Dear Bishop Robinson

I found a little comment on "The Emmaus Theory" (a wonderfully encouraging blog!) about Rick Santorum, Republican Senator for Pennsylvania. He's quoted in the New York Times magazine on 22nd May as saying: "I've never read the Bible cover to cover; maybe I should have." A google on him reveals that Time magazine recently voted him one of the "25 Most Influential Evangelicals." Leaving aside the interesting issue of an evangelical who confesses not to having bothered to read the book which is supposed to define their values, the New York Times article has some further revealing points:

• Like very many right-wing Christians, he feels they are victims and under threat -- 'As a person of faith, he feels under attack, even victimized. He has stepped forward as a defender of the unborn, of religious Americans whose voices have been stifled':

''How is it possible, I wonder, to believe in the existence of God yet refuse to express outrage when his moral code is flouted?'' he asked that day. ''To have faith in God, but to reject moral absolutes? How is it possible that there exists so little space in the public square for expressions of faith and the standards that follow from belief in a transcendent God?''

• Even though he's a Catholic, he's as keen as the Protestant fundamentalists to turn the US into a religious state:

'His line of reasoning usually goes like this: The founding fathers were men of faith. They believed in a nation based on traditional, religiously derived values, the same ''moral absolutes'' that he finds in his faith, and to diverge from them is to undermine the health of American society. The same reasoning, taken to its extreme, edges toward treating the Constitution as a kind of Christian document, but Santorum doesn't go quite that far.'

• He's so anti-gay that he's happy to overturn pro-privacy law; for a Brit, this really isn't a surprise, but I assume for US citizens, it would be more paradoxical:

"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. "It destroys the basic unit of our society because it condones behavior that's antithetical to strong healthy families. Whether it's polygamy, whether it's adultery, where it's sodomy, all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family. Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships. In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."

As to this last point, I actually agree with him on the use of the privacy law to protect gays and lesbians. Gays and lesbians have a perfect right to be as totally open about sexuality and love and relationships as do straights. Privacy is not the issue, openness is.

I've just read an excerpt from Bishop Spong's book against fundamentalism , which has a lovely little story:

"One irate reader of a newspaper article wrote that he was praying that the next plane I took would crash, carrying me to my grave. The next time I boarded a flight I felt I should stop at the front of the plane and say, 'Folks, there's something you need to know before this plane takes off..."

Ah, the power of prayer!

Earlier this evening I was reading the commentary on 1 & 2 Kings in the evangelical Hill & Walton "A Survey of the Old Testament". They list eight factors which contributed to the eventual downfall of Solomon's kingdom. They read like the political bogeymen of the Christian right-wing in the US:

# Political allegiance to foreign nations

# Tendencies towards religious syncretism ("in an effort to appease" foreign residents)

# Administrative realignments ("a practice similar to 'gerrymandering' in modern politics")

# "The proliferation of state bureaucracy"

# "Lavish building projects" (shades of the New Deal, eh?)

# "The influx of pagan political and religious ideology...as a result of international trade and commerce"

# "The revolt of satellite states as Solomon's military power waned" (pity the poor Latin Americans)

# "...offset by increased taxation"

The suspicion towards foreigners and a centralised state, linked with the assumption that satellite states are there to be kept down by military might, is clearly laid bare. I'd commented on Hill & Walton's view of The Tower of Babel some weeks ago in "Merton's Quest".

"God then placed limitations on people's ability to unite by means of geographical dispersion and linguistic differentiation. This...restricted human ability to act in solidarity." (p98)

And there's John Bolton revealed in all his ugliness.

For forty years I've ignored Christianity as an irrelevance. I started this quest as a purely religious one; it seems to be bringing me full circle back to a need for activism.

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.

My "Merton's Quest" blog is the place where I'm exploring the religious impulse from a systematic and intellectual point of view. Systematic because my intention is to look at Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Wicca through their major writings and teachings. Intellectual because my touchstone will be my own reason -- however contaminated by western, liberal, 60s student values. It's not a surprise that I am in a profession demanding thought and analysis, it is my natural modus operandi and I'm not going to check it in with the evangelical hat-girl as I enter the world of religion.

I am not a natural activist. I prefer the study. But I've been involved in politics for most of my life -- apart from the last ten years when I've wanted to concentrate on my son. I've sat on icy roads blockading USAF missile bases, joined civil service strikes, even stood for Parliament as a Green Party candidate. But none of this has really achieved anything beyond the Quakers' "light a candle" effect, which in truth I've got some problems with. I can't claim to have achieved anything whatsoever in public life. But I acknowledge the need to be involved. We are a social species, and that "social" implies work for the good of something other than oneself and one's biological kin.

I was brought up in the Anglican church -- even though I was baptised Welsh Methodist and went to the only Methodist public school in England and Wales. Boarding school meant church on Sundays, and later chapel every day, twice on Wednesdays and three times on Sundays. Boarding school also meant the structured life of the total institution (I read Erving Goffman the year I left school!). I've been a hill-walker and rock climber since I was fifteen -- the mountains are my natural habitat. All this makes it natural for me to find joy and comfort in rhythm, ritual and recurrence. It's no surprise that a key chapter of the novel I'm currently writing has this as a key theme -- the only surprise is that it took my study of Wicca to make me aware of the value and the need for this.

So: thought, action and ritual. The fourth -- missing -- element is prayer, contemplation, meditation. What attracted me in my earlier explorations of religion in 1969-1970 was mysticism. It seemed to me at the time the one thing that all religions had in common. I am not a contemplative and if prayer involves a personal, transcendental, God "up there" then I'll never manage it. But prayer is obviously something I can't ignore in these searchings, and this blog is the place for me to explore it.

"Merton's Quest" is my study and "Dear Bishop Robinson" should be where I look at action, ritual and prayer.