Much as I appreciate a lot of what he writes in "A New Christianity for a New World", one thing does trouble me. It might just be my Ecclesiastes side coming out... "There is nothing new under the sun" for "another Tiphys will sail for Troy".
I agree wholeheartedly with Bishop Spong on the inappropriateness of much of traditional Christianity for the modern world. I also respect him hugely for having been able to stare into the jaws of the fearsome fundamentalists. But I'm afraid the numbers and the politics are against him. This is one reason I so admire him and Bishop Robinson. On the one hand they might seem to be on the side of irresistible progress, riding a tide of change into a more mature, adult world, "come of age". What I see is the most powerful nation in world with three-quarters of its population professing Christianity in the face of one ideological enemy after another. Communism has been "defeated", now they're taking on Islam. And Bishops Spong and Robinson are also in their sights -- I use the metaphor of the rifle consciously.
Christian fundamentalists put science on the back foot in one state after another. An Alabama judge might be forced to step down for raising the Ten Commandments outside his courthouse, but George Bush himself gives access to the highest power in the world to Christian lobbyists. And John Paul II, a man I am amazed to see praised by the entire world, blind to the misery caused by his policies on AIDS, abortion, birth control, and any mildly progressive cause, is replaced by someone even worse, "God's Rottweiler", indeed, a man whose strongest statement about his membership of the Hitler Youth is that he didn't particularly enjoy it...
And the numbers. The US Census is barred by law from asking about US citizens' religious affiliations, but there are data available from other sources, collated by the US Census. There were 207,980,000 adults in the US in 2001. Of these 159,506,000 said they were Christian -- that's over 76%. Of these only 27,000 explicitly call themselves fundamentalists (that's 1.3%), but 33,830,000 call themselves Baptists, 1,032,000 call themselves Evangelicals and a host of other fundamentalist-type cults make up a good 5 million more. Only 3,451,000 call themselves Episcopalian or Anglican. So the numbers don't look good. What to me is the sensible wing of Christianity seems to be a tiny minority in a sea of weirdness.
My heart is with Bishop Spong and Bishop Robinson, but it seems to me they represent, as Christians, an even smaller percentage of decent folk than my one-in-ten does the general population.