Baptist Follow Episcopalians into the Pit
John Shelby Spong served as the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, for 24 years before retiring in 2000. He is a leading spokesperson for liberal Christianity and has appeared on 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, FOX News Live, and Extra. John Shelby Spong served as Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, for twenty-four years before retiring in 2000. He is a leading spokesperson for liberal Christianity.
Bishop Spong is responsible for precipitating and chronicling the decline of the Christian faith.
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, an insidious erosion took hold within the core institutions of Western civilization. It did not begin in the streets with violence, nor did it originate entirely through foreign military aggression. Instead, it took root in the quietly captured halls of academia, governance, and religious institutions. A prime example of this internal subversion is the life and work of John Shelby Spong, who served as the Episcopal Bishop of Newark from 1979 to 2000. Spong became one of the most visible champions of theological revisionism and collapse in American Christianity, publicly demanding that the historic Christian faith dismantle its most sacred doctrines to accommodate the sensibilities of modern secularism.
In books such as Why Christianity Must Change or Die, published in 1998, Spong argued that Christianity had to undergo a radical transformation to remain viable in the modern era. Describing himself as a believer in exile, he insisted that modern man could no longer accept traditional, exclusive theistic claims. He systematically launched attacks against the foundational pillars of historic orthodoxy, including the authority of Sacred Scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, the physical bodily resurrection, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, and the absolute reality of divine miracles. Spong was not merely advocating for subtle interpretive adjustments; he was explicitly demanding the total destruction of traditional Christian theology and its replacement with a humanistic, non-theistic ideology tailored to current cultural fads.
Spong’s efforts to denigrate and ultimately destroy Christianity have been more successful than anyone thought possible. 
His efforts have persuaded other denominations, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and others to reject faith in favor of pleasing the World.
The result has been a collapse of Christianity in America.
A rigorous examination of Spong’s intellectual framework reveals that his arguments rested on profound logical fallacies and methodological defects. His fundamental error lay in his uncritical adoption of anti-supernatural assumptions. Spong repeatedly asserted that miracles, angels, and the bodily resurrection were no longer credible because modern science had revealed the natural world’s uniform operations. In doing so, he conflated an empirical description of ordinary natural processes with a categorical denial of extraordinary, divine interventions. Science observes and describes repeatable natural phenomena; it possesses no empirical apparatus to prove that a unique supernatural act of God never occurred in human history. To assert that dead men do not naturally return to life is a simple scientific observation; to claim that God could not or did not raise Jesus from the dead is an unproven philosophical assertion. Spong routinely passed off modern philosophical biases as established scientific facts. Unfortunately, to the laymen, it seems perfectly plausible.
This methodological dishonesty was particularly glaring in Spong’s treatment of the resurrection. In his 1994 book, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, Spong rejected the physical resuscitation of Jesus Christ, claiming instead that Easter represented a purely subjective, symbolic insight interpreted through Jewish literary traditions. Yet this symbolic reconstruction directly contradicts the earliest historical evidence available. In 1 Corinthians 15, written in the first century AD, the Apostle Paul provides a clear and unambiguous account of Christ’s physical burial, bodily resurrection, and subsequent post-resurrection appearances to hundreds of eyewitnesses. Paul explicitly warned that if Christ is not physically raised, the entire Christian faith is in vain and believers remain in their sins. Spong tried to erase this historic reality by proposing psychological and literary theories with no grounding in ancient historical evidence.
Spong applied the same speculative overreach to the Apostle Paul’s personal life. In his 1991 book, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Spong claimed that Paul was a repressed homosexual whose psychological frustration shaped his moral stance on human sexuality. This claim was presented with great public confidence, despite the complete absence of historical or biographical evidence supporting it. While Spong constantly accused orthodox Christians of allowing dogmatic assumptions to dictate their reading of Scripture, his own work presented a textbook example of contemporary cultural assumptions being forcibly projected onto ancient texts. His project was not dispassionate historical scholarship; it was ideological sabotage dressed in clerical vestments.
The tragic collapse of the Episcopal Church over the last several decades serves as a stark warning of what happens when religious leadership surrenders to secular revisionism. Churches that abandoned biblical authority in pursuit of modern cultural approval did not experience the golden renaissance that Spong promised. Instead, they experienced catastrophic decline, emptying pews, moral confusion, and total spiritual bankruptcy. When a church rejects the miraculous divinity of Christ, it ceases to be a house of God and becomes nothing more than a glorified secular political action committee.
You can see the results of Spong’s heresy and watch as other faiths follow him into the pit.
Consider the timeline. The Episcopal free-fall became irreversible when they breached biblical order in the 1970s, normalizing what Scripture explicitly forbids regarding the pastoral office. For example, Scripture directly prohibits pant-suited preachers.
Many Baptists and other clergy couldn’t care less. I’m a Baptist, so I’m concerned.
Today, the Southern Baptist Convention and Texas Baptists face their own defining crisis. Under the guise of cultural relevance and institutional pragmatism, we see the steady rise of female pastors and deacons in prominent pulpits. The Apostle Paul wrote with absolute clarity in 1 Timothy: pastoral oversight and spiritual authority belong to qualified men within the covenant community. God established male headship in the home and the church not as an arbitrary cultural artifact, but as a reflection of Christ’s headship over His bride. When Baptists waver on this clear biblical mandate, they replicate the exact error of the 1976 Episcopal General Convention.
Compounding this institutional erosion is the pervasive preaching of cheap grace. Across thousands of modern pulpits, consumer Christianity has replaced true repentance. Men are told they can claim salvation without obedience, receive a crown without bearing a cross, and confess Jesus as Savior while outright rejecting His Lordship. This is antinomianism, a deadly error that empties the Gospel of its transformative power. The Apostle James warned that faith without works is dead. True saving faith produces a life submitted to God’s moral law, disciplined discipleship, and genuine righteousness. When churches trade costly discipleship for easy-believism to keep attendance numbers high, they hollow out their congregations’ spiritual vitality from within.
Equally damaging is the theological distortion that has gripped conservative evangelicalism regarding the covenant people of God. For decades, popular dispensational systems have corrupted millions of Baptists. The faithful have subordinated the Church of Jesus Christ to earthly, geopolitical narratives, elevating Jewish lineage and Jewish secular political entities above the body of Christ. Scripture declares unequivocally that Christ fulfills all the promises made to Abraham. The Apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3: “If you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” There is no dual-covenant salvation. The Church—composed of all who repent and place their faith in the risen Savior—is God’s true Israel, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation. To preach that any earthly group possesses spiritual chosenness apart from saving faith in Jesus Christ is to diminish the all-sufficiency of the Cross and deny the Deity of Christ.
Many clergy reject the Deity of Christ through this assertion while congregants blissfully march into the abyss. It’s demonstrably wrong. Click Here.
The Episcopal Church’s lesson is stark and unmistakable. Once an institution begins accommodating the spirit of the age, the descent is swift and unforgiving. The Episcopalians thought their compromises would make them modern and attractive; instead, they rendered themselves utterly irrelevant. If Baptists continue down this road—tolerating the subversion of biblical order, peddling grace without obedience, and placing geopolitical loyalties above the supremacy of Christ and His Church—they will suffer the exact same fate. God will not be mocked, nor will He preserve an unfaithful institution. It is time for faithful men to stand in the gap, reject these compromises, restore biblical order, preach the whole counsel of God, and proclaim that Jesus Christ is the sole King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
This spiritual decay within American churches cannot be separated from the political and civilizational crisis currently gripping the United States. Religion and culture are inextricably linked. The theological subversion pioneered by faithless men like Spong and his acolytes provides the spiritual cover for the capture of American political, educational, and economic institutions. When America is stripped of its Christian anchor, the moral foundation necessary to sustain a free, sovereign, and orderly Constitutional Republic is gone.
For decades, globalist ideologues have pushed a secular, anti-national narrative designed to dissolve the American state from within. Just as Spong and other faithless clerics claimed that historic doctrines were outdated, politicians claimed that national borders, sovereign self-determination, and traditional patriotic identity were obsolete relics of the past. They insisted that the historic American people—founded primarily by Christian settlers who built this nation through centuries of sacrifice—had no unique right to preserve their heritage, protect their borders, or prioritize their own posterity. They promoted open borders, mass unassimilable immigration, economic globalism, and discrimination under the banners of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Feckless Clergy, hoping to fill pews with illegals, did nothing but waive them in, our Nation be damned.
This dual assault—spiritual revisionism in the church and subversion in the state—has produced a nation in deep crisis. American cities suffer under rising lawlessness, traditional families are demonized, industrial jobs have been shipped overseas, and American wealth is squandered on endless foreign wars and multi-billion-dollar foreign handouts. We have seen our national interest sacrificed to advance international consensus, corporate cosmopolitanism, and foreign states, while our own borders remain overrun and our citizens struggle to afford basic necessities.
This is a direct result of faithless clerics like Spong and his ilk.
The principle of ordered loves, famously articulated by Saint Augustine, establishes that human moral duties begin with 
those closest to us. A man’s primary duty is to his immediate household, his local neighbors, and his sovereign nation before he owes any duty to foreign populations. Saint Paul reinforced this truth in 1 Timothy 5:8, writing that anyone who fails to provide for his own household has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. Applied to national governance, this biblical rule dictates that the American government’s primary, non-negotiable obligation is to protect American citizens’ security, prosperity, and heritage. Any political doctrine that prioritizes foreign nations, global corporations, or non-citizens over the historic American people is fundamentally unjust, anti-biblical, and traitorous.
To overcome this civilizational crisis, we must adopt an uncompromising policy of America First, and America Only. We must reject the proposition-nation lie that reduces America to a mere geographical shopping mall or a set of abstract ideas. America is a real nation, established by a real people, with a distinct bloodline, language, culture, and Christian faith. The Preamble to the United States Constitution states explicitly that the Constitution was ordained to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It was not written to manage global population flows or to spread liberal democracy across the globe at the expense of American blood and treasure.
True national restoration requires embracing Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism is the straightforward recognition that Jesus Christ is King over every sphere of human existence, including civil government, law, culture, and national life. Religious neutrality does not exist in politics. A society will either be governed by Christian moral law or by the tyrannical whims of modern secularism. When Christians retreat from the public square under the false pretense of neutrality, godless ideologues fill the vacuum and impose their own pagan morality upon our children.
Scripture commands Christians to take dominion over the earth. In Psalm 33:12, the Bible declares, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.” In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus asserted His absolute authority, declaring that all power in heaven and on earth had been given unto Him, and commanding His followers to disciple all nations. Taking dominion means 
asserting Christ’s righteous rule over law, policy, education, and culture. It means standing up for the traditional patriarchal family, where men act as strong protectors, providers, and builders, and women serve as nurturers and guardians of the home. It means protecting unborn life, abolishing discrimination, rebuilding productive domestic industries, and enforcing strict rule of law at home and along our borders.
The logical and theological failures of revisionists like Bishop Spong and his ilk offer a vital lesson: when you abandon foundational truth to appease the modern world, you do not win the world; you lose your soul and destroy your inheritance. America’s path forward does not lie in modern revisionism, globalist surrender, or soft cowardice. It lies in an unyielding return to historic orthodoxy, uncompromising national sovereignty, and the bold assertion of Christian Nationalism.
Jesus Christ is the risen, victorious King. His kingdom will endure long after modern secular empires and apostate churches have crumbled into dust. As American patriots, our duty is clear: stand firm in the faith once delivered to the saints, protect our households, defend our sovereign Republic, and work tirelessly to ensure that America remains one nation under God, putting America First today, tomorrow, and forever.
Dave
Sources:
John Shelby Spong
