Holy marketeers want your soul
Friday, December 22nd, 2006NEVER has Gary Bouma’s fascination with the soul been more to the point. When the Melbourne academic and Anglican priest heard Kevin Rudd was the new leader of the Labor Party, he fairly hooted with delight at the thought of two of the country’s most public Christians, Rudd and John Howard, going head to head.
“Two Anglicans squaring off against each other!” he crowed. And this within a week of the publication of his latest book, Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century, which argues religion is becoming more relevant to public life.
A professor of sociology at Monash University, Bouma also holds the UNESCO chair in inter-religious and intercultural relations in Asia and the Pacific. His commitment to the interfaith movement is widely known and together with Des Cahill, he lobbied long, hard and successfully for Melbourne to be chosen as the host of the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, the largest and most significant gathering of its kind in the world.
This is a big deal. Melbourne beat Singapore and Delhi for the honour, and it is expected the $9 million event will draw up to 12,000 people to the Victorian capital when its turn comes. So when Bouma pushes the line that “God is back” in Australia, it is not just the wishful thinking of a faithful man who has been dismayed by some of the developments in his own religion and within his own tradition: Anglican in-fighting is distressingly prominent. It is the confident assertion of a scholar who defines God more broadly than might be expected.
He is talking about spirituality, the need to identify with something transcendent, rather than with a prescriptive theology that seems not to answer the questions posed by people in the postmodern era.
Diversity, he says, is the watchword for 21st-century Australia. “I have been studying Australian religion for a long time,” Bouma says. “What’s been very clear in the first part of this century is not only the religious diversity but the impact of that for Australia, which has been to produce an increase in religious interest. What’s becoming interesting is religious identification.”
His book’s central argument is that religion is a marketplace, competition is booming and the battle for souls is set to intensify. “What’s not growing is dry, rational Christianity,” he says. “The mysticism is returning to the religious marketplace, a real sense of experiencing the presence of God or the beyond: that’s what spiritualities give people, and usually in a fairly unmediated way.”
But competition does not have to be hostile. “There is a difference between conflict and competitors who respect each other, and it’s a major difference. We have a competitive, open market, so people are displaying their wares: once you have competition and diversity, it becomes interesting.”
The most recent census figures, for 2001, showed that although about 75 per cent of Australians continued to identify with a religious group, the number who nominated the non-Christian “other religions” category was up 33 per cent since the 1996 census.
There was impressive proportional growth in adherence to religions such as Buddhism (up 79 per cent), Islam (up 40 per cent), Hinduism (up 42 per cent), and “nature religions” including paganism and Wicca (witchcraft, up 130 per cent), but these increases were off low bases and in some cases partly attributable to immigration or birthrates.
According to Bouma, people are rejecting highly structured ways of conducting their spiritual lives. “The question of the soul is there: they are tired of materialism and an unexplained universe, they are searching for something that makes sense in the 21st-century environment.”
This does not imply a headlong flight to faiths other than Christianity, although the census shows they are picking up adherents and there is enormous interest in what the 2006 census figures will show when they are released next year. Still, nearly 70 per cent identify with Christianity, although regular church attendance (now defined as once a month) is at 19 per cent and the weekly figure is 8.8 per cent and probably falling.
So, Christianity is still the main game in Australian society.
But, anecdotally, there has been a rise in the number of people who are believers, yet feel no need to attend a church as part of their spiritual regimen. Well known examples of this are Labor’s new environment spokesman Peter Garrett and author Tim Winton.
It would be folly to forget the avowed atheists, who have among their ranks some great entertainers. The most prominent of these is Englishman Richard Dawkins, who ensured God would receive a great deal of new attention when he published his best-selling The God Delusion recently. A lesser light, but nonetheless a best-selling author on the subject, is American Sam Harris, who also brought out a book this year, Letter to a Christian Nation. Also making a splash was former Jesuit priest Henry Ansgar Kelly’s book on God’s opposition, Satan: The Biography. All very appropriate in the year in which The Da Vinci Code brought Jesus and conspiracy theories about him to news pages across the world as Ron Howard’s film of Dan Brown’s novel earned almost $1 billion at the box office. The churches did their best to explain why it was not true that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were a couple who had a daughter and the rest of Christianity’s history had to be seen in the context of the cover-up. Looking back, it was a lighter note for them, given the challenges they face.
But not all denominations are bleeding supporters, and not all churches within some of the most affected denominations. Pentecostal and evangelical churches, which include the so-called happy-clappers and the mega-churches – those that attract big congregations to a single venue – are growing. “They are engaging with the kind of people who are out there, who want their questions taken seriously, so if all you are doing is peddling answers before they ask the questions, you are not going to get home,” Bouma says.
“Mega-churches are very successful. If you drive to them, you will find a parking place, you will get a cup of coffee and will be treated as someone who can be served.
“In a small neighbourhood church, they will grab you and say: ‘You can help us stay alive for the next 10 years.’ ”
To be fair, the churches are on to this. The National Church Life Survey, which conducts a five-yearly statistical analysis to coincide with the government census, monitors attendance and offers churches feedback on their relative health as organisations. This year the NCLS included a detailed leadership survey, questioning ministers and lay leaders about their qualities as well as asking churchgoers what they think of their leaders. It began a process of gauging the challenge in an era some designate post-Christian.
Another academic group, convened by the Melbourne-based Christian Research Association, released the findings of its Spirit of Gen Y study this year, confirming that the young are about as interested in religion as their baby-boomer parents but, importantly, unlikely to accept much direction from spiritual elders.
The Pastoral Projects Office, run under the auspices of the National Catholic Bishops Conference, came out with research later in the year that showed older Catholics were drifting away for reasons that included continuing fallout from the sexual abuse scandals involving clergy. The good news was that in some cases a warm welcome would be enough to get them back to mass again.
While the churches grapple with their relevance to modern society, the debate about their role and the role of religion generally in political life and government has been heating up. That the leaders of the two main political parties are professing Christians has provided a recent focus for this development.
“Who would have guessed five years ago about religion and politics?” Bouma asks. He was impressed with Rudd’s Faith in Politics essay, which ran in The Monthly journal in October, calling it “carefully grounded”. Rudd’s starting point was the example of one of the 20th century’s best-loved theologians, the German Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred for his stand against Hitler.
Rudd argued for what is called the social gospel, which means caring for the disadvantaged in society and standing up for the weak as well as for the fair-go principle. He made it clear this was a broader responsibility than adopting a conservative stand on personal moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia and embryonic cell research.
The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly, in this year’s Acton Lecture on religion and freedom, summarised the stances of Howard and Rudd. While the Prime Minister finds religion compatible with and supportive of his values-based agenda, the Opposition Leader appeals to Christianity’s basic commitment to social justice to boost the Labor Party. “The symbolism of Howard and Rudd as competing political leaders is unmistakable,” Kelly told the Centre for Independent Studies. “Its message suggests that while the church as an institution is in decline, the role of religion in politics is being revived and redefined.”
Rudd is not the only one preaching the social gospel. Baptist minister and World Vision chief executive Tim Costello has been on about it for years, and is a close friend of Jim Wallis, one of its chief proponents in the US and author of God’s Politics. A typical line from them is that although there is very little in the Bible regarding personal moral isssues, there are thousands of verses dealing with social justice concerns. Ergo, a balanced Christianity should cover both.
This was music to more liberal Christians who have seen Australia’s version of the religious Right make the running in politics recently. They have watched with concern the rise of the Family First political party and observed the increasing efficiency of pressure groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby.
“We are not going to become like the US, because we do not work that way,” says Bouma, who was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “This is not the US ‘disease’ coming here, it’s very much an Australian development. In the next 10 to 20 years, it will play out in health and social services.” He says there will be a religious dimension to deciding policies and delivering services.
But it will be a diverse set of Christian influences. The first signs of it in the modern era was the re-emergence of right-wing Christianity, talking about family values. A significant element of this, Bouma says, was this group’s desire to define itself against other Christians as much as to define itself in politics. Then people from the Islamic community joined the debate and now those on the Christian liberal Left have begun to have a voice once again, “something not evident since the Vietnam War years”.
Those years from the mid-1960s into the early ’70s, when Australia was involved in the Vietnam War, are highly relevant to Bouma’s view of the role of religion in public life. Australia entered that war, he says, “with a lot of religious voices opposing it, but co-incidentally we emerged with a very secular discourse: political discussion became very strongly secular. So every policy put forward by religious agencies was couched in a secular voice, which de-natured and reduced the vitality of the Christian input.”
That is turning again, he says. Further, there is scope for interesting coalitions between Christian denominations and between faiths. He cites the united front over the environment earlier this month. Denominations across the Christian spectrum and other faiths including Buddhists, Muslims and Baha’is issued statements, under the auspices of the Climate Institute, supporting care of the environment as a religious priority.
“If you put up another question you would get a different coalition, for example on family issues,” Bouma says. “The problem is, within each denomination there is a great deal of diversity. People have the misconception of the monochromatic middle suburbs, people who look the same and who vote the same way, but the diversity between groups and within groups is huge.”
The significance of this is becoming apparent in the US, as the solid front of the evangelical Christians – the religious Right – shows signs of wear, at least at the leadership level. In November, Rick Warren, the world-famous founder of California’s Saddleback Church and author of the bestseller The Purpose-Driven Life, found himself in hot water with some fellow evangelicals when he invited Democrat senator and potential presidential aspirant Barack Obama to speak on the subject of AIDS.
The conservative National Clergy Council’s Rob Schenck told media that Warren had no business bringing to the pulpit a man who supported abortion rights. Warren had already emailed members of his congregation saying: “Jesus loved and accepted others without approving of everything they did. That’s our position too, but it upsets a lot of people.”
Evangelicalism has an attractive energy. But with its emphasis on the Bible, it is in a tussle with more liberal interpreters of the faith, who hold the Bible in balance with other elements of the 2000-year-old religion, such as ritual and history. Former Anglican primate Peter Carnley characterised himself as “progressive orthodox”, valuing doctrinal tradition but recognising, as he told The Melbourne Anglican in 2000, that we live “within the tension of what we inherit from the past and dawning kingdom of God”.
Bouma is unfazed. “The important thing to remember about these kinds of movements is usually they are fundamentalist and tend to be very charismatic at the beginning.” But the longer they persist, the more likely it is that adherents will “want to ask more complex questions and seek more complex answers. When people take up a religion, converts are always more interested in sharing their faith and a strict application of rules, and likely to engage in what I call competitive piety; I think competitive compassion is the answer.
“And those things become more tempered and moderate as people become more mature in their faith.” Over the past 25 years, he argues, these patches of revival or growth have occurred in all the major faiths. “It’s not just a Christian thing: look at Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism. These groups are now asking each other questions: OK, you say you are a Christian, what do you believe? I see that as a natural part of the history of religious life: we are coming up out of a trough.”
And, Bouma says, they’re finding the age-old dilemmas remain and that religion is one of the more enduring answers. “Is there more than what we see and touch? Are there ways issues of justice are going to be solved? Or the answer to pain and suffering? Because science has not removed injustice and suffering. Religion traditionally provides the answers and people find great comfort in it.
“What is not going to happen is there is not going to be a single Christian party that will take a spiritual and moral agenda into politics. What’s going to happen is there will be a religious dimension to the discourse that will be part of the contribution to what we want to be as a society.”
Source: The Australian
