Spong: In the Middle Ages, people generally got married a year or so after puberty, around age 15

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Now we're going to listen to Terry's interview with John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal bishop who championed the acceptance of women and LGBTQ people in the clergy. He also promoted a non-literal interpretation of scripture. He died earlier this month at age 90. From 1976 to the year 2000, he served as the Episcopal bishop of Newark, N.J. In 1977, he became one of the first American bishops to ordain a woman into the clergy. In 1989, he was the first to ordain an openly gay man. Bishop Spong was the author of more than 25 books, and his speaking schedule often included 200 events a year.

Terry Gross spoke with Bishop Spong in 1996 after the publication of his book "Liberating The Gospels: Reading The Bible With Jewish Eyes."

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GROSS: Now, I believe you first saw or initiated a church study on how changing ideas and changing sexual practices should affect the church. Could you sum up some of the things that you found in that study?

SPONG: Sure. That was done in the Diocese of Newark in 1986 and 1987, and it was a profoundly shaping experience for the whole of the Episcopal Church and maybe even for the whole of Christendom.

What we did was to begin to study changing patterns in family life. It was a rather innocuous beginning. But in this changing patterns of family life, we began to be aware that a vast majority of our young people today do not wait until they are married to initiate their sexual activity. That's just a fact. People might like it or dislike it, but it's just a fact. Another aspect of life that we wanted to look at was, what do you do with post-married people? By that, I mean, people who are divorced or people who are widowed. Are they supposed to either remain sexually celibate or to immediately get married again so that they can have a legitimate partner with which they can exercise their sexual lives? And then we looked at the gay and lesbian population that under the laws of the states of the United States of America and every country of the world are not given the privilege of a legal relationship. And we raised questions about that.

I think the first issue was that I became aware that sex inside marriage is not always holy. Rape takes place inside marriage. Sexual abuse takes place inside marriage. It is not marriage that makes sexual activity holy. It's the quality of the relationship. So if sex inside marriage is not always holy, we had to face the question that sex outside marriage might not always be sinful. We began by looking at the young people. When you go back to the Middle Ages, when the standards of the church were proclaimed that sex was to be exercised only inside the marital relationship, people entered puberty in that era at ages 15, 16 and 17. They didn't live much past 30 or 40. They tended to get married within a year or a year and a half of puberty.

We don't live in that kind of world. Through better diet and many other things, we have run the age of puberty back to 11, 12 and 13 because we honor women with the understanding that they are equal and that they have brains that are capable of being educated. University-educated women like you, Terry, are a 20th-century phenomenon in the Western world. There were very few university-educated women before the turn of the century.

But because of that, we've pushed the age of marriage for women into the mid-20s so that we've created a 10- to 15-year gap between puberty and marriage in this society. And we've not bothered to recognize that the standard of the Middle Ages was applied in a world where there might be a one- to two-year gap between puberty and marriage and a whole different set of circumstances. Now, I don't know anybody that's suggesting that people ought to get married at age 13 and 14 so that they can be sexually celibate until they're married. But that's the reality that we're dealing with. The only way you can keep people sexually celibate, it seems to me, for 10 to 15 years after puberty is to impose upon the activity of sex enormous controls like guilt and fear. And that's exactly what the Christian church has done through the years. And I do not think that that is loving, and I do not think that that's an appropriate way to proclaim the fullness of life for God's people.

BIANCULLI: Bishop John Shelby Spong speaking with Terry Gross in 1996. He died earlier this month at age 90. 

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1042359282/remembering-john-shelby-spong-episcopal-bishop-and-lgbtq-champion