional doctrines.
