Question & Answer
Craig A. Schiffert of Washington, DC, writes:
Question:
I am a 54 year-old gay man who "came out" to my parents (and others) in the early 1980s. Of course, at that time there was a great deal of homophobia in America and one of my struggles was the negative reaction of my mother, who had raised us in the Methodist Church. Somehow, however, by the late 1980s my mother started to become more accepting, perhaps naturally "softening" on the gay issue as it related to her son, but also influenced by social changes around her.
Somewhat ironically, some of her changing views came from within her church, which by that time was the Episcopal Church, my mother having changed denominations. At the time I was dimly aware that the Episcopal Church was a forerunner in the religious movement to fully accept gays. In any event, I can remember around 1990, my mother made a point to tell me about a new book she’d read by Bishop Spong of Newark, challenging and reinterpreting some commonly held biblical injunctions against homosexuality. The book wasLiving in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality. At the time, to be honest, having made great progress in my own self-acceptance as a gay man, I had little interest in what any person, such as yourself, within “organized religion,” had to say, good or bad, on the subject.
Of course, my mother had been inspired by your book, but in mentioning it for me to read, she was “really” saying that she had reconciled her religious beliefs with my (and others‘) sexuality and had become accepting. Quite an evolution in only a few years-and of course I was delighted.
Skip to this past weekend when, due to my mother’s recent move to a senior facility, I was sorting through some of her books and came across Living in Sin? In the past few days, I read a few chapters, including the excellent one about what the Bible really says-and doesn’t say-about homosexuality. In other words, I was “discovering” 35 years later, the book that had helped transform my mother. I look forward to finishing the book in the near future.
Thank you, Bishop Spong, for your book that is indeed provocative, powerful and compelling and has, in the way I described above, made a difference in my immediate family. I am happy to see you are still writing and being read by many. I will visit your website from time to time, to see some of your latest work. My above account may be written a bit roughly but it is sincere.
Answer:
Dear Craig,
Thank you for your letter. That book, Living in Sin? came out in 1988, almost 27 years ago now. It is still in print, a rather remarkable record since five years is about the maximum for the life of a religious book. That book also had its own interesting history. It was commissioned by the Abingdon Press of Nashville, Tennessee, the official publishing house of the United Methodist Church. They, literally, came to me to request that I write it for them after some studies on the subject of homosexuality in the Diocese of Newark had received national attention. They wanted this book to be out by April 1988 in time for the National General Conference of the United Methodist Church. I met all of their deadlines, flew to Nashville to plan its launch and arranged my calendar with their publicity people in order to accommodate the media appearances that they were lining up. They clearly thought that this book was going to be a big book for them.
Abingdon Press even began pre-publication advertisements of this “coming book.” Some of those ads were placed in an in-house publication for Methodist clergy called “The Circuit Rider.” Much to their surprise they suddenly began to get negative reactions from conservative church sources, primarily in Texas. Threats were issued against Abingdon Press, stating that if they continued their plans to publish this book, an effort would be made at the upcoming General Conference to censure this Methodist publishing house and to have the General Conference place editorial controls on what Abingdon could publish in the future. The furor grew and Abingdon’s leaders collapsed under this pressure and agreed to cancel the publication of my book. By this time, the cover had been designed, the page layouts completed and the presses were ready to run. My editor at Abingdon, Michael Lawrence, called to tell that my book would not be published and to apologize. I was devastated. They had asked me to write it, they had approved the text, set the type and designed the launch. They had even paid me a modest advance. Now they were canceling the book and my work for the past year had been done in vain. I felt totally defeated.
I was such a rookie author in those years that I did not embrace the fact that “being banned by the United Methodists” was almost as good as “being banned in Boston.” When the news broke on the wire services that “The Methodist Publishing House was cancelling an Episcopal bishop’s book on sex,” within a week I had seven publishers bidding for the rights to publish this manuscript. One of the seven was my regular publisher Harper Collins, from whom I had gotten leave to write this book for Abingdon Press, one of their minor competitors. It was a simple choice for me to give them the book. So Living in Sin? came out, not in April of 1988, but in the fall of 1988. Harper deleted from the text only one line and that was in the preface, where I gave thanks to my editor, Michael Lawrence, at Abingdon Press. It now read that I gave thanks to my editor Michael Lawrence. It no longer designate the publishing house for which he worked. Nothing else was changed except the Harper Collins imprint replaced the Abingdon imprint.
In six months’ time, that book sold more copies than all the books I had written up to that point put together. I was suddenly in a very different category as an author. I went on my first media book tour. I would never again be a private person or an unknown bishop in my church. It was not always comfortable for me, but the chance to move my church along in that struggle for justice was worth all the tension, the hate mail and even the death threats with which I lived. A letter like yours affirms again the rightness of this cause.
The world has moved rapidly on this issue since 1988. The struggle is over, the battle has been won. Thirty-seven states in America now have legalized gay marriage. The Supreme Court will pronounce in June definitively, and if positive, as I anticipate, the issue will be settled politically once and for all. I am grateful that I had a chance to be a part of this great struggle in the cause of humanity and justice.
Thank you for your life and your witness and thank your mother for me.
John Shelby Spong
|
No comments:
Post a Comment