Organized religion (“Churchianity”) no longer views charity as a stern test of character, as a civic virtue which cannot be equated with even the most ostentatious feelings of compassion for the poor and downtrodden. In sharp contrast, the apostle Paul declared (in the King James Version): “And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing…charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up” (1 Corinthians 13:3–4).
In that passage, the KJV translates the Greek word agape (αγαπη) as “charity”. Significantly, in the New International Version (a theological product of the Sixties) agape becomes “love”. Following the rise of the corporate welfare state, Paul’s distinction between “charity” and “benevolence to the poor” appears contradictory because the former now almost always denotes the latter. But ancient Greeks used agape in our sense of “love” as compassionate self-giving only when referring to affection for one’s spouse, family and kindred folk (or, as in Homer, affection for their own dead). In the Latin Vulgate of the early church, agape became caritas. According to Augustine, caritas is the highest good which can exist between people, even between (inter se) robbers. Hannah Arendt saw what she called the “Christian political principle” in Augustine’s surprising but well-chosen robber analogy.952 For Augustine, even a band of robbers was like a “little kingdom…Indeed, without justice, what are kingdoms but great robberies?”953 Justice, mercy, charity — even honour among thieves: all are virtues not feelings. So when agape was translated into early modern English as “charity,” the word signified not an inner, emotional state but rather a social, political, or civic virtue essential to organized community life.
In Renaissance Italy and early modern England no less than in classical antiquity it was axiomatic that the realm in which such civic virtues were nurtured and practiced was a man’s world. According to JGA Pocock, “Christian men continued, in one way and another to be Romans”. They were “civic beings, intensely concerned with the events of political history, the civil and military happenings which befell them, and of which they from time to time asked God the meaning”. As members of the body politic, citizens prized “the quality of personality that commanded good fortune and…that dealt effectively and nobly with whatever fortune might send; and the Roman term for this complex characteristic was virtus”. In their Anglicized form, “virtue and fortune…were regularly paired as opposites”. The struggle between the two “was frequently expressed in the image of a sexual relation: a masculine active intelligence was seeking to dominate a feminine passive unpredictability which would submissively reward him for his strength or vindictively betray him for his weakness”. Civic virtue therefore carried “many of the connotations of virility, with which it is etymologically linked; vir means man”.954 For almost two thousand years, whenever fortune afflicted feminine displays of pathological altruism upon virtuous men, they were schooled to recognize such capricious, womanly feelings as vices destructive of the very possibility of Christian nationhood.
8: Unilateral Moral Disarmament
The Decline of Mainline Protestant Denominations since the Sixties
Introduction
In retrospect, the Fifties were a “golden era” for mainline Protestant churches in Australia.955 Australian Christians, generally, accommodated themselves readily to a debt-fuelled consumer society newly nestling under the imperial wing of the American eagle. Post-war prosperity was accompanied by a “popular piety and denominational solidarity…expressed through great public gatherings” across the nation. In Brisbane the Catholic Church regularly organized public processions attracting thousands of people. Meanwhile, huge crowds attended crusades for Christ mounted by celebrity evangelical preachers such as Billy Graham. Even in a relatively small state capital such as Adelaide, non-denominational events such as Carols by Candlelight drew many tens of thousands, year after year. As a consequence, “in middle-class home-owning suburbs most of the population had at least a tenuous connection with a Christian congregation”.956 Even so, by the middle of the decade there were worrying signs that attendance at church services was beginning to fall.
At first, the trend was almost “imperceptible. There was no sudden departure, just a slow ebbing away, which occurred at different times and took different forms”.957 By the middle of the Sixties, however, it became unmistakeably clear that “revolutionary changes in American [and Australian] religious and moral attitudes, and radical movements in theology…had brought a ‘sudden, traumatic and disruptive’ end to the religious revival and comfortable social values of the postwar period”.958 Since then the demographic decline of the mainline Protestant churches has worsened steadily. Pessimistic forecasters such as Anglican Bishop Tom Frame predict that by 2030 the number of Australians reporting a Christian affiliation on their census return will fall below 50 percent.959
On the other hand, Catholic numbers are holding steady, perhaps even increasing, partly because of mass immigration. Still, even among self-described Catholics the number of those who attend church at least once a month has dropped substantially since the Sixties.960 There is no doubt however that over the past half century the “drift away from the traditional churches [has] been greatest among Anglicans and Protestants”. This trend is especially pronounced among the Baby Boomer generation, large numbers of whom went to Sunday school in the Fifties but “no longer identified with a denominational or specifically Christian tradition”.961 Such alienation from mainline Protestant churches co-exists with the increasing numbers of census respondents reporting other exotic spiritual affiliations, some “that cannot be coded to a particular group”. The result is that Australia appears to have been transformed from a solidly Christian nation into “a secular postmodern society” that “is not anti-religious or even irreligious, but one where the religious and spiritual is less under the control of religious organizations”.962
Denominational Pluralism in Australia and the USA
The eventual triumph of secular humanism throughout the British dominions was not altogether unexpected. In 1858 the long-drawn-out controversy over Jewish emancipation in Britain ended with the decision to release members of Parliament from the traditional obligation to swear allegiance to the Crown “on the true faith of a Christian”. Not long afterward, one member of the Broad-Church movement in the Church of England read the writing on the wall both at home and in the colonies. John Westlake contended that no Christian community worthy of the name can exist apart from a national church which concentrates “all the intellectual activity which has grown up on the soil and under the influence of Christianity”.963 In colonial New South Wales, the embryonic “Christian community” was fragmented by the Church Act of 1836 which provided state support to Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic churches, and even, in principle, to Jewish synagogues.964 By the time state grants ended in the 1860s, denominational differences between the mainline Christian churches were well entrenched.
The most direct consequence of pluralistic government policies was to compel colonial Anglicans to abandon any hope of becoming the national church in Australia. In the long term, state support not just for all major Christian denominations but for Jews as well was a significant step toward the establishment of secular humanism in what became the Commonwealth of Australia. To rule out the possibility of a national church was “as much as to say that the moving spiritual forces of the nation have diverged too widely for common action in any yet recognised direction; that, in short, any further development must be outside of Christianity”.965 Westlake’s observation anticipated the trend line in the history of the mainline denominations in twentieth century Australia. It will require much more than evangelical fervour to reverse that trend.
In the Sixties, the accelerating process of secularization produced what the American sociologist John Murray Cuddihy called “denominational pluralism”. Religious plurality was no longer manifest solely in the “sectarianism�
� that had provided generations of Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholics with a strong sense of ascribed identity (e.g., “poor Irish Catholics” or “wealthy WASP Episcopalians”). Cuddihy contends that “[t]he differentiating and universalizing thrust of the modernization process, then, tends to dissolve [all such] traditionary particularisms”.966 The primary product of this process was a civil religion common to all, forcing a fastidious etiquette of tolerance upon the religious consciousness.
Older “fused” religious identities were broken up “into their component parts” and radically simplified. Secularization, Cuddihy suggests, was similar to the cracking process in an oil refinery. Crude, old-fashioned, traditional, religious identities — once grounded in a complex unity of family, folk, and faith — were “refined” into a purified form of “spiritual gasoline”. Left behind were the sticky residues of ethno-religious particularism once attached to poor (or rich) Irish Catholics, East European Jews, or Midwestern Lutheran Protestants. Pluralism then acquired a more rarefied, “denominational” character, distilling “the religious variable out of its fused state in the older ethnic or regional identities”. One’s religion became “an ‘aspect,’ and a largely private aspect, of the total society”.967
Secularization produced similar results in Australia. From the Sixties onwards, Australian churches have been remarkably open to influences emanating from England and the United States. David Hilliard observes that “no major trend in Australian religion was unique to Australia”. Church leaders and theologians here “commented on and responded to external influences from overseas…with a time lag of no more than a few months”.968 Denominational pluralism was probably the most significant American theological export of the Sixties era. Here as there, it transformed Protestant, Catholic, and Jew into brand names denoting denominational allegiances relevant only to the religious aspect of individual and family life.
In both countries, a new “civic religion” of brotherhood was established: inter-denominational tolerance became mandatory. Each of the three major religious denominations came to be treated “as a voluntary association where the individual member is bound only by a responsible personal commitment, not by any factor of ascription”.969 (Sociologists use the concept of ascribed status to denote a position assigned to individuals or groups based on traits beyond their control, such as sex, race, or parental social status. Achieved status, by contrast, is earned or chosen.) Among “other-directed”970 Protestants, the ascription of social superiority to one’s ancestral religion was scorned as unacceptably boorish behaviour. Simply by “denominationalizing” themselves, Jews and Catholics shed their ancestral identities as subaltern ethno-religious minorities.971
By the late Fifties, American Jews were rewarded by the unconditional surrender of their historic ethno-religious rivals in the WASP elite. In 1958, purely for the sake of appearances, the leading liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr urged his fellow Protestants to abandon the traditional Christian mission to the Jews. It seems that calls for the conversion of the Jews embarrassed Protestants in their relationships with Jewish friends. The mission to the Jews was repudiated “[n]ot because Christ and Paul had not commanded it (they had)” but because “it was in bad taste’.972 From the Sixties onwards, Australian Protestants were no less fastidious in their dealings with members of other denominations. One consequence was “the rapid crumbling of the barriers that had long separated the Roman Catholic Church from other Christian denominations”.973 This buoyant mood of ecumenical tolerance had its downside, however. Having renounced the sectarian ethno-religious identities of their forefathers, mainline Protestantism detached the Christian faith from its traditional roots in family and folk. In place of the blood faith of every historic Christian nation, an “existential” theology of Christian humanism bestowed its blessing upon a deracinated cult of the Other.
The Secular Cult of the Other
By the early Sixties, the spiritualized deconstruction of traditional ethno-religious identities had created an intellectual mass market for an explicitly secular theology locating “God” not in “the beyond” but “at the centre of life…between man and man”.974 In Honest to God, a wildly successful polemic against biblical mythology, the English theologian John Robinson rejected the “supranaturalist” image of God as an Old Man in the Sky somewhere “up there” or “out there” in a “heaven” beyond time and space. Robinson refused to believe in “a Being whose separate existence over and above the sum of things has to be demonstrated and established”.975 He recognized that religion had become but one aspect of all the human lives nourished, sustained, and shaped by a complex, highly differentiated socio-economic system. In the space age, a novel naturalistic image of God had to be distilled from the mythological “supranatural” language of the Bible. Responding to what he perceived as the coming of age of modern man, Robinson presented God as the ultimate reality upon which our existence is grounded: not a Being but the source of Being itself. God is not to be found above and beyond us but rather in the depths of our common humanity. 976
Robinson was careful to deny that the transcendence of God can be understood “by searching the depths of the individual soul”. His secular theology rejected mystical solipsism. Instead, Robinson affirmed that “it is only in response and obedience to the neighbour that the claims of God can be met and known”. It is not in a monastic withdrawal or turning away from the world “that God is to be met…but in unconditional concern for ‘the other’ seen through to its ultimate depths”.977 Such a desperate desire to discover God in the face of the Other clearly ran counter to the in-group altruism mandated by the Mosaic law in Leviticus 19:17–18. When ancient Israelites were commanded to “love your neighbour” the word explicitly denoted “brother” or “one of your people”. In their tribal culture the unbreakable bond between family, folk, and faith was axiomatic.
Similarly, in the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus restricts rather than expands the scope of the legal obligation to love one’s neighbour. He identifies the neighbour, not as the anonymous Other lying unconscious and bleeding by life’s roadside, but rather as the Samaritan working in association with the innkeeper to create an embryonic neighbourhood.978 Jesus tells the expert in the law to emulate trustworthy and honourable people who act in a prudent and responsible manner to create social capital, thereby earning our love and respect; he did not expect the lawyer to signal his superior moral status by showering self-sacrificial love (or taxpayer shekels) upon the next helpless, hopeless vagrant he might happen upon.
Unfortunately, Australian Protestants — by making out-group altruism the supreme sign of Christian virtue — choose to follow in Robinson’s rather than the Samaritan’s footsteps. His modernist cult of the Other dissolved traditional ethno-religious boundaries between in-groups and out-groups to embrace the whole of humanity. Fifty years later, Roy Williams avows that “a sense of collective decency” requires Australian Protestants “to set aside selfish, short-term tribalism and consider ‘the brotherhood of man’”. Citing the apparently unchallengeable reality of “a globalised world,” he insists that “there is a strong case for saying that everyone is our neighbour”.979 The ethno-religious reality of every actual neighbourhood disappears into the existential ether of universal otherhood.980
Unfortunately, in drilling down — all the way down — in search of divine otherness (the ultimate “sweet spot”), religious consciousness must bore through all the fossilized myths buried in the sedimentary layers of the language, history, and traditions belonging to one’s own family and folk. Unhappily, having abandoned their old-time religion, mainline Protestants failed to find richer reservoirs of pure spiritual gasoline beneath the cake of custom. In its futile subterranean quest for the Holy Grail, secular theology drilled countless dry wells.
There was something “deeply shallow” in Robinson’s confident hope that beneath the surface all “human beings” are much like those found i
n the still relatively homogeneous, high-trust society of England in the early Sixties. Simply through “the breaking of our common bread,” he hoped to encounter “the transcendent in a world without religion”.981 Institutionalized religion left him cold; he was “spiritual but not religious”. As Tom Frame puts it, Robinson believed that “[w]henever human beings acted ethically, lovingly, and compassionately towards another, they were reaching towards God”.982 But ethics, love, and compassion necessarily draw upon accumulated stocks of social capital unevenly distributed among peoples and nations. Robinson’s deracinated, existentialist vision of the kingdom of God separated blood from both belonging and belief. Even the fact that he was English, indeed an English bishop, had no apparent theological significance for him. Instead, he deplored anything that might turn the “Church of the nation…in upon itself as a religious organization or episcopalian sect”.983 Openness to the world was the core of his creed.
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