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by John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark
We live in angry times. The evidence of this anger is all around us. The reasons for it are not nearly so obvious.
This anger expresses itself in many ways. We saw something of its political expression in the election of November, 1994. The primary motivation of the voters in that election seemed to be far more the venting of negativity than it was division on ideological grounds. A "throw the bums out" mentality was clearly abroad. By that standard it was a successful campaign; incumbents, great and incompetent alike, lost their seats in goodly numbers. But the anger did not disappear when that victory was won. The public today seems to be equally disenchanted with the new incumbents.
This anger also has an economic component. Part of the present political agenda is designed to speak to the economic issues that seem to upset so many. The push for welfare reform appears to be fueled primarily by anger against that system which is believed to be both corrupt and filled with freeloaders. The faces of the poor, who are overwhelmingly women and children, are never held before the voting populace. Rather, the public faces of the welfare recipients that are portrayed in the media are those of the cheats who collect numerous checks and the stereotypical portrait of a flashily dressed male who drives an expensive limousine to collect his welfare check. These are the images to which rage is the response.
Welfare reform will never be achieved and the number of welfare recipients will never be reduced until the systemic causes of poverty are addressed. Welfare as we now know it today, in all of its inadequacy, is cheap compared with the social revolution that would be required to put a dent into real poverty and to remove lives from the welfare rolls.
But our economic anger also reflects that vague middle class sense that no matter how hard one tries, economic progress is not being achieved by most people. There is no confidence that at the end of one's working life, things will be substantially better than they are at the beginning, or in the middle of one's career. There is also the sense that our children will not have a standard of living as high as their parents. So anger abounds and solutions are not forthcoming. The people simmer and steam, but find no appropriate target on which to focus their discomfort.
This anger also expresses itself morally. The media fastens on pregnant unmarried teenagers, perhaps even more emotionally than it does on white collar crime, and people decry the moral bankruptcy in our society. Blame for this breakdown is distributed generously in many directions. The population lives in fear of crime. Much money and energy are spent to protect private property from theft, houses from robbery and one's very person from being violated. Sometimes this moral anger takes the form of calling for no payments to pregnant teenagers who are under eighteen, the building of bigger and better jails in which to incarcerate a larger and larger percentage of the population, or in the final angry act of vengeance, the demand that the death penalty be reinstated.
All of these are manifestations of a frustration that recognizes that nothing is working, that no solution appears viable save to repress, to control and to hurt. So, our anger remains constant.
This anger also has a religious dimension. Religious protests against abortion have degenerated into the murder of doctors and staff of abortion clinics. But religious anger is more pervasive than that. Theological discussion, in the present climate, is all but impossible because it destabilizes those who cling so desperately to their version of religious truth. This fear and anger erupts vehemently when that religious security blanket is disturbed. Movements to purge new ideas from religious circles have found manifestation in the Vatican in its crusades against such people as Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, Charles Curran and Matthew Fox, and in Protestant circles in the purge attempts in the seminaries of the Southern Baptists, among the conservative Lutherans, and in the civil wars that mark various Pentecostal sects. It is this same anger that is present in the Episcopal House of Bishops as the ultra-conservatives mount a holy jihad against Bishop Walter Righter for ordaining a gay man in this diocese. That angry ecclesiastical version of ethnic cleansing is now before the church.
What is the real source of this negativity? What is going on in the life of this society that so much anger seems to be abroad? Let me raise a few possibilities to what must be a many-faceted answer.
First, our whole social order is in transition. The values of yesterday are not holding. The values of tomorrow are not yet universal. In this transition, roles are shifting and that personal sense of knowing who one is and living into a comfortable niche and definition is evaporating. Women are being redefined and, since men have traditionally defined themselves against the cultural stereotype of what a woman is, men are also undergoing a redefinition. What was counted as acceptable behavior between the sexes yesterday is today regarded as inappropriate. Into that mix of new definitions must be added the demand for recognition and a place in the sun for other parts of the human family that were once marginalized. It is a positive movement, but it produces heightened insecurity that finally erupts as anger.
A second factor is that we today have no external enemy. Our mental health has been purchased for the last century by venting our hostility on those abroad who were identified as threats to our well-being. In the first half of this century, that enemy was Germany and Fascism. In the last half of this century, that enemy was Russia and Communism. As long as we had an external enemy, we could rid ourselves of our anger. But the two World Wars and the Cold War have been won and today no major military power threatens our security. Our anger, our discontent, has no target other than ourselves and one another. So we spread it around indiscriminately.
The third factor that gives rise to our underlying anger is both the most important and the one of which we are least conscious. Increasingly, the religious systems of the past, through which we have defined ourselves, from which we have derived the values by which we lived, and in which we have found the very meaning that made sense out of our lives, are today wobbling and losing their power. The truth of the religious systems of the past is less and less self-evident to contemporary men and women. More and more of our people have stepped outside the religious truth of the ages to live their lives in the secular city. This causes those of us who refuse to take that step increasingly to wonder if we are right. It is a wonder with which even our grandparents did not have to contend.
The words that we still use in our worship are derived primarily from a pre-modern world. The creeds of our church still assume a Ptolemaic world view that came to an end with Copernicus and Galileo. The Bible that we read in worship still reflects in so many of its narratives a world in which it was assumed that the miraculous intervention of divine power worked either to reward or punish human behavior with its deservings. That world view largely came to an end with the work of Isaac Newton. Our traditional religious story still proclaims that we were created in a state of divine perfection, but then we fell into sin, creating the need for divine rescue which Jesus accomplished. However, Charles Darwin put an end to that mythological understanding of life by telling us that the creation is still evolving and that there never was a fall from perfection because there never was a finished and perfect creation from which God rested.
The modern world created by the intellectual revolution of the last 600 years has eroded our confidence in traditional values, traditional definitions and traditional understandings of God. With that erosion has come massive human insecurity. We were able to camouflage that insecurity when we concentrated our psychic energy on external enemies. We were able to drug ourselves into not recognizing that insecurity when we were consumed by a relentless drive toward material plenty. But with no external enemies and with our drive toward material plenty being dissipated in this moment of history, we can avoid this despair no longer. It haunts us so that not even a hard-won peace and the presence of economic plenty are able today to give us security or to contain our anger. A noted author once observed that "When the gods die, modern men and women gather nightly around the divine graves to weep." Our human anger, so irrational and so unfocused, arises ultimately, I believe, out of a spiritual crisis that lies at the heart of modern life. "Voting the bums out," seeking vengeance, taking punitive political measures or purging religious systems of those who offer different solutions, will never work because these measures only address symptoms, not causes. Human anger is never righteous, it is always an expression of human emptiness and human fear.
If the problem of our anger can be located in this analysis, then where do we go for a solution? That is the great question that needs to be addressed in both the church and society of our time. I will seek to sketch my way into a solution in a future article.
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