back back to Books previous previous story  |  next story next

Doing God down under

David L. Edwards finds wisdom in two guides to Australian religion

Australian Soul: Religion and spirituality in the 21st century
Gary Bouma

Cambridge University Press £19.99 (978-0-521-67389-1)
Church Times Bookshop £18

reviewed with

Anglicans in Australia

Tom Frame

University of South Wales Press/Eurospan £25.50

(978-0-86840-0830-9)

IF PROFESSOR BOUMA of Monash University were to own a newspaper, it might be called the Soul Times, although he takes “church” seriously and is himself an Anglican priest.

What he points out, as an objective sociologist, is that most Churches have fewer members, and most of these are not young. In the 1947 census, 39 per cent of Australians identified themselves as Anglicans, but in 2001 it was 21 per cent. In 1947, the Methodists, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians were 22 per cent; but in 2001, when most had come together in the Uniting Church, that mustered only ten per cent. The Roman Catholic Church grew from 20 to 27 per cent in this period, but the growth was mainly due to immigration. In 1947, only 11 per cent of Australians accepted no religious label, but in 2001 it was 25 per cent.

The Professor does not, however, waste space on nostalgic lamentations. Instead, he is positive about the remaining and growing “spirituality” outside, as well as inside, organised religion. It includes the faiths of non-Christian immigrants; but, in 2001, 68 per cent of Australians counted themselves as Christians (in 1947, it had been 88 per cent), and these included people drawn to Pentecostal-type megachurches that needed car parks to cater for congregations of thousands.

Most importantly, most Australians who do not feel a duty to attend a traditional service-and-sermon every Sunday can be classified in a phrase quoted from Manning Clarke: “a whisper in the mind and a shy hope in the heart”. That is how life is half believed to have an ultimate meaning that can be affirmed at death.

Two specially Australian sources can feed this spirituality. For some 40,000 years, the continent has been inhabited by Aborigines with their “dreaming”, which sees the sacred in the land and the tribe; and that heritage is no longer scorned by sensitive people who are modern or post-modern. And such people can have their own grateful appreciation of nature as creation — building, so to speak, a church on the beach.

As the Professor ponders whether this spirituality can be strengthened as religion, inevitably he is more controversial. He sees the future as being “post-ecumenical”: goodbye to the dream of One Church, and three cheers for diversity and competition in an atmosphere friendlier than it was in pre-ecumenical days. The future will also be “post-family”. “Recreational sex has become the norm” before marriage in one’s 30s and the arrival of children, who (at least in the expanding middle class) will be fewer than in the past.

The future is also predicted as “post-book”, meaning that faith or spirituality will be expressed mainly in actions, images, and short words. But at this point this reviewer must protest. This author has shown in this book what such an instrument can do to convey solid information and shrewd wisdom, and he is to be thanked for his skill.

Tom Frame has written another very useful book, again teaching that “if religion is to play any part in the lives of Australians, it has to be practical and therapeutic,” but adding what Bouma cannot bring himself to say with total conviction: Anglicanism is the best source for such religion, not because of Henry VIII and all that (although it was called “the Church of England in Australia” until 1981), but because it is an example of “Reformed Catholicism”, something more solid than “spirituality”.

By that, he does not mean to defend everything in products of the 19th century, such as Anglo-Catholicism, liberal Protestantism, and conservative Evangelicalism. Indeed, he attacks what has become the tradition in Australian Anglicanism: the Church is “essentially a federation of independent dioceses” heavily dependent on the personality of the bishop, who is decisive in appointments of clergy congenial to him. Frame, who joined the navy at 16, and was Bishop to the Australian Defence Force 2001-07, sends out a signal urging a united fleet to sail into battle confidently and briskly.

The trouble he faces is that there is no flagship. Ideally, that ought to be in Sydney, where the Church has inherited wealth from colonial days when it was Established in order to improve the transported convicts. Around a very exclusive Evangelical diocese, insisting on one brand of evangelism, lies a booming city with a fascinating mixture of cultures. But this bishop is eloquent by his silence about any present possibility that the Archbishops of Sydney could be accepted as Primates of all Australia.

He is now Director of St Mark’s National Theological Centre, an Anglican foundation to serve and to stimulate all the dioceses. It is located in Canberra, to which the federal Parliament moved in 1927. At first, there was a vision of a National Cathedral like the splendid one in Washington DC, but it was never built; and St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney, where the Dean is the Archbishop’s brother, is no substitute.

The Very Revd Dr David L. Edwards is a former Provost of Southwark Cathedral.

To order Australian Soul, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price")



back back to Books up back to top previous previous story  |  next story next


© Church Times 2006 - All rights reserved

Website by Baigent