The liturgical strategy adopted by St Peter’s rests upon an “evangelical theology”. If the “church theology” is traditional, the evangelical approach to liturgy is thoroughly modern, being adapted to “an alien land” where “there is no Sunday anymore”. The evangelical liturgy treats the scriptures as an “a-cultural, a-historical theological datum,” providing believers with “a fixed reference point against which the world is kept at a safe distance”.898 Evangelical Christians are concerned more about going to heaven when they die than with establishing and maintaining the kingdom of God here on earth. Awaiting, as they do, the Second Coming and the end of this broken planet earth, the restoration of Christendom is not on their agenda. This futurist orientation inevitably undermines the traditionalist foundations of every priestly order or caste.
While holding itself apart from a sinful world, evangelical theology mirrors the secular world in many of its core features: “the priesthood of all believers” parallels “the rise of democracy and egalitarianism”. Hence, few any longer raise an eyebrow when Anglican ministers preside over Holy Communion in metrosexual men’s clothing. (Outside the Sydney diocese, of course, the minister actually might be a woman). Similarly, the evangelical “focus on individual salvation parallels the centrality of the individual in modernity”.899 In an increasingly pluralist, multi-racial society, evangelical churches readily accommodate themselves to the politically correct, egalitarian demands issued by the secular theocracy of the contemporary corporate welfare state.900 In a one-dimensional society which has erased the age-old boundaries between those who pray, those who fight and those who work, strict, formal “demarcations between ordained and lay leaders are imperceptible”. In evangelical churches, “the dominant idiom is informality — of dress, of personal manner, or forms of communication”.901
Given its preoccupation with the direct personal relationship that should exist between every Christian believer and God, evangelical theology can best be described as essentially existential. Christian identity is constructed through an individual experience of conversion and discipleship which reveals the purpose of our existence as human beings.902 According to Goheen, the church represents all “the people of God” gathered together to participate “in God’s own mission within the history of the world for the redemption of God’s creation”. In his view, “the mission of the church is first of all a call to be something not to go somewhere or to do something”.903 Like ancient Israel according to the flesh, the modern Israel of God is called upon to be a light unto the nations.
On this view, Christian identity is inseparable from participation in the mission Dei which “involves God’s people living in God’s way in the sight of the nations”. Christians are called to become “a display people who embody God’s original creational intention and eschatological goal for human life”.904 It is the existence of God’s people that matters not its historicity. The people of God may be in but they are not of the nations. The universal church exists on a transcendental plane detached from the gritty historical realities observable in the rise and fall of particular nations and states, peoples and empires. Just such an ethereal vision of Christian identity is reflected in the self-understanding of most of those who preach and pray at St Peter’s in Mount Victoria.
Christian Identity at St Peter’s
One might ask then whether evangelical liturgy makes for good worship.905 Subjectively speaking, I suppose most of the worshippers at St Peter’s would rate the liturgy highly in terms of experience, teaching, and ritual, perhaps with the first two categories carrying more weight than the third. The explicitly universalistic theology of the mission Dei figures largely in the hymns, sermons, and outreach activities of the church. But when one examines the socio-religious identity of the congregation in more detached and objective terms, one can hardly fail to notice the implicitly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of those who attend worship services at St Peter’s.
As evangelical Christians, their expressed hope is to serve as a light to the world. Their nominal identity as Anglicans, however, is comparatively thin and shallow. What distinguishes the theology (as distinct from the episcopal ecclesiology) of the Anglican Church from other middlebrow Protestant denominations is not at all clear.906 In an increasingly alien land, sharply divided along racial, religious, and linguistic lines, the pious universalism of Anglican evangelicalism has a limited capacity to attract new adherents. Nevertheless, the implicitly WASP character of the St Peter’s congregation gives its members much in common with most of the population of the upper Blue Mountains — even those presently alienated from the Christian faith. It is at least possible that Anglican churches generally and St Peter’s in particular might be able to generate thicker and deeper ties of Christian solidarity among their Anglo-Australian neighbours if they gave more explicit liturgical expression to their shared ethno-religious roots. Blood is thicker than water especially when it has been infused with the Holy Spirit (1 John 5:6–9).
The Australian flag standing in the apse at St Peter’s is only one visible manifestation of the implicitly WASP identity of the congregation. These are people conscious and proud, if only tacitly, of their British roots and heritage. Many of them were present a few weeks earlier when over two hundred Anglo-Australians gathered on a cold and windswept paddock miles from anywhere to commemorate the first Christian service ever to be held west of the Blue Mountains on 26 April 1815 when Governor Lachlan Macquarie was on his way to Bathurst. To mark the two hundredth anniversary of that historic event, the minister from St Peter’s (wearing a borrowed set of robes) celebrated a Divine Service based on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. Significantly, however, he was at pains to emphasize that there had been nothing exclusively British in the Christian message that Governor Macquarie and his party were bringing to the central west of New South Wales. One wonders. Perhaps, rather than being consciously repressed, the implicitly British ethno-religious identity of the St Peter’s congregation ought to be accorded explicit theological recognition.
Australian Anglicans once acknowledged that there are many “peoples of God”. They recognised Anglo-Australian ethno-patriotism as a worldly channel of divine grace. They nourished the hope that a new Christian nation might yet be born in the Southern Oceans. For almost a century, the Church of England in Australia was a visible institutional manifestation in Mount Victoria of pan-British race patriotism — a now much-reviled, ancestral spirit denied explicit liturgical validation in the teaching and ritual of contemporary Christian worship at St Peter’s. Jane Foulcher mourns the fact that “our society doesn’t appear to care whether [Anglican churches] exist or not”.907 Perhaps the Anglican church could once again become a church in and for society if it set out to resurrect the Anglo-Australian ethno-nation as a moral community, a “people of God” destined to provide a light unto other nations.
Foulcher observes that “You cannot be a community constituted by narrative if you have forgotten the story”.908 The question then becomes what is the story and who is it about? WASP Anglican ministers should be telling the story of the Anglo-Australian people in an effort to reconstitute that ethno-nation as a self-conscious moral community. But, as we have seen, evangelical theology rips scripture out of its historical and cultural context, both in preaching the word and applying its lessons to the contemporary world. The minister at St Peter’s automatically uses the story of Judas hanging himself in first century Jerusalem to teach a universal moral lesson valid for all times, places, and peoples. For all practical purposes, he and other Anglican ministers treat the history of the Anglo-Australian people “with complete indifference. Because the prophets speak of Jerusalem — their own city — they too speak of Jerusalem — a foreign city, and, by way of imitating men in whom patriotism was a burning passion, are silent about their own country and the events of their own age”.909
Almost one hundred and fifty years ago, the English historian John Robert Seeley wrote in supp
ort of a Broad-Church movement to fuse Christian moral teaching with a patriotic sense of civic responsibility to the English nation. He believed that “the clergy should draw largely upon English history and biography for illustrations of their moral teaching. Carlyle has said that every nation’s true Bible is its history”. If the Hebrew history recounted in the Bible provides a cosmopolitan vision of Israel serving as a light unto the nations, every subsequent Christian nation deserves its own national Bible as well. Seeley could “imagine no more proper and nobler task for a clergy than the perpetual shaping and elaborating of such a national monument”.910 How times have changed!
Conclusion
Generally speaking, contemporary churches throughout the West disapprove any linkage between ethno-patriotism and Christian liturgy — except in the case of other, non-white peoples who are presumed to be innocent victims of European imperialism and white racist exploitation. Stephen Burns, for example, suggests that “Eucharistic celebration across many different ecclesial traditions and church styles…involves praise, which is a practice of other-centredness”. This “ex-centric focus” often seems to obscure the distinction between the worship of Jesus Christ and the worship of the Other. Burns remarks approvingly on the “inscription bearing the words of local indigenous elders spoken at the first mass celebrated in the new [Parramatta] cathedral building in 2003. This plaque acknowledges the presence on the land on which the cathedral stands of indigenous persons, whose home this had been for thousands of years prior to the European invasion”. Naturally enough, the inscription is located in what is called the “Chapel of Reparation”.911
In their dealings with the Anglo-Australian ethno-nation, most churches seem less interested in granting forgiveness for sins allegedly committed in the past than in instilling and perpetuating collective white guilt. Catholic writer Yvette Clifton does just that when she insists that “the crimes of the past culture of institutionalisation [must be] acknowledged if the Aboriginal Church is to be fully received in Australia”. She recommends that non-Aboriginal Christians be taught to respect the importance of kinship structures in the Aboriginal Church. Indeed, she tells us that because these kinship structures are “shared by the animal kingdom, non-Aboriginal people may develop in their respect for the animals that are sacred to Aboriginal people”.912
Surely, one might ask, if animals “sacred” to Aboriginal Australians can be incorporated legitimately into the Christian liturgy celebrated by the Catholic church, might it not be equally legitimate for the Anglican church to recognize the Anglo-Australian ethno-nation as a historic “people of God”? After all, Anglo-Australians are possessed of a long history with an organic connection to the rise and fall of Christendom. That story ought to be told by its preachers and reflected upon in public by its parishioners. Certainly, a Christian liturgy must teach a universal morality. But Seeley was adamant that it is no less important to recognize that just as ancient Hebrew tribes and the nascent English race both “rose to the universal morality through the national, so, it seems must the individual”. In Australia, as in nineteenth century England, it has been a catastrophic mistake “in the present school of preachers, that they omit this middle class of duties altogether”.913 Clearly, the secular crisis of ethno-religious identity has been grievously aggravated by evangelical liturgies. In England and throughout the Anglo-Saxon diaspora, the problem has deepened immeasurably since Seeley wrote his patriotic critique of Christian universalism. Meanwhile, the folks at St Peter’s (as in other predominantly Anglo-Australian parishes across this dry brown land) continue to whistle in the dark.914
5: Postscript: Triggered!
The preceding essay on worship and identity was submitted as the major essay (worth 50% of the final grade) in THL 115 Liturgical Theology. I enrolled in this unit as a distance student at St Mark’s Theological Centre in Canberra. The lecturer was Dr Jane Foulcher, an Anglican priest who recently exchanged pastoral ministry for life as a full-time academic theologian. She has just published a book entitled Reclaiming Humility: Four Studies in the Monastic Tradition. The first assignment she set (worth 20%) asked students to compare ritual structures in early Christian and contemporary worship to a secular ritual such as a birthday party in 750 words. For that short essay, I obtained a mark of 16/20. In the second assignment, I provided a summary and a mildly critical discussion of a scholarly article on the “conceptual geography” of liturgical theology which received 24/30.
Having aced the first two assignments, I was expecting to do well on the major essay, a 1500 paper on the relationship to worship and identity. Based upon the observation and description of a service conducted in one’s own church, we were expected to analyse that ritual performance in the light of “key ideas” on worship and identity [or “worship and mission” or “worship and pastoral care”] distilled from the unit readings. “This is where you can say how the service of worship you experienced fulfilled or did not fulfil the key ideas in the theme you are studying, or where (and why) you agree or disagree with the key ideas in the theme”. When writing my essay, I tried my best to comply with those directives in both letter and spirit. I was a bit nonplussed, therefore, when — weeks after I had received the grade for my essay in Synoptic Gospels — I discovered online that I had received a mark of only 26/50 on the worship and identity paper. There were no comments attached to that mark. I sent Dr Foulcher a couple of e-mails asking for an explanation of why this essay had received such a low mark by comparison with my results in the first two assignments. A few days later, I received the following terse critique from Dr Foulcher:
Drew
While you have described the setting of and participants in the service in some detail your analysis of the structure and integrity of the service itself is limited. There are some irrelevant observations of the congregation (e.g. the minister’s son escaping his grasp is an expression suggesting something sinister).915 There is no evidence of engagement with the material provided to assist with the analysis. While there is no general discussion of the key points of the theme that you have chosen (Identity), you have minimally addressed your experience of the service. Your argument that the evangelical style of worship is ‘thoroughly modern’ lacks an adequate discussion. You present some quite fixed views of what the term evangelical means and you have expressed these without adequate explanation. I suggest that if you wished to interact with Hughes’ typology you should have engaged directly with his text, rather than relying on a secondary source. Your focus on ‘Anglo-Australian ethno-patriotism’ in the second half of the essay has little relevance to the question and to the observed service. I suggest that the analysis of the service has been sacrificed to the prosecution of certain theory which has little relevance to the question asked.
Readers will decide for themselves whether that is an adequate response to my critique of the liturgical theology on display at St Peter’s and in the unit readings. But, whatever others make of my essay, in Dr Foulcher’s mind, it certainly triggered an altogether unsympathetic and thoroughly dismissive response. On her view, my paper barely deserves a passing grade. Once again, I stand accused by my academic superiors of having made up my own topic to prosecute a “certain theory which has little relevance to the question asked”.
Surely, in this context, it is relevant to take note of the fact that Dr Foulcher has associated herself publicly with a certain (disingenuously white liberal) theory as to the theological significance of national or ethnic identity. This politically correct humanist theory explicitly asserts that Christians must choose between loyalty to the extended families of tribe, nation, and race and loyalty to God. I suspect that Dr Foulcher believes I have fallen into sin in asserting that we may find God in and through membership in a nation. She associates the dark, ugly spectre of Anglo-Australian ethno-patriotism with a broken world of violence, deception, and fear. Like most white Anglo-Protestants she follows Jesus in and through the public worship of the Other.
I
n April 2006, when she was Senior Priest in a central Canberra parish, Dr Foulcher was one of fifteen local church leaders who were signatory to a public statement expressing the view that “Christian faith has deep connections to social and political issues, including how we respond to violence, fear and deception”. Seven members of this interdenominational but almost exclusively WASP group have been associated with St Mark’s Theological Centre. Their ethno-masochistic public proclamation presents an unmistakeable symptom of the pathological altruism afflicting evangelical Anglo-Protestantism in contemporary Australia. As such, it deserves to be reproduced in full. Historically speaking, the evangelical mind-set “is a relatively modern phenomenon,” a moralistic middle-class response to the commercial and industrial revolutions in Great Britain.916 In time, the unrestrained religious romanticism of the evangelical movement contributed greatly to the eventual decline and fall of the British Empire. Churches imbued with the sanctimonious spirit of the Canberra Confession will have a similarly solvent effect on the ethno-religious foundations of Anglo-Australian nationhood.
Dissident Dispatches Page 48