By David Gushee
Sometimes the best way to understand one’s own culture is to leave it, which I have done to teach a course this week at Morling College, a fine Baptist institution here in metropolitan Sydney.
My most unexpected task here is to speak to a Sydney Baptist church group about a new proposal being circulated for the primary schools of this state, New South Wales (NSW).
NSW primary schools currently offer one hour of “Special Religious Education” (SRE) per week. Most of these are taught as Bible classes and are led by Christian leaders. You heard it right: In secular Australia, the Bible is taught from an explicitly Christian perspective every week during regular hours in the public schools. Students participate in these classes unless their parents explicitly opt them out. Students who opt out just sit quietly in another room. The current approach clearly favors Christian faith.
The NSW government now proposes a new option. This alternative course would deal with contemporary ethical issues such as lying, animal abuse, nature, character, and fairness, and would introduce various moral theories. The course would not be taught from a Christian perspective.
Among NSW residents are many quite conservative Christians, most of whom have met the ethics-education proposal with apprehension. They fear it will eventually lead to the abandonment of religious education in the schools. Alternatively, they fear it will eventually lead to the pluralizing of the weekly SRE timeslot to meet the demands of Australia’s other religious groups. They fear that this new course will teach bad ethics because it will not be taught from a theistic or Christian viewpoint. Perhaps most importantly, they fear that the proposal symbolizes — and will help to advance — the fading of Christian influence in Australia.
Sound familiar, anyone?
It is actually quite surprising to me that SRE still exists here and that Christians have held a monopoly so far. Rapid religious and worldview pluralization in Australia means that, inevitably, secularists and people of other faiths will demand either abolition of SRE or pluralization of SRE to reflect the real pluralism of the society. Christians in Australia will probably have to decide whether they would rather have a “naked” public square stripped of any religion/ethics classes or a “plural” public square filled with a diverse variety of classes.
The broader issue has to do with Christian mission in a post-Christendom era. Throughout Western culture, the success of Christian mission meant that entire societies (or strong majorities) embraced the Christian gospel. State officials and laws have enshrined Christian religion and morality in public institutions, symbols and rhetoric. The state and the Christian church together were viewed as the guardians of Christian civilization.
Since the Enlightenment, however, Western societies gradually have come to reject the gospel — beginning with their intellectual elites and gradually trickling down to much of the society. But laws change more slowly than societies do. So Australia still has this vestige of a Christendom-based law long after the time in which most Australians believed in Christ.
In the United States, where conservative Christians attempt to mobilize political power to fight off the impact of secularization, they can sometimes win short-term victories if they organize well. But, because so many in the society simply do not accept our faith anymore, these short-term victories come at a long-term cost. We are seen as “shoving our faith down the throats” of those who do not want it. Thirty years of U.S. culture-war fighting have actually inflamed negative attitudes toward Christianity and hurt our mission. Australian Christians face a similar dilemma.
We face a choice between using our remaining political power to win occasional “rear-guard” policy victories versus offering a non-coercive evangelistic witness. Many younger Christians are shifting towards an infiltrative social-change-and-service strategy rather than a public-policy-mobilization strategy that wins small victories at such great costs.
The basic problem is the same in Australia as in the United States: The historic favoring of a Christian perspective emerged from a society that wanted that favoring. If the society no longer wants it, our efforts to hold onto it inevitably will be seen as coercive and will eventually fail as our numbers in society drop. And successful mission is the only way to arrest the statistical decline.
I will urge my audience to remember that God is sovereign no matter what anyone may believe or do; that one hour a week of religious instruction for a child in school is not nearly as important as 168 hours of his or her parents’ lived Christian integrity; that Christian witness can never be destroyed by a government’s actions; and that God commissioned the church, not the state, to go into all the world and preach the gospel.
We’ll see how that goes!