© 1986 Dr. P. Jensen
© 1986 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
Can you call Australia a pagan country and get away with it ? Apparently not, as I discovered when I attempted this exercise through the media recently. People were both puzzled and offended.
But why? Surely it’s time that believers and unbelievers alike faced up to certain realities about the Christian religion in Australia. On the one hand, Christianity is not as insignificant or irrelevant as its optimistic enemies and pessimistic friends seem to think. On the other hand, the residual christianity of the unchurched majority is perceptibly ebbing away.
To be a Christian these days requires a definite commitment. People deliberately choose to go to church rather than merely conform to social pressure. As a result, there is far less hypocrisy about Australian Christianity, and Christians are better informed and better equipped.
But unbelief is sharper too. A generation has come to adulthood without significant contact with Christianity and owing no loyalty to its memory. Children are not baptised and marriages are not held in church. The results of a recent values survey suggest that Australia is the Western world’s most secular nation.
This means that society’s broad agreement that Christian morality is worth living by is disappearing. The Christian ethic of unconditional love and the pagan ethic of self-fulfillment are fundamentally incompatible. You cannot be God-serving and self-serving at the same time.
It is not just a matter of declining church attendance or changing morality. Getting Christianity on the national agenda for reasoned discussion seems to be impossible. The man who said “All great issues are basically theological” never took part in an Australian debate. The God-question seems to be studiously avoided by all parties. Take the so-called “Protestant work ethic”. The phrase has been one of the most popular put-downs of the past 20 years, but has the re ever been a debate on its significance or merits? It has been used to avoid argument, not to provoke it.
Why has Australia become pagan? Some would regard Christianity as intellectually disreputable. It is popularly thought that the Christian position has been demolished. This would be more impressive if there was genuine religious debate in Australia.
The fact is that few believers and even fewer unbelievers have engaged in the rigorous pursuit of the truth about God and the world. The Australian context, historical and natural, should provoke many serious questions. It does not.
It is no accident that the Fest’s most secular nation is the country most content to remain in cultural captivity and intellectual shallowness. Christians have contributed to their own decline as an intellectual force. Christian academics — of whom there are not a few — are far too modest to put their views and to insist that they be taken seriously.
To take an example at another level, the unfortunate division between secular and Christian bookshops means that books which may persuade and inform are not in the market-place where the unbeliever buys. Instead, he is confronted with books that promote superstition and the occult.
If the fundamental problem is not intellectual, what is it? For almost 15 years I have been involved in a series of “dialogue meetings” in which one or two Christians meet a larger group of unbelievers and argue the pros and cons of Christian faith.
The opening difficulties constitute a standard range, whether the meetings are held in Carlton or Toorak: “Is the Bible true?”, “Does God exist?”, “What about other religions?”. Such conundrums are often introduced with a sort of elephantine solemnity by middle-aged men who convey the impression that they are the first to think of these shattering questions.
As the evening wears on, however, the real agenda emerges. The problem of pain and suffering in a world ruled by God is discussed. But the standard defence against the claims of Christianity, the objection most deeply felt are that Christians are hypocrites and wowsers. In short, the major stumbling block to the Christian faith is not intellectual but moral. It is to do with the sort of people we are and the sort of people we would like to be.
Christianity is perceived to be about morality; Christians claim to be morally superior; unbelievers respond by claiming to be as good or better because they are not wowsers and therefore not hypocrites. But wowserism is detachable from Christianity. In fact wowserism perverts the Christian gospel and makes it unintelligible to the ordinary person.
The distinction between wowserism and Christianity has become clear in recent decades as the wowsers have left the church but maintained their extraordinary strong conviction that they know best how the country should behave. The results has been that society is more repressive and puritanical than ever.
The issues have changed. The prohibition of swearing, Sunday trading, the use of alcohol, pornography, divorce, abortion, gambling, are causes that agitate only a minority of people. The battle against Protestant wowserism was won years ago.
From uranium mining through conservation to feminism we live in the day of the issue. Mobile graffiti preach their mini-sermons at us from a million bumper-bars. The language itself has to be altered to conform to the new wowserism and fresh swear words are created: you must not now use “he” to include “she” for example.
We live in a moralistic society.
The present situation presents Christians with an unparalleled opportunity to differentiate between morality and religion. Many of the new wowsers’ moral stands are valid and would be endorsed by Christians. But morality is not Christianity. In fact it stands in the way of Christianity.
The real problem for Christianity is the sheer self-confessed decency of people. The new wowsers and their countless followers have an unassailable conviction of their own acceptability to God if God exists. Like patriotism, however, decency is not enough. The Christian message is about relationships before it is about life-style; specifically, it is about relationship with God. He must come first. Most Australians claim to believe in God; only a minority believe in a personal God. That is a way of saying that the majority have no personal relationship with God they believe exists. Decent people do not need one.
In the Christian view, however, we are a mixture of good and evil, “the glory and shame of the Universe”, to quote Pascal. Even the best of us is unworthy of God. We are, in fact, alienated from God and our alienation shows up in our unwillingness to treat Him as God by thanking Him and worshipping Him, as well as the way in which human relationships are in a mess.
On this view the love of God is not a bland force pervading the universe like the gentle warmth of a spring. It is a fierce, and passionate, love seeking relationship with us that requires a total commitment to Him in return.
Decency is the last and strongest refuge of unbelief. It holds God off by claiming that its moral credentials make up for lack of faith. It fails to see that the first requirement before God is forgiveness.
The Gospels reveal that this was the same problem which dogged Jesus. It was the poor, the weak, the outcast, the fallen, who flocked to him. The righteous expressed their view of him in other ways leading to the cross. “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, said Jesus, “for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Dr. P. Jensen, Moore Theological College, Sydney