The Battle for Gay Inclusion: An Open Letter to George F. Will

by Bishop John Shelby Spong and illustrations by J.B. Lowe, March 04, 2009

Dear George: You have a huge platform through television, Newsweek, and the Washington Post to be a major influence in shaping public opinion. I find myself impressed by your insights into the world of baseball and a bit less impressed by your right-of-center political musings. I am, however, absolutely amazed at the profoundly uninformed positions you have recently offered the public on the questions that are currently the content of ecclesiastical debate in our churches. You seem to have no understanding of what it means to seek to bind together an ancient faith with the insights of our contemporary world.

I appreciate the fact that you are a fellow Episcopalian and, as such, are vitally interested in the issue of the consecration of the Rt. Rev. Eugene Robinson to be the Bishop of New Hampshire. The fact that this event was covered by the media of the world indicates that it was regarded as a significant moment of history, a turning point in the life of the Christian Church. Indeed, I believe it was the enabling vote at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church that allowed this consecration to go forward that opened our church decisively to the full inclusion of homosexual people. It also struck a mighty blow at cultural homophobia. As such it has inaugurated a great consciousness-raising and welcome discussion that has now reached far beyond the boundaries of the Episcopal Church. That is a major accomplishment for a relatively small church.

Yet you, George, in your Washington Post column, have characterized this debate as one that pits the “cultural trendiness” of the Northern Hemisphere nations against the “doctrinal clarity” of the Southern Hemisphere nations. I regard that analysis as breathtakingly naive and suggest that it is revelatory of nothing more than your own deep and abiding prejudice. For you to speak publicly about this issue, when you are as poorly informed as your words reveal you to be, calls either your competence or your integrity, perhaps both, into question. Because you added a gratuitous comment about me by name in your Newsweek column (November 10, 2003), I think it appropriate that I respond to you in an equally public way.

You pose the issues of this debate as between modernism in religion and the true faith of antiquity. You suggest that two thousand years of church teaching about sexuality and family are being imaginatively construed in “a certain interpretive trajectory.” You quote approvingly a Fairfax, Virginia, Episcopal priest who, referring to the debate at the National Episcopal General Convention last summer, said, “When the plain teaching of the Bible was referenced, eyes rolled, and with expressions of polite exasperation, we were told that it was time to move on. The Bible simply had not kept up.” You appear to be saying that those who quote the Bible, as if it provides the last word on moral issues, are to be commended.

Well, George, perhaps you need to understand why it is that people who quote the Bible to undergird their own inability to embrace reality might need to be enlightened.