THE EARLY CHRISTIANS & LESSONS FOR TODAY – GREG SHERIDAN

The first Christians confronted a cultural environment vastly more hostile than today’s. They had no powerful backers, very little money and numbered no more than a few hundred. Yet they revolutionised the ancient world and spread their movement far and wide. There is a deep, pervasive crisis of meaning and purpose across all Western societies today. Greg Sheridan, foreign editor with The Australian and author of the just released How Christians Can Succeed Today, encourages us to listen to the voices of the early Christians and emulate their commitment, integrity, resilience and smarts. To discuss his new book, Greg Sheridan addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 8 October 2025

THE EARLY CHRISTIANS & LESSONS FOR TODAY

GREG SHERIDAN

Thank you very much Gerard, and Anne, and ladies and gentlemen. I’m greatly honoured to be here. And I’d just like to thank Gerard and Anne very much for inviting me, and also to pay tribute to Gerard and Anne, what a wonderful thing they’ve done with The Sydney Institute over all these decades.

I’ve known Gerard, roughly, since the late Pleistocene period. We served together in the battle for Constantinople and we were mentioned in dispatches in the Thirty Years War, which we’ve made the several 100 Years War and so on. In any event, it’s a long association.

I’m going to talk to you about my book, How Christians can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church. I’m reminded of a remark that Adlai Stevenson made in a circumstance like this – for the next 30 minutes or so, it’s my job to talk. It’s your job to listen, and if you should happen to finish your job before I finish my job, no hard feelings whatsoever.

Now I am the foreign editor of The Australian, a position I’ve held since 1992. I’ve worked at The Australian since 1984 and I’ve been a full time professional journalist since 1979. So, I am a very good exhibit for the falsity of the proposition that you have to change your career frequently and be agile and so on. That’s rubbish. You just grab hold of your desk and don’t let go.

I’ve always been a believing Christian, but my book is about culture and history. It’s not a statement of my religious belief. I have, though, failed Christianity in practice but not in theory. But I would never deny it, And I would write the occasional column in the old days saying, “Good on you the Pope. You know, go for it. Boo, sucks to you communists”. When John Paul II was Pope, in particular, I thought the side was well led. We were winning the premiership. They didn’t need me to run on the field. I could just cheer occasionally from the sidelines.

Then, over the 50 years of my journalism, I saw the culture going from being notionally pro-Christian to more or less neutral. Often very hypocritically but, notionally, from pro-Christian to neutral, and then to being actively hostile to Christianity. And I thought, if circumstance gives you a public microphone and all your friends are under attack, it is not a bad idea to come to their aid. Of course, journalism is a search for two things, the truth and a good story. And it finally occurred to me, after 35 years or so in professional journalism, that Christianity was both true and the best story.

As a result, this is now my third book about Christianity. The first was called God is Good for You and it dealt with the God problem. What do we know about God? What do we think when we say God? It also argued that belief in God is entirely rational. Belief, I think, is a matter of the will not of the intellect. But you can’t believe things which outrage your intellect. So, I read Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and AC Grayling. I tell you, I’m going to get time off purgatory for that, because what a dreary lot of deadbeats they are, really. Although, of course, I’m being too equivocal there. That’s my besetting sin. It was all just the old nineteenth century arguments against God put next to a lot of irrelevant science.

Richard Dawkins says the universe is 14 billion years old. That proves there’s no God. Because why would he waste 14 billion years. Then you think, “Well, Richard, you’ve just told us there is no God, so how would you know what he thinks. And his scale of generosity might be a bit different from yours.” It strikes me as absolutely characteristic of God, that he’d spent 14 billion years preparing this splendid garden for us. And in any event, it’s not an intellectual argument against God, it’s just a prejudice. So that was the first book.

Writing books is a lot like taking heroin. It’s better if you don’t start. Once you start, you can never stop. It just goes on and on forever. My second book was provoked by a reaction to the first. Somebody wrote to me and said, “You’ve got a wonderful correspondence when you write Christian books.” The book astonished the publisher, and indeed the author, by being much more successful than either of us ever imagined. Books by secular journalists in favour of God and Christianity and published by a mainstream publisher in Australia is a niche market. And you get the nitpickers. A clergyman wrote saying, “Good effort, but You made a terrible mistake on page 138.” I got a lot of letters like that. And he added, “Not a bad effort about God, but where is the living Jesus in your book?”

But it doesn’t take much to provoke an addicted book writer to the next book, which was called Christians, The Urgent Case for Jesus in our World. It was seeking the living Jesus in the New Testament. It was about reading the New Testament as a journalist, admittedly a journalist who believed it was true, but as a journalist and being aware of the historical debates about the historic Jesus and the Christ of religion and so on. It was not really entering into those debates but just reading the New Testament as a journalist when the great philosophical program of the last several 100 years has been disenchantment.

The project of disenchantment has had two central propositions. One, that God is dead and belief in God is irrational. Two, that the Bible is completely unreliable. Now, I discovered in researching Christians that really all contemporary scholarship is validating the historicity of the New Testament. The Israeli authorities, in particular, are doing wonderful research about the history of Judaism, which keeps validating the New Testament. Jesus was recording the Gospels as preaching in the synagogues in the Galilee. For a long time, there was no evidence of synagogues in the Galilee from his time. Historians said that’s an anachronism – they wrote the Gospels a long time later. Then the Israeli archaeological authorities discovered the unmistakable ruins of a synagogue in Magdala, where Mary of Magdalene came from at the time of Jesus. They’ve since discovered four or five others. There are a couple of other prospective sites. It turns out the New Testament historicity was accurate. The scholars were wrong. There are many other examples of that. The Jewish historical authorities have done exhaustive surveys of Jewish names that were used all through history. And the New Testament is very accurately representative of the Jewish names that were in use at the time the Gospels were written

I thought the public should know that the proposition that everything in the Bible is a lie is now being disproved by scholarship, not supported by scholarship. Finally, I looked at the cultural moment. A friend had said to me, “What Christian leaders and followers and people need now, is a book which tells them or offers them some suggestions about how they can be effective in today’s culture.” I had done such a lot of research on the early Christians for the first two books. The early Christians are such fun to write about. There’s lots of what they wrote and lots that people wrote about them. They’ve been almost completely neglected in the Western imagination, not only since our culture became anti-religious, but even when it was pro-religious.

The great movies about Christ finished with the resurrection of Christ. Typically, they don’t go on and explore Polycarp and Irenaeus, Irenaeus of Lyon and the other great figures from the early church. And these folks are terrific to write about. So, the proposition of the book is that the early Christians were dealing with an extremely unsympathetic pagan, Greco-Roman culture and, yet, they did astonishingly well. Now you can attribute their success to divine intervention, if you like, but you don’t have to rely on divine intervention. You can analyse their success in cultural and historical terms.

And my thesis is that today, we’re dealing with a somewhat Neo-pagan society, and there are lessons from the early Christians. The first half of the book is historical treatment of the early Christians, a thematic treatment. It’s not a comprehensive. It is just 150 pages and finishes with Augustine who is a terrific character to write about. He wrote five million words. This doesn’t really compare with a News Corp journalist, but it’s not a bad effort for a guy who was also busy being the Bishop of Hippo and sorting out his clergy’s holiday disputes and performing marriages and so on all day.

Augustine is often regarded as the last man of antiquity and the first man of medieval Christianity. I think of him as the first great modern because his confessions were the first psychological autobiography, the first memoir. They’re wonderful. He was a great journalist. He gave us fantastic lines that are very accessible. Of all the books of the ancient world, except the Bible, I’d recommend Augustine’s Confessions more than any other. He had marvellous lines, lampooning himself. In his early life, he was a bit of a libertine before converting to Christianity. He said his prayer as a young man was, “Lord, make me pure, but not yet.” That’s a great line. He gave us wonderful other lines too such as “Our hearts are restless, Lord, till they rest in you.” Or “Late have I loved thee.” How often have I heard that lament? It’s a universal human lament that people feel. Augustine was addressing God, but often people feel they didn’t appreciate their parents or their spouse or their children, and this phrase “late have I loved thee” is a very universal human reflection.

I found the success of the early Christians arose from a number of factors. One, they were more pro-women and pro-female than any disposition had been in the history of the human race up until then. It was very common in the ancient world to kill female babies, to leave them out for the elements to get them, or to just actively kill them. The archaeological evidence is overwhelming. Roman families almost never had more than one daughter. So, if they had a bit of money and so forth, they might keep one daughter. They never would keep a sister and many of them would kill all the daughters, so they’d only have sons. There’s a very affectionate letter from a Roman soldier to his wife saying, “Darling, I love you. Don’t think I’ll ever forget you.” He’s away at battle which is very unusual because Roman marriages were very dysfunctional by our standards. The wife is pregnant and he says to her in this letter, “If it’s a boy, I want you to name him such and such, and if it’s a girl, of course, discard it.” This was absolutely routine advice.

Now, Christians didn’t do that, so they had lots of girls in their families, which made them much happier families. Can you imagine anything more ghastly than a society which is made up entirely of blokes and with no women. Of course, there was a tremendous shortage of women in the Greco-Roman world because of these practices. So, a large number of men who married Christian women converted to Christianity.

As well, the pagan society saw how happy Christian families were. Likewise, the Christian performance in plagues was very powerful. Now you might say Christians were talking their own book here, but there is extensive writing by Roman and Greek and other scholars, some of whom hated Christianity, about the way Christians behaved in plagues. Christians didn’t run away in plagues, which is what everyone else did. There were terrible plagues in the ancient world – the Cyprian plague and the Galen plague are two that I write about in particular. In one of them, 5000 people were dying in Rome every day and, typically, if a family member got the plague, you just put them out in the street and left them to die by themselves in the hope that you didn’t get infected. Christians didn’t do that.

Now, even in a plague, a deadly plague, most people who get the disease don’t die. And if you give them even basic medical assistance, giving them water and a bit of food when they’re at their worst, the survival rate is much higher. As well, some of the people who don’t die become immune. Paradoxically, by tending to their sick, Christians had a much higher survival rate in plagues than the pagan environment around them. That had two results. One, their proportion of the population was higher at the end of the plague than it was at the start. And two, all the pagans again saw these Christians and said, “Isn’t this marvellous?”

Of course, Christians looked after their pagan neighbours as much as they could as well. This had a very profound effect on the standing of Christians in public opinion. Christians were spasmodically persecuted. They were not persecuted all the time, very much like Christians today in China. Persecution could be very intense, but it tended to be quite episodic, and they bore it with an extraordinary good grace. Most didn’t seek it, although some did. There were always fanatics and wild enthusiasts, and the church was always telling the enthusiasts to calm down and just go to church on Sunday and take it easy and so on. Christians mostly tried to live as good citizens, but wanted to be allowed to spread the gospel and live according to their beliefs. There were things they wouldn’t do. They had bright, red lines that they wouldn’t cross. They wouldn’t worship the Roman gods. They wouldn’t worship Caesar. They would pray for Caesar. They wouldn’t pray to Caesar. This is very analogous to Chinese Christians today. A lot of them were executed, and this is not an overstatement. There is a survey I write which deals with an extended period of Roman writing about Christians. Every case, except one, referenced the execution of Christians.

We have letters that Christians wrote between being sentenced to death and being killed. The first preserved writing in Latin by a woman, is a woman who’s going to be executed, Perpetua, who’s executed with a slave, Felicity. She sticks to her Christianity, against the wishes of her father. So, this up ends the social hierarchy of Roman life. It shows that there’s a higher authority than the family authority. Perpetua’s case was promoted all through the Roman Empire by the early Christians. It was striking courage, and it was pro-woman in the sense that the women’s testimony was as powerful as the men’s. There’s very strong evidence that there were many more women than men in the early Christian movement, and that was a key to their success.

The Christians never rode back on the essential weirdness of their belief. There is something essentially weird about Christian belief. It’s quite counter intuitive, a lot of it. It’s a paradox, because it does resonate with the deepest truths and instincts at the centre of the human heart – that life goes on, that love goes on, that we don’t abandon our loved ones forever at death. On the other hand, it is very counter intuitive in day-to-day life. Christians teach that everybody, Christian and non-Christian, will live forever in their bodies through all eternity, will have a physical existence risen in their bodies for all eternity. It teaches the four last things, death, judgement, heaven and hell. It teaches miracles, the truth of miracles, it teaches angels and devils. You know, if you eliminate angels and devils and miracles out of the Bible, you take away about 30 per cent of it.

My reading on Christianity is very non-denominational. They’re pro any Christian group that believes in the Apostles Creed. And all the different denominations have their genius. The Pentecostals are brilliant at social media. The Evangelicals are great in their defence of the inerrancy of the Bible. The Catholics are terrific for the intellectual sophistication and depth that they bring to Christianity and their ecclesial music and so on. The only Christians I can’t quite understand are liberal Christians who think the whole thing is a metaphor. Yet, if it was just a metaphor, I’d rather be at the races. You know, I’m going to the beach. If it’s just a version of Shakespeare, and if it’s all lies, why does it have any value? What use is its moral teaching? If everything that it tells you happened was a lie, then it’s hard to believe the metaphor stuff. Those early Christians, went to their deaths in defence of the truths which are asserted in the Gospel. If it was just a metaphor, they would have said to their executioners, “Yes, yes, we were just joking. It’s not real. It’s just a metaphor.” That version of Christianity I don’t really hold with.

There are a whole lot of other things I explore about the early Christians. They were inspired by God and very Christocentric; Christ was the centre of their lives. At the same time, they had to deal with all the awkwardness and difficulty of life. Faith didn’t make things easy, it made them possible. So, they’re always bickering with each other, and often quite rude to each other. Saint Paul, a wonderful figure, was also bad tempered and cross grained, just plain difficult. He was an apostle of love, but could also be pretty tough. There’s a wonderful passage in Galatians where he’s writing to the Galatians and saying “All these people who are misleading you. I wish they would all go and castrate themselves.” I must say, when I first read that, I thought, well you don’t hear that passage read out very often in Church. There’s a wonderful moment in the Acts of the Apostles where Paul is being annoyed by a woman possessed by a demon who’s following him around and also saying good things about him. But Paul thinks this is bad, because it is the demon who is speaking. So, the Acts records that Paul, greatly annoyed, expelled the demon. And what a wonderful motive for performing a miracle. Because he was annoyed, he was angry about it, so he sent the demon away.

There’s another case where Paul is in the hands of the Roman official Festus, who says, “Look, Paul, if you’ll just stop talking about this bodily resurrection, I’ll let you free. I know you’re a good bloke. You’re very learned. Just stop doing that, and we’ll be right.” You can imagine Paul’s advisers saying to him, “Well, look Paul, you’ve got to be sensitive to the signs of the times. You know you’ve got to accept the acculturation. Look this doctrine of bodily resurrection is very difficult for the Romans. Why not just concentrate on Christian charity and giving and all the good works we’ve done and leave bodily resurrection for another time.” But when Paul’s chance to speak before the court comes up, he says, “I wish to proclaim the bodily resurrection of Jesus, the first risen of all the others.” And Festus says, “You’re mad, Paul. I can’t do anything with you.” And he sends him off to stay in jail for a bit longer.

The early Christians made their mark because they cared for the poor. Now, how does that relate today? Since Christianity became dominant in the West in the fourth century, we’ve never before confronted a moment where we have a post-Christian society, which is somewhat Neo-pagan. From a Christian point of view, there are three groups in contemporary society. There’s the post-Christians, especially baby boomers, about my age, and so on, who had a tiny bit of Christianity as kids. It’s as if they’ve been inoculated against it. You’d need a very strong virus of Christianity to get them back.

Then there are the Christians who continue to be, according to the census, well over 40 per cent of the Australian population. They are what you might term the pre-Christians, or the pagans. If you’re under 40 today, unless you’ve been to a Christian school, you may never have met Christianity at all. Our education system, in its normal vacuous vandalism and callousness, prevents students from meeting the greatest literature in human history, the writings of Paul and the writings of the great early Christians, Augustine and Tertullian and Origen and Cyprian and so on. They’re never going to hear about anything like that, and nothing in the popular culture tells them about Christianity. When I was a kid, all the Christmas movies were very religious. Miracle on 34th Street, It’s a Wonderful Life and so on. But, for decades now, the Christmas movies have had nothing of God in them. Love Actually, Home Alone, whatever passes for a Christmas movie today, you’d never meet God there.

So Western Christianity has been in decline for several decades. That’s not true in the rest of the world. Christianity is on fire in Africa, it’s on fire in China. There were three or four million Christians in China when the Communists took over. There’s somewhere between 60 and 120 million now. In one of my books, I outline why it’s very hard to get a more accurate estimate than that, but say it’s 100 million. That’s more Christians in China than members of the Chinese Communist Party, one of the astonishing periods of growth of Christianity in human history. But in the West, it’s been in decline. Now, all of a sudden, that decline has stopped.

I had to rewrite the introductory chapter of this book, because in the last couple of years, the statistical decline of Christianity in the West has stopped. What is stopping the decline is this astonishing rebirth amongst Generation Z, the Zoomers. They have the good qualities and the bad qualities of pagans. They’re a little bit hedonistic. They don’t want the party to stop. But on the other hand, they are young people full of the courage and the idealism of youth and searching for meaning. They want to know what meaning is. Everything is on offer to them, but they quickly work out that a life of endless self indulgence is pretty empty, and they look for meaning. People have been saying for years, this will be a Christian moment, because these people are good recruits. And amazingly, it’s actually happening. And all the denominations. It’s not one against the other, all the denominations who believe in the gospel are showing quite astounding increase. Archbishop Fisher, Archbishop in Sydney and Archbishop Comensoli in Melbourne, will tell you about the great rise in church attendance in the Catholic Church. The Pentecostals are absolutely booming. The Sydney Anglicans are doing extraordinarily well. A wonderful person, the Sydney Anglican Archbishop Kanishka Raphael, said to me that he had helped me a bit with this book. He said to me recently, “People say the Church is full of hypocrites. It’s not true.” He said. “There’s always room for more.”

In the second half of the book, I profile a number of people whom I think are demonstrating virtues that are evident amongst the early Christians, and who are helping spread Christianity. I spent a wonderful time with Danny and Leila Abdulha. You know their tragic story. They had three of their children killed by a drunken, drug affected driver, whom they forgave straight away. And they’ve founded the I Forgive Foundation. They’re wonderful people, regular Maronite Christians. Danny’s a builder who was a kickboxing champion. He’s not some pious guy. He’s a regular guy, a Lebanese Australian in the Western suburbs. They are fantastic people whose example has touched millions.

I profile Dallas Jenkins. He is the creator of The Chosen. Now, Hollywood would not fund The Chosen, a TV series about the life of Christ and His Apostles, not because of religious prejudice but because they thought it couldn’t possibly succeed. So, he crowd funded the first season. He raised $11 million. This is not a huge amount to finance a mini-series, but it allowed him to do a professional job. The Chosen is now into Series 5, and one episode has been seen by at least 500 million people around the world. It is an enormous success. In countries where Christianity is persecuted, it’s seen on videos and so forth.

Twenty or 30 years ago, Bishop Robert Barron of the Word on Fire mission, went to his Archbishop. He was a young priest. He told the archbishop, “We Catholics are terrible in the media. We had Fulton Sheen, but he’s long gone, and now we do nothing, and we’re hopeless. We’re not spreading our message. What are you going to do about it Archbishop?” The Archbishop replied, “Wrong question, Father Baron. What are you going to do about it?” So, Baron started by raising money to get a weekly spot on Chicago radio. Now his Word on Fire mission has millions upon millions of social media users. He doesn’t dumb down the message. He does a 15-minute sermon every week which is sophisticated but accessible. He produces beautiful books, a great film series and so on.

I profile Mike Pence, the former Vice President. I’m not interested in his politics and I’m not endorsing his politics. I am curious about how Christianity can survive in a political life which is full of conflict? Pence is a wonderful person to interview. He is generous with his time, humble, sincere, a good guy. He said to me, you know, paraphrasing him slightly, “The hardest thing in the Gospel is the injunction to love your enemy.” He said, “I’ve found it very hard, and the way I try to approach it is I pray for my enemy. And what that does is it drains the poison out of my body. Amazingly, so many people in that circumstance become my friend.” And Pence is well regarded across the range of American politics. Nobody has a bad word for him, personally. Courteous, decent, and has always done what he thought was right.

Marilyn Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist. Her novel Gilead is the great Christian novel of the 21st Century. Great Christian novelists in the 19th century were Russian Orthodox – Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Of the 20th century, the great Christian novelists were Catholic – Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and so on. In the 21st Century, it’s Marilyn Robinson. She is a Calvinist Congregationalist, and her novel is about a 77-year-old congregationalist minister who has a heart condition and is soon going to die. He is writing a reflection on his life because he has a very young son. You couldn’t imagine anything less likely to succeed. It’s been a runaway success.

What Dallas Jenkins and Marilyn Robinson show is that you can go round the cultural gatekeepers. I’ll finish with two others. The first is Jordan Peterson. Lot of people say Jordan Peterson isn’t a Christian. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing him a number of times, and he’s a hard man to interview. His mind is very. He’s very erudite and it can be a bit hard to follow sometimes. I said to him in one interview, “Dr Peterson, do you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who rose in his body from the dead, not as a metaphor, not as an archetypal story for civilization, but as something that is literally true?” He said, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.” And then he raced off, saying, “But the implications of that?” And so on. But that was an assertion. I got to interview him again about a year later when his wife had been gravely ill with cancer and had miraculously recovered. I asked, “When your wife was sick, did you pray for her?” He said, “Yes, I did. I prayed every day, and I do pray every day.” I asked him if he thought that that human love is a reflection of the divine love of God. And he said, “Yes, I do.” Having answered those questions, that’s good enough for me. I classify him as a Christian.