CHRISTIANITY TODAY – A TIME OF CRISIS?

In a Zoom meeting for The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 11 August 2021, commentator and long-time ABC presenter Geraldine Doogue joined Andrew West, presenter of the ABC’s Religion Report. Regarded by many who joined the meeting as one of The Sydney Institute’s best discussions, the conversation grappled with identity and meaning for Christians in a modern secular world where regard for many institutions has waned.

CHRISTIANITY TODAY – A TIME OF CRISIS?

ANDREW WEST

This is census week, so, right now, millions of Australians are being asked the questions, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a Christian church?” I fully expect the answer, next year, to be less than 52 per cent, which was the number of self-identifying Christians in the 2016 census. This does not surprise me. People like our mutual friend Greg Sheridan have been saying, for some years, that Australia is an atheist country. I’m enormously fond of Greg and he’s written a wonderful new book. But I think Greg overstates that. For Christianity in Australia, the greatest danger is not atheism or aggression, it is irrelevance. That’s something, for example, that Dr Michael Jensen, theologian and a Sydney Anglican, has written of. He doesn’t sense that we are no longer a moment of triumph for, if you like, the new atheist movement.

A couple of years ago I interviewed Helen Pluckrose, who’s a heterodox left winger who spoke at the Ramsay Centre and wrote a wonderful book. Helen herself was part of the new atheist movement about 10-12 years ago. But she wasn’t keen to talk about that. She wanted to talk about her book and I said I would mention it in passing. “Yes,” she said, “But Andrew, you can only talk for so long about what you don’t believe in.” In that sense, that movement seems to have had its day.

Nonetheless, faith in Australia is challenged by a sense of indifference. There’s a lot of reasons for this. A lot of hostility is directed at the institutional church, and we cannot look past the tragedy of the abuse crisis. That is a terrible, self-inflicted wound, and it has enabled a lot of mobilisation against organised religion.

Interestingly, a lot of critics of the Christian Church use the moral terms of religion to condemn religion, or to condemn the Church. They use its own terms to condemn the Church, and quite correctly at times. For example, the Royal Commission. Anecdotal evidence is not always the most valuable, but when you hear it 30 or 40 times it begins to form a pattern. When I would interview a critic of the Church, and there were many quite obviously, the most repeated comment was often along the lines, “Imagine what Jesus would think.”

That to me does not suggest someone angry with Christianity; it suggests to me people deeply hurt by what they see as the betrayal of Christianity by the Church. That is a very different thing to a triumphalism that many atheists will claim coming out, for example, of the expected census results. I expect the census results to put Christianity at somewhere below 50 per cent when the results come out next year. This follows a trend of secularisation that has been going on for 50 years since the 1960s. It has been accelerated by the self-inflicted crisis of the sexual abuse scandal. But even without that, this trend was happening.

In March 2021, the GALLUP Group in the United States had what for the United States was an absolutely shattering figure. For the first time in polling history, fewer than 50 per cent of Americans claimed membership of a church, mosque or synagogue – the figure was 47 per cent.

This is very interesting, because it’s not as simple as people might think. It is not necessarily a renunciation of religion, but it is a nervousness, an anxiousness, a reluctance to identify. For example, white evangelicalism has become such a politically loaded phrase with the consequence that the number of people who identify as white evangelicals has fallen from 19 per cent to 16 per cent. Not a massive drop, but a significant drop. If you’re a Southern Baptist, or a member of the Presbyterian Church or PCA, which is the Conservative wing of the Presbyterians, or you’re a Missouri Synod Lutheran, all of which would consider themselves part of the broad white evangelical community, these are not good numbers for you. Again, this is a question of identification; it is not a question of belief. It is a great mistake to assume that people who don’t identify institutionally now with a religion, have given up on religion.

Many of these folk have a great sense of betrayal and many of church leaders recognise this. For example, before the 2019 election, the Catholic Bishops Conference of Australia put out what I thought was an extremely honest and very humble statement. It said, “We realise we have no credibility to instruct Australians on how to vote, we simply ask them to consider a range of issues.” Along with the traditional issues regarding the sanctity of life, most of what the Catholic bishops asked us to consider or asked voters to consider when voting were things like poverty, the treatment of asylum seekers, or the future of health care.

So, I think there is a realisation that religion, or Christianity, in Australia and the West is becoming a minority. However, the situation around the world, in the global south and East Asia, is extraordinarily different. There are around 680 million people in Africa who identify as Christian. By 2030, something like 40 per cent of the world’s Christians will be in Africa. In China, the number of Christians is anywhere between 70 million and 150 million. I acknowledge that 150 million is likely to be the most optimistic number, but in a country that has ruthlessly oppressed Christianity, since 1949, even to have something like 70 million Christians is an extraordinary accomplishment for the Christian faith. The Catholic Church has somewhere between 10 and 15 million adherents in China.

This has led to some controversy, because Pope Francis has been trying to negotiate a form of arrangements with the Chinese Communist Government to allow more freedoms for Chinese Catholics. That involves allowing the Chinese Communist Party to approve bishops, and this has led to a lot of pushback. This puts the Pope – and I try not to allow my personal opinion to intrude on the program but people wouldn’t be the first to say that they do sense some warmth that I have for Pope Francis – in a very difficult position. Pope Francis sees the massive growth of Christianity in China, and he obviously wants Catholicism to have a piece of that — which is fair enough. But it may involve something Faustian with the Chinese Communist Party. Of course, the other great area of growth, particularly for the Evangelical and Protestant Churches and the Pentecostal Churches, is in Latin America. Around the world, there’s something like 500 million Pentecostals.

There’s a deep misunderstanding, particularly among a lot of journalists and people on the so-called progressive side of politics about Pentecostalism in Australia. I am not uncritical of our Prime Minister, but I am not one of those people who has some guttural reaction against our Prime Minister’s Pentecostal faith. It’s deeply misunderstood. Pentecostalism in this country is nothing like white evangelical Protestantism in the United States. It certainly has some core socially conservative values, but it is a serious misreading to see it as any sort of outgrowth of the white Christian evangelical right in the United States. Even the most casual survey of a Pentecostal congregation in this country would reveal something much different – and anyone who was listening to my program just 30 minutes ago would have heard this. Pentecostal congregations in this country are, in many ways, models of modern multicultural Australia, as it is increasingly the case with a lot of Catholic parishes.

If anything is keeping the numbers in Catholic churches steady, if not up, it is immigrants from South Asia, from the Philippines, from China, and from Vietnam. If anything is keeping alive the flagging Uniting Church, it is the congregations of the South Pacific. Interestingly, the Uniting Church has just elected as it’s National leader, its moderator, a Pacific Islander who is a female pastor. There’s a lot of misunderstanding, in this country, about Pentecostalism. I don’t go into the details of its theology, but if you look at it as a social force, it’s something very, very different, and political leaders in this country, particularly on the left, should be very wary of trying to characterise this very fast growing religion – off a very small base – in negative terms.

The politicisation of Christianity in the US has been a real problem. The growing association of white evangelicalism with just one political party is a bad development for white evangelicalism, even any form of Christianity. In Australia, a lot of evangelical and Pentecostal leaders are very eager not to be owned by one political party. That is a wise thing that they pursue. That is not, of course, to say that our faith leaders have no rights to make their arguments. We live in a country of secular governance, but we live in a country of religious and ethnic pluralism, and that is a big difference. We have secular governance, which is entirely appropriate, but we are a religiously and ethnically plural country. It is entirely appropriate that faith leaders are able to contribute to that debate.

There is a very interesting statistic to note. It concerns the way Christianity has ebbed and flowed through recent history. In his book, Greg Sheridan takes us back to Easter 1750 in London – on the streets there are 10,000 prostitutes. In St Pauls Cathedral, there are 16 people worshipping. But, within three decades, the great Wesleyan revival had begun, then it ebbed a little bit. Yet, in the mid 1800s, there was a second revival, mainly based around the United States. There was a revival when the Tractarians, taking the lead of Cardinal Newman and Edward Pusey, revived the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Anglican Church. While this strain is weak nowadays, nonetheless, for many decades, it was a vital, vibrant partner in the Church of England.

As Peter Hitchens records in some of his marvellous writing, Christianity weakened in Europe in WW1 – the churches’ link with call to war, the call to arms, was very damaging for. But Christianity revived again in the West in the late 1940s and 1950s. Even so, in Australia, Christianity never could claim more than 50 per cent weekly church attendance. It was around the late 1940s and early 1950s when Australia got to something like 47-48 per cent weekly or fortnightly church attendance. While the figures today are very sobering for the Christian churches and Christian leaders in the West, they are not hopeless.

There is one final point that I would make. It is the challenge for both conservatives and liberals in the Christian churches. For example, Sue Hooke who is at this Zoom tonight would know this since she heard me speaking about this about two years ago when she invited me to speak to a very large group of people on the lower North Shore at a wonderful dinner they had. There are two challenges. One is for conservative Christians and conservative Christian leaders. Hard line Christian theology does not simply meet people where they are in their lives. It is pointless saying to a single mother who has had many travails in her life that she has made some grievous error and is cut off from the sacraments of the Church and the love of Church. This is an impossible way to meet people where they are in their lives.

At the same time, liberals in the Church cannot practise the theology of evasion, or the theology of avoidance. Many liberal or progressive Christian leaders today, when asked about the tough stuff to do with matters of life or death – euthanasia, abortion, questions about the sanctity of life, about traditional marriage – will simply say, “Yes, but the Bible contains 2000 references to the poor and 12 references to homosexuality.” That may be the case, but it doesn’t help to avoid the tough stuff.

The challenge for Christian leaders is to be both pastoral, but also faithful to their doctrines, but to do so in a way that recognises the reality of modern life.