During a visit to Chicago last week, Bishop Frank Griswold, spiritual leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States, was supposed to be talking about the future of his faith tradition in an increasingly secular world. But his mind was elsewhere.
"We are in a state of corporate desolation," Griswold told the Sun-Times in an interview Friday at an Oak Brook hotel where he was attending an Episcopal conference called "Will Our Faith Have Children?"
"The only sense of community we have now is shared fear or anxiety," Griswold said. "Instead of this experience of 9/11 making us, as it were, in a new way citizens of the world community bound together in a common sense of vulnerability, our reaction has been one of bald assertion of our strength and our power. But I think underneath all of that, people still, no matter how firmly the president of the United States speaks, are living with a level of anxiety, a sense of insecurity, which is, of course, bolstered now by the economic situation we're living with, the specter of war, and no sense of what the consequences of a military invasion of Iraq might be.
"As important as this conference is--I mean, 'Will our faith have children?'--I would ask, will our children have a world?"
Among the growing number of religious voices opposing military action in Iraq, Griswold's has been one of the loudest.
Earlier this year, Griswold, who was Episcopal bishop of Chicago from 1987 to 1997 before being named presiding bishop of the United States in 1998, said, "We are loathed, and I think the world has every right to loathe us because they see us as greedy, self-interested and almost totally unconcerned about poverty, disease and suffering."
In a speech Jan. 31 in Stamford, Conn., former President George H.W. Bush, who is an Episcopalian, called Griswold's comments "highly offensive."
"We are the most generous, fairest nation in the world," Bush said. "How can this man of God think so little of the United States? . . . Unlike the bishop, I never feel the need to apologize for this great country."
Griswold is unfazed by the elder Bush's complaints.
"Listening to Anglican voices in the Middle East, it's very clear to me that they sense it will be a complete destabilization of the entire Middle East. And what may be perceived here as a focused attack on one particular country is going to erupt into something involving the whole region, if not the whole world," the bishop said. "This is the climate in which we are living, and my own sense is we always fool ourselves that we think we're invulnerable."
"The focus on terrorism and fear and anxiety and heightened alerts make the populace more and more anxious and means we turn more and more inward and disconnect ourselves from the larger world," he said. "Our nation historically has been generous and so open to the rest of the world, and now it's all turned in on itself."
The bishop urged American leaders to reach out with compassion to alleviate suffering instead of using military might to stem the tide of anti-American sentiment abroad.
"If we are a nation under God ... then we have to adopt God's perspectives, which means a superpower must be a super servant. I think this is what we don't see clearly," Griswold said.
Until last month's State of the Union address in which President Bush announced a $15 billion plan for AIDS relief in Africa, "I was having to deal with bishops in sub-Saharan Africa who were enraged, enraged over our stance, our unwillingness to commit significant resources to HIV/AIDS," he said. "They'd say to me, 'I'm living with 20 AIDS orphans in my house ... and our clergy do nothing from Sunday to Sunday except bury people.' They would say, 'Why can't your country see? Why can't they be with us in our suffering? You have the resources. You have the power.'"
Religious leaders and people of faith need to be publicly and forcefully critical of America's foreign policy, particularly when the future of the world seems so precarious, he said.
"The voices that are being raised up now are equivalent to the prophets of old saying, 'Wait a minute; what is justice here rather than retribution and revenge?' How are we being called to be a people of mercy, a people of compassion, a people who see the world as God's world and that everyone in it is loved by God?" he said. "I think the church is called to be subversive, and I'm grateful when I see subversion in public values in favor of the values of the Gospel."