"Turn from religious extremes, says Carey"
by Ruth Gledhill
("The Times" (London), May 13, 2000)

 

THE Archbishop of Canterbury pleaded yesterday for a return to "sanity" in religion and for the extremes of literalism and liberalism to be rejected. Dr George Carey, in the second of four lectures he is delivering in Wichita, Texas, singled out Jerry Falwell, the Baptist minister from Virginia who founded America's Moral Majority movement, for particular criticism. Mr Falwell had made the Bible "the actual voice of God", Dr Carey said.

He then chastised one of the Anglican Church's own bishops, Jack Spong, the liberal and gay rights campaigner who recently retired as Bishop of Newark. Dr Carey accused Bishop Spong of treating the Bible as no better than Aesop's Fables. "For Spong the Bible is merely a witness to the past. It points back, but it has little to say to us today."

Dr Carey said: "There must, of course, be a middle way. We cannot abandon scriptures to the dogmatic voices of either the fundamentalist literalist or the fundamentalist radical. Sanity must prevail."