It always pays to examine how someone frames an issue to how they want you to think about it. It’s a good way of working out their real intent and the assumptions they’re bringing.
Take Stan Grant’s essay on the weekend about religion in Australian public life, which begins: “Does Australia have a God problem?” Grant, who has been forthright about the positive role of Christianity in his own upbringing, clearly thinks we do — though you won’t find a statement anywhere near as clear as that. But he uses words like “divisive”, “implacable” and “existential”, which kinda suggest he’s pretty sure there’s a problem.
He also quotes a variety of commentators, philosophers and historians in his presentation of liberal society struggling to deal with the clash of rights — or, as he ends rather dramatically, the right to have rights.
But it’s the dearth of history that’s a key problem for Grant.
If Australia has a God problem now, it’s a pretty innocuous one compared to that of previous generations.
Sectarianism is at the heart of the white history of Australia, dating from invasion right through to our own living memory, dividing Protestant from Catholic, a British Australia from a nationalist one, threatening to tear the country apart in the debates over conscription in the First World War and lingering beyond World War II in persistent discrimination against Catholics by the Establishment.
Compared to the fundamental division between Protestant and Catholic Australians for much of Australian history, and the extraordinary discrimination suffered by Catholics for much of that time, the current debate about who gets to expel kids is trivial at best.
And that’s the difficulty with Grant’s framing. He may want us to think the issue is an existential, implacable one, but it’s taken years of huffing and puffing by News Corp and some Coalition figures to conjure up the illusion of religion under threat in Australia — and even then, large numbers of communities of faith, church leaders and even strongly religious politicians such as Dominic Perrottet think it’s a non-issue. A clear case of, if the molehill won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the molehill.
But press further into Grant’s framing and some other things fall out as it falls apart.
It’s not clear that Grant has any particular coherent account of the development of Western liberalism — though the Enlightenment (or a monolithic stereotype of it) apparently features in it — especially when the key idea of individualism is only mentioned once, and then in the statement: “Modernity itself is built upon the elevation of the individual, the rupture of tradition, and the goal of human flourishing.”
As it turns out, I agree fully with that. But like Grant’s claim that Australia faces some existential issue over religion, there’s a glaring absence: sectarianism. Individualism is not some emergent property of secularism or the rise of liberalism. Quite the opposite: it was created by religion itself. It is Protestantism, and it is the fundamental assertion of a personal relationship between the believer and God, via the Word, that seeds individualism.
Starting with Martin Luther, Protestantism moves Europe from a world based on a community of the faithful for whom a priest mediates with God, to one of individuals with their own direct line to the Lord via the vernacular Bible.
Grant overlooks all of that — and funnily enough, that’s exactly the criticism of the book he seems to heavily rely on, Catholic historian Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.
And once the logic that individuals can determine their relationship with God is out of the bottle, it can never be put back in, becoming a key driver of religious fragmentation first, then toleration, then secularism, then economics.
Christianity cleaves into Protestantism and Catholicism, then Protestantism cleaves into Lutheranism and Calvinism, then into ever smaller churches, communities and sects. Then the logic of individualism spreads from religion to politics, to social structures, to the economy.
The economics of belief
Eventually it finds its fullest expression in the mid-20th century with the emergence of neoliberalism, which does away with any concept of community and elevates the individual to the status of supreme object of moral and political philosophy: consumer, producer, worker, given full freedom to maximise their economic value in a market economy unencumbered by community restrictions or states, even to move seamlessly around the globe to wherever they can maximise their value.
Necessarily, of course, at least half of any such group will face below-average economic outcomes; having one’s identity fixed to maximising one’s economic outcomes becomes, in any but the least developed economies, an alienating experience, driving a search for more meaningful forms of identification — usually tribalism of various kinds, based on racial identification, faith, sexuality, political affiliation, whatever you’ve got.
The spiritual “emptiness” that Grant attributes to liberalism in fact emerges from neoliberalism and its ruthless assertion of the primacy of the individual over any community — not some flabby, self-undermining secular political liberalism that right-wing critics (and some religious thinkers) like to level at the contemporary West.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that organised Christianity has often been on the side of those opposing liberal and neoliberal economics — and not just in the great tradition (ignored by Grant) of Christian socialism, or the rise of liberation theology in the Americas. It’s forgotten now, but George Pell was among the critics of WorkChoices when the Howard government unveiled it in 2005.
One response from the right to the “emptiness” that results from neoliberalism — from the stripping away of all social values other than one’s economic worth — is to try to exploit the search for other forms of identity through culture wars.
Divisions over relatively minor matters are ginned up, or they’re invented out of whole cloth, into conflicts portrayed by the right as fundamental ones in which one must take a side, with us or against us, civilisation versus barbarians. In these culture wars, according to the right, Western society is always in some major crisis, is always facing incipient collapse, is always on its last chance.
That’s exactly the kind of framing Grant ends up using about his “God problem” — existential and implacable. Grant’s essay, in the end, is the perfect symptom of the problem he is groping towards identifying.
“Christianity cleaves into Protestantism and Catholicism…”
Which leaves out an awful lot of cleaving. The Great Schism of 1054 is still with us, and the Orthodox would no doubt wonder why they don’t exist in this account. The Copts might ask the same. Christianity had plenty of divisions almost from the start, certainly from the point where the early Christians who respected their Jewish tradition split with the more recent gentile converts. That was mild compared to the Arian controversy in the 4th C, which led to some deadly fighting between the factions in the Roman Empire. And so on. The Protestant movement is chiefly distinguished as near enough the only break from within Catholicism that the Catholic church has failed to suppress as heresy.
So true.
Read Ireneaus and you’ll see Christianity was schism-city from the beginning.
The victors wrote the history and destroyed any writings that did not agree with their version.
Thanks for that in-depth article Bernard.
I have just finished reading Stan Grant’s essay on the ABC site that you provided a link to. The issues that you both raise really deserve some time and consideration before writing a reply. At the moment I have other things which require my attention. I just wanted to thank you for this excellent contribution.
I basically agree with your argument Bernard. To add one thought to the source of emptiness: If you push society into a never ending competition of individuals, you cannot avoid producing a lot of losers; ie in any contest one must lose. And therein is the evil flaw of neoliberal capitalism.
And where the race is run with some individuals starting at the finish line, and the vast majority of the disadvantaged barefoot and contemplating the course strewn with broken glass and landmines, the evil flaw of Capitalism on its own, let alone with a sickeningly historical repetition movement to the right, becomes abundantly apparent.
I well remember the Catholic/Protestant divide.I started work in 1953 and the very first quetion my supervisor asked me was,”What religion are you, son?”.I remember I was a bit nonplussed, as I remember, but I think I stammered out something like,”I don’t go to church, Mr.Ryan, my family’s not religious”.That seemed to satisfy him as he never brought the subject up again . I also remember from my school days the doggerel verses,”Catholic dogs, sitting on logs, eating the bellies out of frogs”.And the one the Micks would retaliate with.”Catholics, Catholics, ring the bell, Protestants, Protestants go to hell”.Ah, they eere simpler days.
Wasn’t around in the 50s. Seemed simpler to the simple minded maybe, just seems to have an underlying nastiness to me. Wasn’t that also the time of the white Australia policy and massive injustices to aborigines and unmarried mothers and abortion bans and bashing of ‘poofs’, etc. Yes, just simpler times. Times when good Christians didn’t have to think or care about others. Good times they’d love to get back to, hey Scomo?
I suspect I completed primary school (1957) agnostic, did high school at an Anglican college and departed close enough to atheist. Sometime in my final decade of 46 years in a fossil fuel industry (oil refining) I realized that the entire universe must evolve purely according to the Laws of Mother Nature which control everything. When you consider humanity’s record of discovery and utilization of those laws it becomes obvious that we wont have much longer on this planet. Just consider that from pre Archimedes to Hawking how humanity has handled the majority of new theories. We first spend more time and money on researching an application in killing/maiming other humans before beneficial emphasis with occasional exception where there an obvious domestic money spinner.
BP operated the refinery and publish annual global fossil fuel statistics which indicate the stupidity of Russia/Ukraine, AUKUS, and the defence expenditure of every nation. In round figures humanity burns eleven billion tonnes of fossil fuel per annum liberating circa 28 billion tonnes CO2. Less than a seventh of this rate of combustion occurred prior to 1950 but since then humans turned location, extraction, and combustion into an art form. Due to the inefficiency of our machines over half the heat liberated from that combustion goes into our planet’s atmosphere and water plus the enormous heating via greenhouse effect of CO2 and lost methane (natural gas). Our atmosphere has such mass that the measured temperature rise is insignificant compared to the ability of that extra energy quota to modify our weather especially via winds and currents in the oceans. Mother Nature will have final say irrespective of the beliefs in hundreds of millions of Gods worshiped by various sectors of humanity.
Robert Egerton – I agree. I did Humanities so forgive my amateur analysis but I have come to realise there are only 3 sets of laws, and they are the Laws of physics, chemistry and biology. Everything else is a construction arising from human imagination. “Sapiens”, by Yuval Noah Harari confirmed it.
Gosh Mal, you are even older than me. I started primary school in 1953.
Back in those days and for many years thereafter, when it came to socializing with the girls I couldn’t have given two hoots about church/synagogue affiliations. Some things overrode religious considerations.
Poor Stan has been elevated by the deeply sectarian ABC to the point where he now believes he’s an intellectual……..
What is this deeply sectarian ABC? How is it sectarian? Should that actually be secular?
A sect preaching the gospel of the Evil Empires – UK, US and their Aussie lap dog – forever wars. The latest sprays of US and UK propaganda should be enough to convince even the most sceptical SSR!
Much of the ABC’s “preaching” during the past year has been from LNP’s talking points and lacking usual journalist rigour of offering time to opposing views.
We’ll, it’s not like the ALP has given them much to talk about. Even now, you’d hardly know there was an election looming…