The political church
The Revd Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Divinity at New College, Oxford, UK, delivered the Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture at Trinity College, Melbourne University in August. This is an edited text of her lecture.
A Christian group in New Zealand has advocated smacking children for up to fifteen minutes to beat the sinful manifestations out of them so that those manifestations do not become permanent fixtures. So went a headline in several Australian newspapers a few weeks ago.
Most of us will know how to decode the word ‘Christian’ in this context - the article is almost certainly talking about a right-wing Christian group that is biblically fundamentalist. This is what ‘Christian’ has come to mean in the media and the public sphere at large.
The problem is that now those of us who are Christians in a different mould do not know how to claim the title back. It is no wonder that some may have hesitations about how and whether to be associated with it.
This phenomenon has, for at least a decade or two now, been associated with American politics and religion, and has been well documented there. What struck me on coming to Australia this time - my fourth visit in four years - is that within the first few days of being here, I began to see signs of an increase in this sort of right-wing Christianity in the public sphere; or perhaps, rather, a growing awareness of its increased power in this largely secular country.
Within my first couple of weeks here, not only did I see that headline about smacking, but I also noted that the current Quarterly Essay is entitled ‘Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia’ (and here, ‘Christian’ again stands for a particular sort of conservative church perspective); a television programme explored the link between rightwing Christianity and rightwing politics; and
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database - and we’ll turn our computers onto your lists, and we’ll make you into household names. We’ll make you famous and we’ll gain political power.”2.
Meanwhile, the mainline Christian denominations were going into decline. The Civil Rights movement had represented the height of their influence on public policy and, looking back, some mainline Christian leaders believe that social action replaced theology for liberal Christians. This may have been the case in some denominations and churches, but the perception that social action replaced theology for liberals has made them an easy target for the Religious Right.
Nevertheless, the Religious Right took one very important thing from the activities of the left in the Civil Rights movement - grass roots activism. They patiently started to take control of America’s political structures from the bottom up, standing for election onto school boards, city and county commissions, as well as the local and state organisations of the Republican Party.
In 1988, they went national when Pat Robertson ran in the presidential primaries (after three million people had signed up to support his campaign). Liberals both sneered and relaxed when he did badly in that election, but looking back at his concession speech from the vantage point of 2006, we can see that the future he predicted has come true: “out of the seeming defeat of my campaign and the demise of what had been called the Moral Majority came an extremely offensive force which I believe is the wave of the future, and which is toppling historic liberalism and will bring about a conservative era in the United States.”3.
Today there are 60 million evangelical Christians in America. They make up about a quarter of the American electorate and form the core support base for George W Bush.
Why and how is all of this affecting my country and yours? At one level, and most obviously, the mindset of the religious right is affecting everyone because it is influencing international politics, and has done so increasingly since 9/11.
2. quoted in Wakefield, The Hijacking of Jesus p. 82
3. ibid
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obsessed with Israeli self-defence, but largely opposed to any peace plan.
Just a few years ago, it would have seemed impossible that the nineteenth-century idea of the Rapture and some late twentieth-century novels and films based on it could determine the foreign policy of the most powerful country in the world. As one commentator writes, “the rest of us can ignore Left Behind, or chuckle at its over-the-top Christian kitsch. We should keep in mind, though, that for some of the most powerful people in the world, this stuff isn’t melodrama. It’s prophecy.”4.
But the key to the success of the Religious Right has always been local, grassroots activism. How then, are these religious views being promoted at the local level in our respective countries, Australia and Britain? How and why is it affecting the nature of Christianity within our countries?
The standard view of secularisation promoted by sociologists for a long time was that a steady and inexorable decline in religious belief began in the Enlightenment and continued over three centuries. This has, in the last decade or so, been re-thought in a number of ways.
First, it has been suggested by historians that secularisation happened much later. The eighteenth century was not only a period of scepticism but also one of devotion and piety, while the nineteenth century was a remarkably religious period, as was the first half of the twentieth century.
Importantly, for our topic, it was in the nineteenth century that evangelical religion embedded itself into English and American culture, through a series of revivals, and spread itself around the globe via missionaries, not least from the Church Missionary Society (CMS), as those evangelical Anglicans followed British colonisers and settlers.
Following this historical revision of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Callum Brown in his influential book The Death of Christian Britain (2001) has argued that religious decline in Britain occurred sharply and suddenly in the 1960s. This model also fits Australia, I think, because
4. Michelle Goldberg, ‘Fundamentally Unsound’ in salon.com p.2http://dir.salon.com/story/books/feature/2002/07/29/left_behind/index.html
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but also trades unions and political parties - as Robert Putnam pointed out in his influential book, Bowling Alone.)
In England, where we have a state church, this means that institutional religion plays a role in providing ‘vicarious religion’ says Davie - it is there for when it is needed, at times of national crisis and celebration.6.
Conservative evangelicalism has seen its opportunity and taken it. The secularisation of Britain and Australia from the 1960s onwards had left a void. There was a solid base of evangelical believers in both of those countries but - as in America - they were largely dismissed in the wider culture through the societal revolutions of the 1960s.
They were, undoubtedly, both cheered by and willing to learn from the rise of the Religious Right in the USA. They benefited from the organisation and the wealth of that movement, and they learnt from it. Not only did they visit the mega churches of the conservative evangelicals in the States, and pick up their techniques of organisation, they also used the Internet to further their communication with them, and bought their books. Christian publishing is big business in the United States, with its own publishing houses and bestseller lists.
We may be seeing an increasing connection between conservative Christianity and politics
We have seen the growth of American-style evangelical churches in both of our countries, such as Hillsong in Sydney and Holy Trinity, Brompton in London (home of the Alpha course), as well as numerous, so-called non-denominational churches that meet in churches, cinemas, football stadiums and any space that is big enough to hold them.
We may also be seeing an increasing connection between conservative Christianity and politics, though this is complex and ambiguous in both our
6. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) and Religion in Modern Europe: a memory mutates (Oxford University Press, 2000).
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In both countries, the majority of mainstream churches spoke out against the Iraq war; they produce sensitive and nuanced reports on social justice and the inner city; they promote, at least to some extent, ideas about the leadership of women that are more in step with society. But all of this is largely ignored as ‘Christian’ argues Amanda Lohrey, writing about the Australian context.
She quotes the liberal Jesuit priest, Frank Brennan, long an activist for human rights who comments, “A majority of John Howard’s senior Cabinet ministers are now Anglicans or Catholics. They wear religious affiliation on their sleeves more readily than did the senior ministers of the Hawke or Keating governments. And yet they have pursued policies on asylum seekers and the Iraq war contrary to the position adopted by most of their church leaders.”7.
Where does all of this leave those of us who are Christians but who do not share the Religious Right’s
I think it leaves us bewildered; unsure in some public situations about whether to call ourselves Christians
definition of what that means?I think it leaves us at times bewildered; unsure of how to regain lost ground; unsure in some public situations about whether to call ourselves Christians lest our views be mistaken for what passes as ‘Christian’ in the public sphere these days.
But I think it also leaves us angry that an understanding of Christianity based on mercy, love and grace has been largely eclipsed in favour of one based on fear and even hatred of others, rigid legalism and unquestioned readings of the Bible which take no account of the context in which those texts were originally written, nor of the context in which they are read today. Christianity has for many people become a force for judgment
7. Amanda Lohrey, ‘Voting for Jesus. Christianity and Politics in Australia’, Quarterly Essay (Issue 22, 2006) pp. 64 - 65
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it has prided itself on being a broad church, capable of holding together many diverse views and practices.
The broad and diverse mainstream of Anglicanism was what kept the connections between individual parishes, dioceses and provinces as well as the Communion itself together. Attempts at tighter unity will almost certainly only cause greater fragmentation and real exclusions.
Since the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, liberals have been notoriously disorganised, despite the fact that they were the ones who got modern grassroots activism going.
We need to recapture the public sphere, so that ‘Christian’ does not become the monolithic term that it is in danger of becoming, solely framed in the public’s mind in relation to the Religious Right.
In order to do this we will need to make strategic alliances with agnostics, non-fundamentalist atheists and people of other faiths with whom we share certain core values.
Just as conservative evangelicals think it more important to make cross-denomination alliances with other conservative evangelicals, so Christian liberals may need to recognise that their most important allies may be those who are not Christian but who share their values of reasoned dialogue, the dignity of the human person and therefore the importance of human rights, and a respect for (if not a belief in) a form of spirituality that recognises that God is greater than a very particular and narrow interpretation of the Bible.
This will be important for all kinds of political and ethical issues, not least public policy - whether we are talking about stem cell research, poverty, gay marriage or asylum seekers. We need to speak out on these issues, write articles, preach, get ourselves informed, and present a different form of Christianity which believes that God is already at work in the world and we are God’s hands and feet. This may mean that we will sometimes be counter-church, rather than counter-cultural, when to do so would be to take us closer to the heart of the gospel.
A lot is going on, but it is not always known about. The solution lies partly in wresting back a place in the public sphere to make this work known,
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It seems that perhaps one of the most important tasks that faces us is how we enable different Christian voices to co-exist. Liberals have long survived on a model of dialogue that allows everyone to have their say.
But many conservative evangelical Christians don’t want others to be heard; to have a voice in politics; to have a public space in which their interpretations of the Bible and the Christian tradition will be given due value and weight. We need to be savvy about this.
A recent Church of England and Methodist report on the church in the inner city, Faithful Cities defines Incarnational theology like this: “Incarnational theology is about translating the divine call to do justice into the ephemeral realities of day to day politics. It calls people, as Jesus Christit, to be ‘wise as serpents’ and ‘harmless as doves’”.8
The irony of the situation we are in, then, is that in order to demonstrate and practise God’s love, we shall sometimes have to be very tough. But the life of Jesus, who overturned the tables of the moneylenders in the temple and, minutes later with the same hand, healed a leper at the temple gate, is a pretty good model for us.
The full text of this lecture can be found at http://www.trinity.unimelb.edu.au/theological_school/news
8. Commission in Urban Life and Faith, Faithful Cities: A call for celebration, vision and justice (London: Methodist Publishing House and Church House Publishing, 2006)
an article in The Sydney Morning Herald investigated fundamentalist Christians and their tactics.
If you went to England I suspect you would notice a similar growth in awareness of the influence of conservative Christians. Both of our countries are becoming ‘Americanised’ in this way.
Dan Wakefield, in his recent book, The Hijacking of Jesus, charts the rise of the Religious Right and its meshing with politics in the USA.
He argues that the Republican party, its fortunes at their lowest in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, deliberately harnessed the voter power of the evangelical and Pentecostal Christians who had been hitherto dismissed as mere Southerners - behind the times.
The Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell’s crusade were born, and numerous right wing foundations and institutes were founded which merged conservative politics with conservative Christianity and
I think the Religious Right is the political seduction of religion
prepared political campaigns, all funded by big businesses, such as the Coors brewing company, Vicks Vaporub and numerous Texas oil companies. 1.Evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, used to being ridiculed in the wider culture, found that they were being embraced by the Republican party and they embraced the Republicans back, suddenly finding themselves both affirmed and vindicated.
Jim Wallis, the liberal evangelical Christian and founder of the Sojourners community, puts it like this:
“I think the Religious Right is the political seduction of religion. There were political operatives on the far right who had meetings with a handful of television preachers - and they made a deal - “You give us your lists - your members list, your
1. Wakefield, Dan. The Hijacking of Jesus. How the Religious Right Distorts Christianity and Promotes Prejudice and Hate (NY: Nation Books, 2006)
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Take the current conflagration in Lebanon and Israel, for example. The Religious Right believes that Israel is doing God’s work in a war of good versus evil. Pastor John Hagee, a televangelist and the founder of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, preached this message in Washington DC in July. His congregation was made up of 3500 evangelicals and a host of congressmen, as well as Israel’s ambassador to the USA and a former Israeli chief of staff.
His view is strongly informed by Christian Zionism, a particular reading of the Bible that sees Israel’s troubles as fulfilling biblical prophecy; a crusading mindset against Islam; and an apocalyptic vision gleaned from the Book of Revelation. Hagee has written books with titles such as Beginning of the End (which reached The New York Times Best Seller List) and Final Dawn over Jerusalem.
Israel, attacked by numerous nations, is miraculously
protected, and the saved are suddenly taken up into heaven
These ‘non-fiction’ books complement the hugely popular ‘Left Behind’ series of novels and films in which the second coming of Christ and the “end of the world as we know it” are heralded.
Israel, attacked by numerous nations, is miraculously protected, and the saved are suddenly taken up into heaven in the Rapture, leaving their clothes in a pile and their unsaved friends and families bewildered (1 Thess 4.16-18).
This is understood as God fulfilling the biblical prophecy to protect the homeland of his ancient people, and remove his saints or ‘Church’ from the seven years of tribulation that will follow the Rapture, in which - in the Left Behind series - the antichrist heads up the United Nations and conflict takes over the earth.
Many evangelical Christians treat these novels and films as non-fiction, accurate interpretations of the biblical prophecies. In this scheme of things, the series of events that lead to the second coming of Christ depends on the existence of a Holy Land that is under catastrophic assault but survives unscathed. The Religious Right is therefore
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although it has never been an avowedly religious country, traditional church membership began to decline in the 1960s, and has continued to do so in the last few decades. The National Church Life Survey statistics show that in 2001 only 8 per cent of Australians went to church weekly.5.
Secondly, it was realised that the secularisation model fitted only certain parts of the west. The USA didn’t exactly fit into this model, despite the decline of the mainline denominations from the 1960s onwards, because of the presence of evangelical Christianity, especially in the south, but also because of patterns of immigration.
In the second half of the twentieth century, many Hispanics came to America with traditional Roman Catholic beliefs and patterns of religious practice, and Hindus and Moslems also made up a high proportion of the increased numbers of people who came to the USA in the wake of the 1965 immigration act.
as religious belief and practice declined in countries such as Britain they were on the rise in the global south
Nor did the secularisation model fit much of the rest of the world. Indeed, as religious belief and practice declined in countries such as Britain and parts of Europe, they were on the rise in the global south, and had never declined in Africa. The secularisation of Britain, parts of western Europe and countries such as Australia is therefore the exception rather than the rule.
Thirdly, sociologists such as Grace Davie have talked about the phenomenon of believing but not belonging. People might have a belief in God, or a desire for spirituality, but they see it as a largely individual (and indeed individualistic) matter, which does not necessarily require church membership. (In fact, there is an overall decline in ‘belonging’ to institutions - not only churches,
5. quoted in Porter M, The New Puritans p. 66. Porter provides a very useful discussion of churchgoing patterns in Australia from the nineteenth century to the present, see pp. 65 – 68.
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countries. In Britain, we have a Labour Government that touted its links to the Christian Socialist Movement when it came to power in 1997 (though these links are rarely remarked on these days) but has pursued a conservative foreign policy, almost entirely led by the agenda of the United States.
On the one hand, this Labour government in Britain has promoted the establishment of private Christian academies, often set up by millionaires from conservative evangelical backgrounds, as model secondary schools, in a way that has alarmed secularists and liberal Christians alike. But it has also encouraged the establishment of faith-based primary schools in other religious traditions, such as Islam, suggesting an openness to all forms of religiously based education which many evangelicals would disavow.
In Australia I have noticed that several books and articles in the last year or so explored the link between the Liberal Party and conservative Christianity.
Marion Maddox has made a strong argument - with which I am sure some will disagree - in her recent book, God Under Howard: The Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics (2005) that this government has been successful in a largely secular country in adopting American-style rightwing religious rhetoric, especially in issues related to marriage and the family, but also in relation to Aboriginal land rights and mandatory detention for asylum seekers.
Maddox argues that Howard has successfully linked ‘Christian values’ to ‘Australian values’ and has a number of conservative Christian ministers at the heart of his cabinet. She suggests that such political players have adopted and indeed used the Religious Right both to gain votes and to promote their own conservative agenda with regard to issues such as wealth (“the prosperity gospel”) and economics (deregulation), abortion, euthanasia and other hot topics such as single mothers and homosexuality.
In both our countries it seems that the liberal Christian voice has been largely eclipsed from the public sphere. There is a disparity between the statements of the mainstream churches and their leaders and what is promoted and represented as ‘Christian’ in the media, and even sometimes in politics.
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and exclusion rather than peace and inclusion.
And all of this leaves those of us who have always considered ourselves at the centre of the church - ‘reasonable’ Christians if you like - squeezed between fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist atheism, under siege from both directions.
Ever since 9/11, there has been a renewed attack by some atheists on all religion - religion has been blamed for all the ills in the world. In fact, that atheist version of religion is fundamentalism. This is the form of religion that my colleague at New College, Oxford, the scientist Richard Dawkins, has repeatedly attacked, and did so recently in a Channel 4 television series in which the worst forms of conservative evangelicalism, the most fundamentalist versions of Islam and Judaism, were pitted again science.
It is important to acknowledge that our ideas about progress - which are at the core of liberal thinking - may be very out-dated. The fact is that lots of people want certainty; they even want hierarchy; they want to be obedient to a set of unquestioned beliefs. Any form of fundamentalism offers these things.
Why is there such an upswing in this desire for certainty, a new craving for unquestioning obedience, at a time when so many of us imagined that we would be living in a time of greater democracy and broader intellectual ‘enlightenment’? We have, after all, been used to associating modernity with progress.
This is a puzzle that cannot be ignored; and we have encountered it before in modernity. The Great War of 1914-18 shattered the Victorian illusions of progress; the holocaust and all that led to the Second World War caused a crisis of confidence in reason. It may be that we are now having our third shock, facing up to the great wave of fundamentalism that threatens modern liberal values of reasoned discussion, conversation and listening.
In the light of this, liberals will have to rethink ideas of toleration. How do we cope with the fact that inherent to our belief system is the toleration of others who will not and do not want to tolerate us? This is a specific problem that my church needs to address in the Anglican Communion. It is a particular problem for Anglicanism
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thus to shift perceptions of what it means to be a Christian.
The common perception is that Christianity is largely about believing impossible things. This is certainly how the attack from the fundamentalist atheists is framed, while the conservative evangelicals accuse liberal Christians of having no theology at all.
But we should make a positive virtue out of two key aspects of practical Christianity that are closely identified with the ‘broad church’.
First, all that is associated with the biblical commandment to love ones neighbour. We need to articulate that the practice of Christianity can help us to live life sanely - which is to say, shape a moral life which will make for peace both within ourselves and within the communities in which we live and work (whether local or global). This means that we necessarily become more outward looking, engaged with the concerns of those outside as well as inside our circles.
one of the most important
tasks that faces us is how
we enable different
Christian voices to co-exist
Secondly, we need to emphasise the importance of prayer and liturgy in shaping our beliefs - they are vital binding forces. We participate in the corporate worship of the church because in doing so we allow ourselves to be caught up in the great ancestry of Christians who have responded to the gospel message, and thus we open ourselves up to change, to the transformation which is at the heart of faith.
Conservative evangelical churches have been so successful because they have harnessed the forms and sounds of popular culture to their worship and their church life. As Amanda Lohrey says in her Quarterly Essay on ‘Jesus and Politics’ in which she focuses on Hillsong in Sydney - one reason Hillsong has been so successful is that their workshops and bible study groups, targeted at specific audiences, have borrowed the language of self-help books. The message is that religion will do something for me.