Justice & Law Quote by John Shelby Spong

Spong frames the post-9/11 security dilemma as a trap with a preacher's bluntness: if you keep answering fear with force, you end up worshipping at the altar of control. The line sets up a stark binary - police state or a world that "doesn't create terrorists" - and that absolutism is the point. It's not a policy memo; it's moral pressure. By pushing the choice to extremes, he exposes what moderates often launder: every new surveillance power, every normalized exception, is a theological trade. You gain a little safety by surrendering the very freedom you claim to defend.

The subtext is aimed at an audience habituated to righteous retaliation. Spong, a liberal Episcopal bishop famous for challenging orthodoxies, is quietly indicting the idea that terrorism is an alien pathology best managed by cages, raids, and black budgets. His phrase "doesn't create terrorists" shifts the frame from hunting bad people to interrogating the conditions that manufacture enemies: occupation, humiliation, poverty, propaganda, the long memory of civilian casualties. It's an uncomfortable move because it implies complicity without excusing violence.

"And that means a whole different way of 'getting along'" is the most loaded part, the scare quotes doing rhetorical work. He's skeptical of the sentimental, bipartisan phrase that usually masks power politics. "Getting along" here implies costly mutual recognition: diplomacy that isn't performative, justice that isn't selective, security that isn't purchased by dehumanizing someone else's neighborhood. In Spong's hands, the choice isn't freedom versus terror; it's whether fear becomes our governing religion.