Bishop Spong Tells Religious "Progressives" to Stick It to Conservatives
Mark Tooley

Contrasting his own sense of divine love with the ostensible "hate" of conservative Protestants and Catholics, Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong insisted, "I don't want to denigrate any human being."

But Spong lashed into traditional Christians in a scorching speech to Michael Lerner's Conference on Spiritual Activism on July 21 in Berkeley, California. He hailed Lerner as a "major force for peace in our nation and the world."

Hundreds at what Spong called a "consciousness-raising conference" cheered and applauded as he mocked traditional Christian and Jewish beliefs about God and the Bible.
"I rise up to say 'no' to popular religion in America today," Spong declared, calling American religiosity "tribal" and the "blessing of private prejudices."

Warning against this supposed "tribal" religion, Spong insinuated a connection between conservative Christians and Islamist terrorists. He noted, as if it were some kind of proof, that both Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush "invoke" God.

Spong, who is the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, has long been a biting polemicist on behalf of liberal religion, writing books suggesting that the Virgin Mary was a prostitute and St. Paul a "self-hating gay man,"while denying that Christ was divine and rejecting a personal God. "It's time to name evil as evil when sounded in pious accents of biblical religion," Spong declared blazingly. "In the 21st century ... my nation seems to be walking religiously back into religious attitudes that I spent a lifetime trying to escape."

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