Club Speech Read the transcript of John Shelby Spong's speech. Club Q & A Read the Q & A for this event. Editorial Read the Editorial on priests & scandals. Related Links Our guide to the best links related to this event. Purchase Tape Buy the audio of this event on tape.

Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:

Q: Religion requires symbols and truth to believe in, but can Christianity accept the kind of radical updating you require or suggest?

A: My sense is that if we cannot, Christianity will die. Look at the very heart of Christian symbolism: I don't believe we will live in a world that much longer will understand God as a sort of Middle Eastern potentate who requires a human sacrifice and a blood offering before this God is able to forgive. That may have played in another world, another time, but I don't believe that's going to play today. If you would take a phrase like "Jesus died for your sins" away from most TV and radio evangelists, they would be mute. They would have nothing else to say.

Q: Did you go through a transformation in your religious experience?

A: My own journey carried me first into a new appreciation of the Jewish roots of Christianity. I used to go to the synagogue in Lynchburg, Virginia, so regularly that they referred to me as the blonde rabbi of Lynchburg. I learned an enormous amount from my Jewish brothers and sisters. I learned an enormous amount about the one I called the Christ, who was himself named Yeshua, who was himself circumcised on the eighth day, presented in the temple on the 40th day, probably in some sort of puberty rite, carried down to Jerusalem at age 12 in what what later came to be called a bar mitzvah. I had to recognize that the only hymnal that Jesus ever knew was what you and I call the Book of Psalms. The only scriptures that Jesus ever knew was what you and I today call the Old Testament.

When I could put Jesus out of this Western milieu and into the Jewish context that produced him, Jesus opened for me in a tremendous way. I've learned that one does not spit upon traditions that create holiness among other people and cultures. We now must move beyond our own ancestry and begin to honor the holiness that we see present in Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and in the other religious traditions in the world. That's going to be the challenge of the next century.

Q: Do you fear that the terrorist attacks will foster feelings of fatalism rather than faith?

A: That's something we need to be on the lookout for. We vibrate between hysteria and rationality as a nation. More people will die in one day in America in an automobile accident than might die in the history of at least the biological warfare that we know in this moment. You have people responding that the only way to deal with the terrorists is to kill them all; I understand that, but I have never known terrorism to be killed by killing terrorists. What you do is create more terrorism. The British army has been in Ireland for a very long time with sufficient military might, but terrorism has not stopped. I think it's an appalling thing to watch Catholic Christians and Protestant Christians spit on each other's children and kill each other in the name of the God of love that both of them claim to serve. I don't think that bodes well for a Christian future. The same could be said for the Jews and Muslims on the West Bank. Both are praying to the same God. You cannot pray to the same God and kill each other at the same time and claim that's rational behavior. That's tribal, fearful, neurotic behavior. But sometimes that's the kind of behavior that organized religion fosters.

Q: How did you feel when personally attacked by fellow Christians for ordaining an openly gay priest?

A: When you identify with people persecuted, you begin to walk into the hostility with which those people live constantly. I had no idea there was as much homophobia in our world as I discovered when I, very overtly, decided to stand at the side of this oppressed minority. I did it because I had become convinced that homosexual people are normal people, that homosexuality is not an abnormality. It can be lived out in an abnormal fashion, but perhaps – maybe you haven't noticed – so can heterosexuality. Homosexuality is a part of the world we live in, present in all people, cultures, times, in about the same percentages. It's present in the natural order, in higher mammals. Tests are being done at Cornell with white mice to vary the testosterone level in the pregnant female and produce homosexual behavior in the offspring at a predictable rate. These things are real. It's just the way some people are, like being left-handed. We used to persecute left-handed people too, because we didn't understand it and thought since it was the minority, it had to be abnormal.

I didn't choose to be heterosexual. When I was twelve or thirteen girls didn't seem obnoxious to me any more. I didn't know what had happened. I didn't make a choice. My mother said the sap had risen, and I didn't know what that meant, either. But I began to comb my hair and take a bath and try to be more attractive to the opposite sex. The time has come for heterosexual people to recognize that gay and lesbian people don't make that decision, either. They awaken to their identity, and if we persecute or are prejudiced against people on the basis of who they are – whether it's skin color, gender or sexual orientation – we are clearly violating the God of creation, of life, of love, of being. I consider it a privilege to stand at the side of those people that our society will persecute and to absorb some of that persecution with them and for them and hopefully to be an agent that will diminish that persecution and call them into the fullness of life, both victim and perpetrator of prejudice.

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