Churches are losing the space race
Professor Gary Bouma addressed the Centennial Conference of Trinity College of Divinity in Melbourne in July entitled the Future of Religion in Australian Society. His subject was Organised Religion and its Relationship with Australian Society. We publish here edited excerpts from his lecture. He began by acknowledging Professor Andrew McGowan, Dean of Trinity College, who defined the secular as “a space of negotiation”.
I want to focus on organised religion and the contestation of this space, called secular. I will be using the word ‘church’, but my subject matter applies equally to Islam, Buddhism, the spiritualities, etc.The forms of contest between religious organisations and other players in this particular space is what we are addressing.
Spiritualities will be here forever,but the form of contestation between religious organisations, and other players in this particular space, is what we’re talking about in terms of the future.
Where have we come from? With Australia I don’t have to go back to the First Century, but to 50,000 years of religious diversity. Honouring our indigenous heritage and remembering its diversity and its continuities does set a tone, a standard, for this land.
Organised religion got off to a fairly weak start in Australia. The late 18th Century was not a high water mark for religiosity in Britain, and those who came here – either willingly or unwillingly – were not particularly churched people in the UK.
This lack of organised religion amongst the European denizens of this land for the first fifty years set a standard for Australian spirituality and expectations about religion – a low temperature religion. We get upset when somebody is too religious – perhaps wearing too large a religious symbol. I had the same response to an industrial strength nun in the 1950s as I did to a woman in a burqa. It was electrifying.
Christianising was part of empire. So as the churches moved in they formed a particular pact with the government and society to Christianize,to civilise, build institutions or provide social services. (In the 19th Century there were plenty of Jewish as well as Buddhist and Chinese organisations, but we got rid of them.)
From 1960 on things begin to change, in ways that have left us with a highly contested secular space. I want to talk about a few basic sociological drivers of change that are operating at this point, to help to be more specific about the future of religion in Australia.
Migration has changed demographic composition and produced diversity in the land. It also produced opportunities for service.
The 1950s, particularly for Christian churches, was a time of welcoming migrants, stitching them into a community; building society; building the nation. Nation building and church involvement in it provided strength, involvement, reason for being, and sources of revenue for churches.
If you are worried about your
place in a new diversity you are
going to fight for it
By 2006 there were more Buddhists than Baptists, more Muslims than Lutherans, more Hindus than Jews. There were four times as many witches as Quakers (when I’m talking to a group under forty years old, they say,What’s a Quaker?).
The old Anglican, English Protestant dominance is gone. Anybody who is sixty and over grew up with that, but for somebody under sixty the reality was quite different. It’s a loss of a major socio-cultural norm.
This shift has also broken the demographic basis for the compact between the churches, religious organisations and society around nation building.
Back in the olden days, in 1950, the prime minister would have made two phone calls – one to the Anglicans and one to the Presbyterians, representing well over fifty per cent of the population. Add the Methodists and the calls would cover more than sixty per cent.The Roman Catholics didn’t count.
Today the diversity within religious groups almost exceeds the diversity between them. This diversity is huge and that is why certain groups have begun to pay more attention to their boundaries. If you are worried about your place in a new diversity you are going to fight for it.
We’ve seen the rise of Pentecostals, new spiritualities, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu communities, and now the new Christian norm is Catholic.The Roman Catholics have the only churches really cashed up; institutionally available to do anything of substance in society.
As groups decline they become noisier; and as Andrew McGowan was saying, our relationships in the 21st Century are characterised by fear.
So this new zone called the secular in which we contest for space is one dominated by fear. Groups who fear their loss of control, influence and impact, who used to be able to quietly operate through informal mechanisms and associations with the state, now have to be much more noisy to make an impact.
So religious voices re-enter the public arena in a new way. Often they haven’t got the theological foundation or the biblical knowledge with which to put their case in the public sphere.They haven’t been trained in it,they aren’t experienced in it,they try to use secular language and as a result, they are not heard. A major voice is no longer there – the Christian voice is abandoned to those who have an agenda that I would call not very Christian.
The smaller groups become noisier.The contestation becomes more difficult.
The failure to retain a voice has resulted in a depletion of an old mainstream. When forty-one per cent of those born Anglican now say they have no religion, you’ve lost two generations and you’re well into losing your third.
Before, it just happened. You went to a state school and you got some Christian stuff there. It was in the ethos, you just sort of sapped it up and you didn’t have to differentiate yourself against much, except maybe Catholics. Now, people don’t know what Christianity is.
Pentecostals are youthful, as are all migrant religions – because it’s youth who migrate. They also have a higher birth rate, because there was a higher birth rate where they came from. It takes a generation or two to bring it down. But the youth are not as Christian as they used to be and that’s going to affect the kind of futures that some churches have to look forward to
We’ve lost Christendom, we have begun to lose normalcy of belief. Spirituality is on the rise but religious types don’t like it because they can’t control it.They can’t charge for it. They can’t get their income from it.
We have had a rise of secularism and that’s a group who wish to take over the secular, defined by McGowan as a space of contestation. They thought they had actually got hold of that space and it was theirs, but with these voices of religion coming back into the public space there’s contestation. So they’ve got to fight.
Contestation over this space influences how religious and philosophical ideas work to shape public policy.
There is no whole package
marketplace unless you happen to
go into Opus Dei
With the rise of consumerism and individualism we’re in an open marketplace,free choice prevails.You say to somebody, Choose this day who you will serve for the rest of your life,and they say,What? I can do it on Tuesday, but I don’t know about Wednesday. I’ll take a bit of this but I won’t have that.There is no whole package marketplace unless you happen to go into Opus Dei.That kind of whole life choice stuff just doesn’t work any more.
The ‘priesthood of each believer’ means you’ve lost your professional priesthood, your capacity to control and you’re into a much freer market. The consequences of that, of education being given to our students, means that they are much more discerning consumers, much more aware of alternatives. Previously a choice was made at baptism, confirmation and you were stuck with it for the rest of your life in an unconsidered, kind of repetitive way.
That isn’t the way these consumers operate in any market, including religion.
I think that a secular society is one in which religion and spirituality are out of the control of state and religious organisations. I think that statement describes the society that we are in at the moment.
If we look back through our history, we can see times when one or the other controlled that space, or the space was controlled by a compact between the state and the religious organisations. There might have been a little bit of diversity around the edges – too much diversity and you got burned at the stake! But now, neither the churches or other religious organisations, nor the state have any levers over the religion and spirituality of Australians.
Any notion that some archbishop can do this or that and things will happen leaves most archbishops weeping at night.They can’t.They don’t have that kind of control.
On the other hand, secular does not mean no religious voices in social policy.We’ve got all kinds of religious voices in social policy and they’re making a fair amount of noise.
Secular does not mean irreligious either; a secular society does not give any priority. It is a space that is open for negotiation, contestation – and that is going on now.
The shift from rational to experiential modes of authority is another major cultural shift that is catching religious organisations unawares.You can see three types of authority:
- Tradition; you give authority to the bishop, to the monarch. It’s an hierarchical authority.
- Reason in law, text based, rational, creedal, reasonable.
- Experience; how things feel, wonder,
encounter, charisma. Authority is seen as something you give, not something you have. Bishops may think they have it but it’s really only because we give it to them.
If you happen to be in the Roman Catholic Church, ultimate authority resides in an hierarchical system in which you refer decisions to be made by bishops, archbishops, etc. So too for Anglicans and Presbyterians.
However, the Reformation used reason to argue against bishops and kings – and reason prevailed.
The high water mark for reason would have to be Jesuits and Presbyterians in about 1950 producing highly reasoned forms of religious understanding – volumes of systematic theology, carefully reasoned out – thinking your way to God.
But that that forum is now passing, quite fast, from reason to experience, starting arguably with Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher. Experiential judgment is what people under fifty are going to be using as their basis for making decisions.
When abortion was first beginning to be made legally available in the West,particularly in Australia and the United States, the Presbyterian Church was officially in favour of abortion. It became a reasoned position because it gave the woman control over her body, it limited damage by butchers, there were health reasons, and the legislation went through.
In comes (Leader of the Federal Opposition) Tony Abbot and he says,A hundred thousand abortions in Australia doesn’t feel good.All of a sudden we had an argument within public policy about feeling. All of a sudden the domain had changed, the kind of argumentation had changed.
Time and time again, somebody will walk into your church, synagogue, mosque and walk out again saying, It didn’t feel good. I didn’t have the experience I came for.The experiential mode of deciding is going to be much more dominant in those who are seeking religious services than it was before.
In that shift, we move from altars, to pulpits, to platforms.
The platforms of the Pentecostals these days have sound systems that make most rock bands weep and they’ll give you an experience. Indeed, in the shift from preaching to aerobic Christianity, you’ll certainly go out feeling better – you’ll have moved around, had a good airing.
aerobic Christianity
you’ll certainly go out feeling better
Reading to watching, sitting to moving, books to video screens, concordances to the Internet, permanence to impression – that’s what we’re dealing with in this kind of shift.Whilst preaching is the ultimate of the rational approaches to Christianity, good liturgy is, of course, good experience. But it will be judged by what experience it imparts as opposed to its objective capacity to deliver grace.
Points of experiential contact are changing vis à vis the roles of Sacraments, preaching and religious experiences. People will no longer want you to describe your God… I don’t want to hear about your God. Can I meet your God? Can I have an experience of encounter with the sacred?
This of course connects with pilgrimages and sacred sites and places that are quite marketable.
But dragging people in to hear a boring sermon on a Sunday morning? That doesn’t feel good. My bed feels much better.
Catholics and Anglicans are tied up in a traditional hierarchical authority system but they do have liturgy, which can be a good experience. Redolent with imperial and monarchical imagery, which I must say leaves me giggling half the time, it’s nonetheless fun if you like it.
Another driver of religious change is the changing competitive market.
The rise of secular alternatives has challenged the particular compact the churches had with the society from about 1840 to 1960.There are alternative sources of entertainment.
People my age and a little bit older talk about how the churches were places for dances, movies, social connections. All this happened around churches in suburban Melbourne. But now you’d go to a café or a club. Some would say that’s purifying religion, getting back to the core business. But you’re going to lose a lot of people that came for the social stuff and may have hooked onto religion as a result.
But the critical factor to focus on is this thing called the welfare state.Where the welfare state was full on providing education, health, social services, you get the greatest declines in religious attendance and participation.Where it was not as full on there was much less decline. It’s one strand of explanation for the differences in decline between the USA and the UK. You didn’t need to go and develop that community in order to have access to education, health, welfare and other aspects of social life if the welfare state provided those things.
Now the question is, as governments are winding back the welfare state, will people go back to church? I can see a bunch of my Anglicans friends saying, Oh good they’ll come back to church. But if they went into your church, you’d probably say, Oh, you can help us, as opposed to, Have we got a program for you?
That’s the difference between a resourced church and a dying church. Go into Hillsong* and they’ll say,We’ve got a program for you, you need something, we can help. You go into an average suburban Anglican church in Melbourne and they would not be able to do that.
* Hillsong: a Pentecostalist congregation in Sydney.
Catholics are probably sufficiently resourced as parishes to be able to provide some assistance, certainly with their schools bolted on. But the Protestant mainline churches are no longer able to do what they did from1840 to 1960.
Perhaps, a mega-church model could work, with some kind of personnel and financial resources to develop programs – not only to resource people who might come in looking for something, but actually to build Christians – which takes a little bit more effort than a half-an-hour on a Sunday morning.
So what’s the future looking like?
Further decline for mainstream Protestants. Decline for Roman Catholics. Loss of a Christian majority in every sense, and rear-guard action contesting this space called secular. Some will try to claw back the old days.There will be a fight over symbols as reality recedes.
We’re being beset with ‘dog whistle politics’ all over the place.Within the Anglican Church it’s gay priests and gay relationships – simply inscribing on those people the symbols of difference and using various kinds of symbolic forms to claim to be better, more pure, closer to God, than some others. I call it competitive piety.
As governments are winding back
the welfare state, will people
go back to church?
Secularists, in the form of the Evangelical atheists,have joined the fray.We’ll fight like blazes over having the Lord’s Prayer to open Parliament, or we’ll behave like Denmark, where eighty-five per cent of Danes are confirmed at age seventeen in high school.
In Denmark the bishop comes to the school, which has given them Religious Education, and confirms the lot. They’ve never been in church, they don’t have to go to church except for baptism, marriage, funeral. But suddenly they call themselves Christians. They don’t know what it means – except that they aren’t Muslim.
When the reality is gone,the cymbals start clanging, the noise increases, and so does the chance for rather nasty stuff.That is what is happening as the old compact breaks down and we move into the contestation of the secular space.
None of these drivers are controlled by religion. Nineteenth Century growth was due to Church being tied to nation – Empire. It produced a particular context that was appropriate. It provided an opportunity for combined social service and religious services – but that’s gone.
Are we the sole marketers of
morality?
The 1950s high point was the second rise of the soufflé, as a result of the baby boom. Migration and government policy forcing women out of employment and into domestic life provided a volunteer army of women to do things in the church sphere– but they are no longer there. What is religion’s speciality? What is that core business that some favour?Is it simply saying mass every day and letting the world come or not – that would have a small slice and could operate. But it certainly wouldn’t sustain many suburban churches.
Make a connection with God – but how to make that experiential in the current cultural context is a question.
In New South Wales they’re busy trying to keep secularists from providing a neutral – well they call it neutral
– philosophical basis for morality, as opposed to a religious one.
Do we deal with our competitors by driving them out of the market? Or by ramping up our own capacity to provide our own goods in a way that’s appealing, providing them confidently in a competitive space? That’s the challenge. And how is religion to be offered? When, where, by whom, to whom and who’s gonna pay for it? Those are the questions that we face at this time.
Gary D Bouma is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations Asia Pacific at Monash University, and Associate Priest in the Anglican Parish of St John’s East Malvern in Melbourne
