A North Carolina religious leader has published a book with a timely and provocative title: Why Bush Must Go: A Bishop's Faith-Based Challenge. According to the Right Rev. Bennett Sims he authored Why Bush Must Go in order to "write truthfully and hopefully about the present and future of the human pilgrimage."

Bishop Sims believes that "we are at a turning point in the human odyssey that magnifies both peril and promise." While maintaining his vision of an "evolutionary leap" toward an era of peace and justice, Bishop Sims writes to "counter the force of fear, violence and predatory nationalism that threaten to foreclose the global future." He contends that President Bush's policies of unilateral warfare, increased military spending, preferential treatment for the wealthy and gradual erosion of constitutional freedoms are major obstacles to this future. Consequently, Bishop Sims believes that, if we are to move from our adolescent addiction to violence into an era of maturity and cooperation, Bush must be defeated on November 2.

I interviewed Bishop Sims earlier this week. A portion of that interview is included below.

Mulkey: What is your experience of being a dissenting voice given the political climate in our nation today?

Sims: My experience is both greatly enlivening and moderately fear inducing. It includes a sense of sharing what prophets must always have experienced in exhilaration and pain-fulfilling the promise of Jesus who invited the discipleship of taking up the cross of real life. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote: "Yet perhaps the crowning paradox of the prophet's role is that although hurt when reviled, he cannot be satisfied that his is doing his job unless he is reviled."

Mulkey: What sorts of responses have you gotten from readers of your book?

Sims: Overwhelmingly positive. These, of course, have come from friends and readers across the country who share with me a sense of deep anxiety that the Bush mentality and leadership are taking the nation into the peril of international isolation, domestic strife and economic disaster. The few accusatory and hateful responses betray the very fury and fear of the fundamentalist ideology that drives the Bush Administration to the proud folly of empire-building by violence, secrecy and the destabilizing pursuit of private wealth over concern for commonwealth.

Mulkey: Where do you place yourself on the continuum of political thought in the U.S.?

Sims: Decidedly liberal, though I came to this in mid-career following participation in the March on Washington in 1963 and hearing first hand the "I Have a Dream" speech of Martin Luther King Jr. At every opportunity I explain that the term "liberal" derives from its root in "liberation." Its meaning is the bestowal of freedom with which humanity is endowed by our Creator-the admittedly perilous gift of freedom to choose and subsequently to bestow and honor, by word and deed, the God-endowed freedom of each fellow pilgrim in the odyssey of life. I repudiate the narrow and frightened rejection of the word "liberal" as a fatuous pejorative label by the forces of political conservatism.

Mulkey: What supports your hopeful view that "humanity could be on the cusp of an epic shift in the use of power-away from a looming possibility of planetary incineration and into an unprecedented maturity of peace among the nations?"

Sims: At the base of this hope is a remarkable discovery about the prehistory of humanity. Since World War II archeologists and paleontologists have found that, in the childhood of our existence, our species knew how to do deal with conflict without resorting to violence. The current adolescent period of competitive struggle and violent conflict resolution represents only about seven percent, or approximately 7,000 years, of the human "reflective conscious" presence in the approximately 100,000 years of our total occupation of the Earth. Therefore, at the base of our genetic makeup, humanity is programmed for the very peace and cooperative tranquility that under-gird every high human ethic, every spiritual aspiration and teaching in the catalogue of human religiosity.

In contemporary history the re-emergence of the genuine Feminist impulse in our time re-enforces the hope that non-violence may be working its way into human interaction and political problem solving. The recent triumphs of non-violent conflict resolution argue a hopeful future: Gandhi in India, King in the U.S., Gorbachev and Yeltsin in the Soviet Union and Tutu and Mandela in South Africa. These are but a few of the real political victories of our time. More are to come-especially if the historic American preference for global cooperation in dealing with conflict can overcome the prevailing strut and swagger of the ruling Administration by a resounding electoral triumph in November 2004.

The Right Rev. Bennett J. Sims is Bishop Emeritus of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta (1972-1983) and Founding President of the Institute for Servant Leadership (1983-1999). He served in the U.S. Navy as a line officer on destroyers during World War II. Bishop Sims has authored three additional books: Invitation to Hope, Purple Ink: Theology and Social Ethics and Servanthood: Leadership for the Third Millennium. Why Bush Must Go is available at many local bookstores and at Amazon.com.