Back in July 2005 Pope Benedict XVI made some off-the-cuff remarks to a group of local priests while on vacation near Aosta in the Italian Alps. He was discussing the self-sufficiency and neglect of Christ and Christianity which dominated Europe. "The mainstream churches appear moribund", he said. Then, out of the blue, he commented: "This is so in Australia, above all, and also in Europe, but not so much in the United States." This sent the Australian media into high dudgeon and like other Catholic commentators I spent a week trying to explain what Benedict might have meant.
Why we were targeted is hard to fathom, although it suits both secularists and bishops to maintain the notion that Australia is 'Godless' and the churches 'moribund'. For secularists it shows that they’ve been right all along. They claim religion has always been a sectarian blight on Australian life. If we all embraced the 'who cares about doctrinal differences' and 'it’s the same God we worship' approach, Australia would evolve into a more tolerant, terrestrial paradise.
On the other hand bishops use our presumed ‘Godlessness’ to claim the collapse in religious practice isn’t really their fault. It’s not church structures, poor leadership, dull sermons, uninspired ministry, lifeless worship, or failure to address the real issues facing society that has led to so many people to abandon the church. It is all the fault of crass materialism, relativism and Godlessness. Therefore, it’s society that has to change, not church leaders.
However a recent book, Australian Soul (Cambridge, 2006), by Professor Gary Bouma of Monash University argues that Australians are not Godless. We’re quietly spiritual rather than explicitly religious, holding on to what Manning Clark called 'a shy hope in the heart'. Bouma says that Australian spirituality is rather understated, wary of enthusiasm, anti-authoritarian, optimistic, open to others, self-deprecating and ultimately characterized by "a serious quiet reverence, a deliberate silence ... an inarticulate awe and a serious distaste for glib wordiness."
It could be argued that these characteristics are secular and that to use the word spirituality to encapsulate them is a misnomer. However, it is the reference to 'reverence' and 'awe' that spiritually transforms these attributes. Bouma says that part of the problem is that we unconsciously tend to judge ourselves by the rather ostentatious religiosity of some American Protestants. Australians are far more understated and reverent.
Bouma has argued for two decades now that faith and spirituality are not marginal to Australian life, and that the large majority of Australians have usually thought of themselves as believers, and today identify with some form of personal spirituality.
Throughout much of the twentieth century and certainly after the1960s the predominant view among the chattering classes was that 'meaning' questions would all eventually be solved by science and that Australia was an explicitly secular society, with an odd and contracting remnant group of 'god-botherers' maintaining the faith. However, Bouma has argued that most Australians described themselves as religious persons even back in the 1970s, the heyday of triumphant secularism.
This doesn’t mean that people are flocking to churches. They are not looking for pat answers and don’t need a religious authority to tell them what to do. They are suspicious of institutions with all the answers. They are content to live with the questions and certainly want to take charge of their own spiritual lives.
The churches that are growing — albeit off a small base — are other Christian, oriental Christian (i.e. the Orthodox whose increase comes from migration), Pentecostals and Mormons. He points out that the mainstream Anglican, Uniting and Protestant churches are still in decline. With parallel declines in New Zealand, Canada and the US, Bouma claims that "this represents the waning of British Protestantism."
Bouma is more optimistic about Catholicism which he sees as differently positioned. While he concedes that there have been some slides in attendance and that Catholicism has much larger parishes than the other churches with a very high priest to people ratio, it has a strong system of schools and institutions which he thinks will sustain it. He points out that parents increasingly want to enroll their children in non-elite Catholic schools because of the discipline and values-based education that they offer.
While I think he is over-optimistic about the Catholic church, his views are a refreshing antidote to the prevailing pessimism about Australian religion and sit in marked contrast to those of Benedict XVI.