In 1982, Australian Anglicans further distanced themselves from the genetic legitimacy of their English origins when they renamed their church the Anglican Church of Australia. Earlier in the twentieth century, Australian national feeling did not stand in contradiction to a deep sense of spiritual kinship with England and its Empire. In fact, Anglican loyalists played a significant role in the Federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. Accordingly, the Church of England in Australia (as it then was) aspired to become a “church for the nation” when the Commonwealth was created. Frame blames that persistent “mindset” for muting the “prophetic witness” of the Anglican Church of Australia down to the present day. He suggests that the desire to become “the national church” has corrupted Anglicans who court popularity “without requiring the nation to be Christian”.587 The difficulty here is that Frame does not seem to notice the fundamental shift in the meaning of nationhood between 1901 and 1962. He simply assumes that the “nation” can be defined solely by reference to the citizenship laws of the Commonwealth of Australia. But in that legalistic context, the Anglo-Australian people cannot be recognized as an ethno-nation in their own right. Indeed, it is all too obvious that the Anglican Church has no desire to become a church for that nation. Strangely, however, altruistic Anglicans rush to recognize the collective identity and ethnic interests of the Aboriginal “nation” and other ethnic minorities in Australia standing outside and apart from the State.588
Frame’s book reflects the confusion endemic in English-speaking countries surrounding the words “nation” and “national”. When discussing either the Church of England or the Anglican Church in Australia, there is a persistent tendency to conflate the concepts of “nation” (properly speaking an “ethnic” category) and “state” (a civic and territorial idea). According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary a nation is a “distinct race or people characterized by common descent, language, or history”. The editors add, however, that a nation is usually “organized as a separate political state…occupying a definite territory”. Such a composite definition accurately reflects the historical experience of the English people for whom the Crown State became the avatar of collective identity.589 In the sixteenth century, Richard Hooker witnessed the birth of the modern nation-state in which the ethnic, civic, and territorial dimensions of nationhood were fused together. In Hooker’s political theology, the triad of church, state, and people together constituted an organic Commonwealth.590
Under such circumstances, a church for the nation was necessarily also a church for the state. Confusion abounds, therefore, when Frame describes the Anglican Communion of the twenty-first century as an association of “38 national churches,” one of which is “the Australian Church”. He clearly believes that Australian Anglicans possess a distinctive national identity. He wrote his book at least partly in the belief that the “role that the Australian Church might play internationally will, however, be muted if Anglicans in this country are unsure about what they believe or uncertain about what constitutes Anglicanism”. Indeed, he even appeals to “a sense of national solidarity” backing “those who represent the Australian Church abroad”.591 But he tells us little or nothing about the lived experience or theological significance of national identity in multiracial Australia.
National identity has become problematic, socially and theologically, because the “state” in both England and Australia has detached itself from the “nation”. Before the Second World War, Australian Anglicans viewed membership in the large, partly-inbred, extended family of Anglo-Saxon peoples that created the British Empire as the essence of national identity. In response to effort by Bishop Burgmann and others to make the Church more truly Australian, one bishop wrote: “I am inclined to think it is our duty rather to emphasize the solidarity of the British race and the contribution which the British people as a whole can make to the world”. But the Anglican Church of Australia no longer even pretends to endow “empire, monarchy, and race with a religious sanction”.592
Squandering the British Legacy
In tandem with the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Australia has disowned its ancestral and still implicitly WASP ethnicity. It has sworn allegiance instead to the transnational corporate state committed to the demographic transformation of England, Australia, and every other white European nation. When Frame calls for “a sense of national solidarity” among Australian Anglicans, he is not invoking the “British race patriotism” that gave birth to the Australian nation-state.593 Instead, the currently dominant vision of Anglicanism strives “to present the Christian gospel in a manner that transcends ethnicity, gender and social status and which reduces the number and extent of human obstacles to Church membership”.594
No matter how hard Anglicans try to shed their implicitly WASP image, snide critics insist that the “Anglican ethos is that of the English middle class”.595 In the face of such rampant Anglophobia, the Anglican Church of Australia appears determined to squander the social, cultural, and spiritual capital bequeathed to it by the Church and people of England. Accordingly, Frame assures his readers that the “Anglican Church of Australia maintains very few links with the Church of England and has little interest in complying with any English practice or in remaining ethnically British”.596
In contemporary Anglican discourse “nation” and “nationalism” have been stripped of their original ethnic significance; they now denote a purely civic or territorial concept of belonging — if only to rule out any possible application to Australians of British ancestry. Such an interpretation is perhaps to be expected of a former Bishop to the Australian Defence Force, an organization sworn to serve those who exercise sovereign authority in the name of the Crown in right of Australia. But Frame reflects a wider consensus among Anglican churchmen as seen, for example, in the career of Archbishop Peter Jensen in the Diocese of Sydney. In recent years, Jensen made it clear that the Anglican Church has “embraced multiculturalism, and I myself am delighted by the new and different Australia that is emerging as a result of our immigration policies”.597 When he assumed archiepiscopal office he announced a mission to expand membership in “Bible-believing” churches from one to ten percent of the population of Sydney. By the time he retired he was calling for the creation of “120 ethnic congregations in the next decade”.598 By “ethnic congregations” Archbishop Jensen did not mean explicitly WASP congregations. On the contrary, ever since 2001 Jensen has urged his fellow Anglicans “to be universal in our outlook and not restricted to people of our own kind, race or class”. In his view, “we are too restricted to the professional and middle class; we are too limited to European and English-speaking tribes”. 599
Like Jensen, Frame conceives the mission of the Anglican Church in universalistic terms: “The Church’s collective task is to proclaim the unity of mankind based on Christ’s acts of reconciliation”. He insists that, because “this universality must also be a visible reality, the Church becomes a witness to the oneness of humanity and the grace of God in its own life”.600 Such attitudes have been the norm among Anglican clergymen since the Sixties. One Anglican bishop denounced any form of “ocker Christianity that would betray the universal God by seeking to nationalize him”. Others were more sensitive to the novel tension between Anglo-Saxon ethnicity and national identity in multicultural Australia. As the “Anglo-Saxon ascendancy lost ground not only to post-war migrants but to the large Irish minority whose social status rose,” some WASP Anglicans emphasized “the dangers of remaining tied too exclusively to their heritage”. By 1983 Bishop Reid of Sydney worried that “in another generation Anglicans will be seen as an Anglo-Saxon sect” with the paradoxical consequence that the Church “would lose its ‘historical role’ as a national church”.601
Frame implicitly acknowledges, however, that so long as it remains a civic nationalist church rather than an Anglo-Saxon sect, the Anglican Church of Australia will never “make Australia an Anglican nation, nor [will] it succeed in cr
eating a Christian society”. He calls upon the Church to “stand as a powerful witness to the power and purpose of God and speak prophetically against a world gripped by selfishness and material greed”.602 In effect, he calls for the formation of a holy people while promoting an ecclesiology that undermines the forms of social life that “free human beings fully to flourish in the world, and achieve the ends God has placed before them”. Even some Anglican scholars acknowledge that nationhood has the capacity to lift a people, “not into eternity but to a higher historical goodness that in some measure exemplifies the holiness of God”.603 When speaking to the citizens of Athens in the Areopagus, the apostle Paul declared:
God made every nation (ethnos) of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each of us. (Acts 17:26–27)
In other words, nation-building (i.e. the process of ethno-genesis) brings men closer to God. Daniel W Hardy suggests, therefore, that “the basis of society” is found in “holy trust”. If “the well-being of [any] society is based on trust,” how much more must the formation of a holy people “be predicated on the development of stable relations of mutual trust between social actors”?604 Unfortunately, it is clear beyond doubt that mutual trust is one of the first casualties in a multicultural and multiracial society in which Church and State combine deliberately to deconstruct the British core identity of the Australian nation.
Conclusion
In his 2012 Presidential Address, Archbishop Jensen deplores the breakdown of “the wholesome tendency to unite in a common cause”. He pointed to the corrosion of family life as one symptom of such trends. Affirming the huge “benefits of stable and loving family life,” he warned that “any society which does not aspire to it and enable it is courting and experiencing the general judgement of God”. Jensen appears to source the problem with family life in Australia to “the communications revolution” which “apes community and subverts family”. At the same time, he celebrates the fact that in the Diocese of Sydney between 2006 and 2011 “over 300,000 people arrived from 216 countries”. He sees no cause for concern now that China and India dominate the countries of origin. On the contrary, he simply presumes that Church growth now depends upon those ethnic groups, along with other “significant intakes…from Nepal, Korea and the Philippines”.605 Certainly, he makes no connection between mass Third World immigration and the steepening obstacles to family formation faced by young Anglo-Australian couples trapped in over-crowded, highly competitive markets for education, jobs, and housing. Nor does he see official multiculturalism as a significant factor in the widespread erosion of social, much less holy trust.
The social reality is that the disappearance of an ethnically homogeneous national community is a major factor in the corrosion of family and social life in Australian towns and cities. American social scientist Robert Putnam very reluctantly came to recognize that “evidence from the US suggests that, in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods, residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer”.606 It is in that foreboding context that one should ponder Hardy’s suggestion that the “key vehicles for the performance of holiness in the world are…developments…capable of maintaining and directing the inherent relationships of all people in all the dimensions of life in the world, to their fulfilment”. He contends that “the Trinitarian economy in the world” is maintained above all “through God’s energetic congruence with the world”.607
1 John 5:6–8 tells us that the Trinitarian character of a holy people is found in the “three who bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one”. At least one Anglican theologian, Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872), located the Spirit, the water, and the blood in the tripartite spiritual constitution of every national church. He believed that English society, in particular, was grounded in the Trinitarian unity of family, church, and nation. He believed that the Church of England was bound to “resist every power, papal, imperial, democratic, which strives to destroy the peculiarities of race, family, [and] individual”.608 Australian Anglicans desperately need to recover such traditional theological insights (while noting that Maurice automatically identified the English nation with “its” State and “its” Church, an equation which — in either case — is now not just utterly untenable but downright risible).
Maurice’s theology was a response to the nineteenth century crisis of Christian authority. He condemned all putatively progressive efforts to dissolve the Trinitarian unity of family, nation, and church in England as profane violations of the divine order aiming “to construct a society which shall be an artificial corporation, not a living body”.609 Orthodox Christians still believe that the Bible “teaches that mankind is composed not of an amorphous mass of individuals but of nations”.610 Unfortunately, the Anglican Church in Australia and elsewhere has rejected such a traditionalist theology. Instead, the Australian Church has embraced the secular cult of human equality with all the religious enthusiasm its middle-class English soul can muster. In the process, the Church has missed altogether the theological point and purpose of Anglo-Australian nationhood. Indeed, the Church has joined forces with the State to siphon off the Spirit and the water from the dying blood-faith of its Angelcynn forbears.611 As a consequence, Frame’s “public theology” now addresses only an “amorphous mass” of individualistic WASPs engaged in the competitive (indeed pathological) displays of out-group altruism which characterize Christian mission in a post-Christian world.612
15: Another Disingenuous White Liberal
The Rev’d Dr Brian Douglas
Rector
St Paul’s Anglican Church, Manuka
with St David’s, Red Hill
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory
I was born in Sydney, Australia in 1950. I am both a teacher and a priest, having taught in primary schools for about 20 years in the New South Wales Department of Education before ordination and then subsequently in Anglican secondary schools. I was ordained Deacon and Priest in the Anglican Diocese of Newcastle, Australia in 1992. I worked for three years as the assistant priest at Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle, before spending 6 years as the School Chaplain at Meriden School — An Anglican School for Girls in the Diocese of Sydney.
In 2001 I came back to Newcastle as the School Chaplain at Newcastle Grammar School, a co-educational school in the Anglican tradition. In 2006 I was appointed a Residentiary Canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Newcastle, the School Chapel.
At Newcastle Grammar I taught mostly senior students in Years 10–12. In Years 11 and 12 I taught the Higher School Certificate subject Studies of Religion which examines the nature of religion as an important aspect of human existence. As School Chaplain I conducted chapel services for all students from the Pre-school (4 years of age) to Year 12 (17–18 years of age) and I had priestly pastoral responsibilities for the School Family.
From 2008 I became Rector of St Paul’s Anglican Church Manuka with St David’s Red Hill in Canberrra, Australia’s national capital within the Australian Capital Territory. The parish of Manuka is part of the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn. Manuka is in a central location in Canberra and is in the parliamentary triangle, being only short distance from Parliament House.
I am a clerical fellow of St Paul’s College in the University of Sydney and a member of the board of the Radford College, Canberra.
My academic qualifications are in education and theology. Most recently I finished a PhD in Education at the University of Newcastle entitled ‘Ways of Knowing in the Anglican Eucharistic Tradition: Ramifications for Theological Education’. I also lecture part time in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University in Canberra in the areas of sacramental theology, interfaith dialogue and Ang
lican foundations.
*
Memo to: Division of Student Administration, Charles Sturt University
From: Andrew Fraser, Student # 11470900
Subject: Application for Review of Grade in 2013 60 THL315
Date: 21 November 2013
Enclosed is a completed Application for Review of Grade in THL315 in which I received a PS grade in 2013 60 following completion of the subject through the Canberra campus by distance education. I have not submitted the application by email for two reasons:
First I found it impossible to pay the $100 fee for this procedure electronically. I therefore enclose a cheque for the required amount.
Second, I must demonstrate that the lecturer in THL315 applied the assessment requirements in the subject outline to me in an unreasonable and prejudicial manner. To do so, the decision-maker in this matter will require copies of the comments made on my two essays by the lecturer in THL315, Rev. Brian Douglas. I therefore enclose photocopies of the pages in each essay on which comments have been made.
I enclose as well clean copies of my two assignments for review by another independent academic.
Assignment # 1
As indicated, there were two assessable assignments in this subject. I attach pp 8–9 of the Subject Outline, highlighting the topics chosen by me in each of the two assignments. When returning my first essay (worth 40% of the final grade), Rev. Douglas charged that I had “chosen to rewrite the question without permission” and warned me in future “to use the question as stated unless you have negotiated change with the lecturer”. Despite this admonition, Rev. Douglas conceded that my essay was “well-argued and creative” and awarded it a Distinction
Dissident Dispatches Page 35