Are There Episcopalians in Foxholes?

THE Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark, may be the most famous Episcopalian in America outside of the Bush family, so when I found that he was to preach an Easter sermon in a church in his diocese, I went to listen. The church proved to be a small, postwar brick building in a medium-rent residential neighborhood. This was the first surprise, for we too often associate Episcopalians with the robber-baron power churches of the big cities or the hunt country. This was not a seventy-year-old structure trying to look seven hundred years old. Hence, it was typical, not stereotypical. When you drive along the back roads of America and see the pale blue and white metal signs with the cross of St. George and the message, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You,” this, in most cases, is the kind of church doing the welcoming.

The second surprise was Bishop Spong himself. Bishop Spong is famous for being a political and ecclesiastical windmill. If there is a breeze, it puffs his sails. Bishop Spong has denied the Virgin Birth and forsworn the right to preach to Buddhists or Moslems; he has ordained active homosexuals, and described St. Paul as a repressed one. The notion that all this represents mere trendiness is untrue: the bishop has a definite theology, of which more later; from it, all his headlines logically flow. But neither the theology nor the newsbreaks were on view Easter morning.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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THE Right Reverend John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark, may be the most famous Episcopalian in America outside of the Bush family, so when I found that he was to preach an Easter sermon in a church in his diocese, I went to listen. The church proved to be a small, postwar brick building in a medium-rent residential neighborhood. This was the first surprise, for we too often associate Episcopalians with the robber-baron power churches of the big cities or the hunt country. This was not a seventy-year-old structure trying to look seven hundred years old. Hence, it was typical, not stereotypical. When you drive along the back roads of America and see the pale blue and white metal signs with the cross of St. George and the message, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You,” this, in most cases, is the kind of church doing the welcoming.

The second surprise was Bishop Spong himself. Bishop Spong is famous for being a political and ecclesiastical windmill. If there is a breeze, it puffs his sails. Bishop Spong has denied the Virgin Birth and forsworn the right to preach to Buddhists or Moslems; he has ordained active homosexuals, and described St. Paul as a repressed one. The notion that all this represents mere trendiness is untrue: the bishop has a definite theology, of which more later; from it, all his headlines logically flow. But neither the theology nor the newsbreaks were on view Easter morning.