An Open Letter to Bishop SiskRev. Dr. Graham Smith December 17, 2010
Dear Bishop Sisk:
I trust that this letter finds you well. You may remember me from Chicago where I am the rector of St. David’s Episcopal Church in Glenview. We had the privilege of hearing you preach at one point in your time as Dean of Seabury Western Theological Seminary.
I am writing in response to your diocese’s recent resolution to investigate the Institute on Religion and Democracy. Apparently you think that IRD is taking members out of the Episcopal Church. I’m still in TEC, so I must have missed the message. I have been a board member of the IRD since the mid 80s and was ordained a deacon by Bishop Paul Moore in June of 1974. So it is with a heavy heart that I write to defend my association with the IRD, especially given the fact that I started out in your diocese, though I never worked there as an ordained priest. I spent three years in the Diocese of Ohio doing youth ministry at St. Peter’s, Lakewood. Then I became rector of Church of the Good Shepherd for the next fifteen years, prior to becoming rector of St. David’s.
The IRD began in the early 1980s before I became associated with it. It was founded in part to stand up for the persecuted church. We were one of the few organizations which prayed for and stood up for the persecuted church in the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the underground Christian church thanked us for our prayers.
I became involved in the work of the IRD in the mid 1980s. You will remember the intense debate in the church over nuclear arms and the morality of nuclear deterrence between the Soviet Union and the United States. My study of this very complex issue led me to a very different place than Paul Moore and the ‘Peace Movement’ at the time. I opposed the popular Nuclear Freeze Movement as overly simplistic and dangerous, concluding that a nuclear freeze was tantamount to unilateral disarmament through attrition. That led me to being invited on the board of IRD. As a part of the debate, we were told that the United States and the Soviet Union were ‘morally equivalent’. I had my doubts.
As an undergraduate at Fordham University, I majored in Russian Studies and Political Philosophy. In the summer of 1969 I took a student tour to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It changed my life. In Prague, I was not allowed to order a meal speaking Russian. The Soviets had invaded Prague during the previous summer. The proud Czech people were deeply wounded and hated their occupiers. When we got to Moscow, I saw tyranny unlike any I had ever seen before. I had a bishop once lecture me on how the Soviet Union was morally equivalent to the United States because it had a universal health system. Yes, it sure did! I witnessed one of our students get sick and have to go to the hospital for treatment. The hospital was so filthy, she refused treatment and demanded to be flown home to Belgium!
My bishop friend then went on to educate me about the full employment in the Soviet Union. Right again! I saw full employment one night when I was returning home alone from touring another part of Moscow. I could go because I knew enough Russian to read the signs. I saw a woman in the subway, who looked at least 80 years old, scrubbing the walls of a subway station at 11 p.m. Full employment? We could have that in this country, but it would not be allowed. The bishop did not ask me any more questions.
I had had a brief but highly impressionable visit to the Soviet Union, but it was enough to become highly suspicious of any talk of ‘moral equivalence’. There is a big difference between Soviet tyranny and a constitutional democracy. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote that ‘democracy was superior to communism because it guaranteed the freedom to challenge power without which there could be no justice’.
As for the nuclear arms debate, I grew increasingly suspicious of blaming the United States for starting and escalating the numbers of nuclear and conventional weapons on both sides. At one point I had the privilege of meeting Moorhead Kennedy, one of the American hostages held in Iran. As I am sure you know, he was asked by Bishop Moore to direct a Peace Institute at the Cathedral in September 1981. He chronicles all of this in his book “The Ayatollah in the Cathedral” chapter 8. He was publically ridiculed and heckled. Eventually Bishop Moore fired him. Kennedy found the movement far too simplistic and dismissive of the complex ethical issues involved in the morality of nuclear deterrence.
A formula like the freeze, based on mutual deterrence implied nuclear armaments of equal effectiveness on both sides. Since Soviet arsenals were relatively more modern than those of the United States, the United States would have to modernize its arsenals merely to maintain the rough equivalence on which the freeze was premised. That would require new weapons, something incompatible with a freeze as it was popularly understood. Moreover, the freeze never addressed the question of whether a new technology increased or decreased the threat of a nuclear holocaust. New weapons might be more accurate, more localized in effect and of lower destructive capacity, (pages 156-157).
My study reached similar conclusions or at least raised the same questions. After Ronald Reagan became President, I listened to Moorehead Kennedy’s wife Louisa say, ‘he got the hostages out of Iran’. By the end of Reagan’s presidency we were on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall and soon would witness the collapse of the Soviet Empire. All of this would not have happened without the courage and leadership of Lech Wolenza in Poland and the election of Pope John Paul II. The Soviet and Polish leadership were terrified of truth, transparency and democracy. Nothing showed this more clearly than when the communist leadership begged the papacy to postpone its triumphal visit on the 900th anniversary of the death of Saint Stanislaus. Some of us recalled the words of Stalin 50 years earlier, who, when asked about the pope said, ‘How many divisions does he have?’
Perhaps I have gone on too long. The issues in the 1980s were very complex and I must tell you how my association with the IRD began. My study almost led me to quit the church, but I am grateful to have stayed on. When you seek the truth it sets you free. I will not waste your time belaboring the point. Ronald Reagan won the nuclear freeze debate. His nuclear policy served to help the Soviet Military High Command conclude that they could not afford to keep up with his nuclear policy. The nuclear freeze movement was dead wrong for a decade, but I know of only two leaders in the church, one an academic and the other a bishop, who took my position. Only one liberal has said to me, ‘you were right’.
Much has happened since the early 1990s, so there must be much for the Diocese of New York to condemn about the IRD. But I will conclude by defending two other disagreements with the leadership of The Episcopal Church. One is its interest in the Jesus Seminar. I have in my office a video course entitled ‘Embracing An Adult Faith’ by Marcus Borg. I do not subscribe to the teachings of the Jesus Seminar and think that they should be challenged. Some of us have read many pages of NT Wright and concluded that the New Testament is more reliable than Marcus Borg would lead us to believe. It is amazing to me that Borg taught at a secular university with no accountability to the institutional church, while being paid by the state to teach his own brand of Christianity. He uses all the words, like resurrection, but blithely changes their definition to mean anything but what classical Christianity says and has said for two thousand years. He does not believe that Jesus rose from the dead. He says it does not matter whether the tomb was empty or not. ‘Whether Easter involved something remarkable happening to the physical body of Jesus is irrelevant’ (The Meaning of Jesus, p. 131). Only the ’experience’ of resurrection matters. He discounts those events which the disciples, who were eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, changed them forever. The IRD stands for classic, orthodox teaching which holds that the narratives of the Gospels are true, because they were accurate accounts of seeing Jesus alive after his crucifixion. Moreover, the first eyewitnesses were women who were not regarded as reliable witnesses but would not allow their stories to be changed or fabricated.
Thirdly, we do not rejoice in the consecrations of Gene Robinson and Mary Glasspool. We are deeply saddened by the decision of The Episcopal Church to ‘walk apart’ from the Anglican Communion. You have chosen to tear the fabric of the Anglican Communion at its deepest level. You, the bishops and the lay deputies of the 2009 General Convention knew exactly what you were doing. To defy the overwhelming majority of provinces, bishops and other clergy and people of the Anglican Communion and then claim to remain Anglican is cynical. TEC does not get to decide on its own, the terms by which you are a member of the world wide Anglican Communion. That decision involves and requires more participation than merely the leadership of TEC. Some would call such unilateral action, American Theological Imperialism.
Bishop Sisk. I regret your diocese’s resolution. The IRD does not support or oppose congregations leaving the Episcopal Church. I am fully prepared to discuss and debate its work. You can criticize and you can condemn. It is a free country, thankfully. But I will not be intimidated into silence.
Thank you for your attention. If I have been overly harsh or inaccurate, then please accept my apologies. I speak as a board member. This is not the official position of the IRD. You are very much in my prayers, as is your diocese, the IRD and The Episcopal Church. I wish you God’s blessings as we enter the seasons of Advent and Christmas.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
The Rev. Dr. Graham M. Smith
Rev. Dr. Graham M. Smith is a board member at the Institute on Religion & Democracy. He is also a clergyman at St. David's Episcopal Church near Chicago, IL. Read our earlier coverage of the resolution here.