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Sydney Morning Herald Highly spirited Date: 03/01/2001 Despite its materialist veneer, religion is thriving in many different guises in Australia, writes Stephen Crittenden Sometimes I wonder whether the moment can't be too far off when Good Friday and Christmas Day cease being public holidays. Not because of any decline in adherence to the Christian religion, but because the true Australian cathedrals are the shopping malls and the big departments stores, and Australians get agitated when they are locked out of them for even a single day. Still, the truth is that, beneath the secular materialist veneer, Australia continues to be a nation of thriving religious communities and observances. Australians have never been big on institutional religion (the explosion of religious observance in the post-war period was exceptional), but census figures continue to suggest that more than 70 per cent of us continue to identify ourselves with some kind of religious grouping. The Catholic churches in the outer western suburbs of Sydney are bursting at the seams, the Pentecostals are creating a new Bible belt, and the Festival of Light still has the electoral clout needed to keep Fred Nile in the NSW Parliament. Buddhism is apparently the fastest growing religion in Australia, though Hinduism is running close behind and Islam is also growing rapidly. These are all ethnic religions, just as Christianity once was. It's important to understand that Lebanese Muslims or Indian Sikhs aren't evangelising Australia. Their religious traditions are part of the cultural identity these people have brought with them. Meanwhile, the explosion of interest in spirituality continues. The New Age movement probably peaked several years ago, but same-sex couples with cats are quietly pouring over Wiccan cookbooks in kitchens everywhere. Western Buddhism and western Hinduism are also on the rise as more and more young urban professionals seek a psychic haven away from their other lives of competition and high achievement. Indeed, every second person you meet in the inner city seems to be doing yoga or meditation classes. Some people say western Buddhism is a faddish designer religion, to go with the BMW and the beach house on the peninsula. But I sometimes think there might be something about Buddhism that matches the Australian spirit. The changing face of the Catholic Church This year St Mary's Cathedral finally got its long-awaited spires, along with a fine new square outside the main steps. But this is a place for skateboarders to play, not for huge public religious occasions. In many ways institutional Catholicism in Australia appears to be on its knees. The bishops are isolated from a people they once used to lead like Irish princes. The Catholic school system is almost completely laicised. The morale of priests and brothers has been destroyed by sexual-abuse scandals, and Australian presbyteries are heavy with that special gloom that descends on middle-aged men. Between ordinary Australian Catholics and headquarters in Rome the gulf is absolute: the Pope (or Cardinal Ratzinger) doesn't like Australia's democratic openness. In the next decade, the shortage of priests will really begin to bite. It may soon be common to go to Catholic funerals where there is no priest presiding. But the fact is that out in the parishes no-one is panicking. Australian Catholicism at the grassroot is going through a period of exuberant self-examination. Middle-class Catholics can't rely on the hierarchy for intellectual stimulation, so they're reading and talking among themselves. Out in the parishes, people also seem to be well prepared for a more improvised future. And to be fair, this is due in large measure to the realism and hard work of the Australian bishops. The fading Irish influence on Australian society During my lifetime, Australia has stopped being a Little Britain, or a Big Ireland, in the South Seas. Many of us who have long since recognised the decline of Little Britain were much more reluctant to acknowledge the decline of Big Ireland. All the nostalgia of the last decade or so was really a tell-tale sign. It is true that religious affiliation continues to have a mysterious impact on our voting patterns. Statistically, Catholics are still more likely than Anglicans or other Protestants to vote Labor. But the times are rapidly changing. At the 1996 election, 51 per cent of Catholics voted for the Coalition and only 40 per cent voted Labor. Similarly, religious affiliation was not a factor in the republican referendum. In other words, there were a lot of Catholics out there, including presumably Catholics of Irish descent, who voted to keep the monarchy. The New Bible Belt The Pentecostal churches include the Assemblies of God and a bunch of other smaller organisations. This is a religious movement that is thriving because it makes its congregations feel good about themselves. Many Australians are fed-up with the politically correct religious language of "brokenness". In Australia people don't want to think of themselves as broken. They want to be happy and well. This is why the Penties are doing so well in the newer suburbs, in the Hills District of Sydney and south-east Queensland. These are areas where there is a lot of social anxiety, young families with large mortgages and the ever-present fear of unemployment. Many Pentecostal churches are preaching the "prosperity" gospel, but they are also extremely good at providing networks social support for their members. Religion and instability in the Asia-Pacific One of my Catholic friends says that if he could give the Holy Father a single piece of advice about Australia, it would be that he should promote to bishop those priests who are working on mission in Asia and the Pacific because they are the ones we need to lead Australia forward. Australians urgently need to develop what is often a fairly superficial understanding of the role religion plays in the politics of our region. In the past couple of years, Australia has woken to the uncomfortable realisation that the near future in our region is going to be far more volatile than previously expected. We are also beginning to realise that religion is driving many of the political events in the region, whether it be the Methodist coup in Fiji, or Islamic separatism in Indonesia and the southern Philippines. Only a couple of weeks ago, Islamic law (sharia) was introduced in the Indonesian province of Acheh. The Governor-General as spiritual leader Religion is largely a private matter in Australia. The kind of overt public displays of religiosity that American politicians go in for would make the Australian electorate most uncomfortable. This is why William Deane is so interesting. At the height of our shock at the Port Arthur massacre he went on the radio, recognising that this was one of those occasions when the Australian people needed more than mere counselling; they needed spiritual guidance. Intuitively, and in a supremely tactful way, he has in fact become something of a spiritual leader, a kind of national chief mourner. He was there after those young Australian hikers were swept away in Switzerland, and he has quietly led the nation forward on reconciliation. Some people complain that the Governor-General is a bit of a "super Catholic", but Deane is perhaps the first religious leader we have had who - because he doesn't speak from within any specific religious institution, or on behalf of any particular faith group - seems able to reach out to all Australians. In doing so he has opened up a very small, but nonetheless very interesting space for public religious expression in Australia. Australians suddenly seem very prone to extravagant outpourings of emotion in the face of tragedy and death. But maybe religion in Australia isn't such a private matter after all. Has anyone noticed that Australians no longer seem to be stoics who are embarrassed by strong displays of emotion? Perhaps encouraged by the media, we suddenly seem prone to very public outpourings of emotion in the face of death or sudden tragedy. Think of Port Arthur, or Childers, or the deaths of Weary Dunlop, Victor Chang, Fred Hollows and Andrew Olle. Sometimes we seem to be mourning for ourselves, as with the gigantic outpouring that accompanied the death of Princess Diana. We have lost our trust in institutions and put our trust in heroes, and when those heroes die our grief is all the stronger. The Sydney Olympics and civil religion in Australia Religion is about a whole lot more than going to church or to the mosque. It is about our collective imaginings, what they tell us about ourselves, and how they bind us together. Civil religion is about the collective imaginings that bind us together as a community, a people, a nation. Civil religion is the kind of religion I'm most interested in, and I'm beginning to think Australians may have a latent genius for it. Over the past half-decade, Anzac Day has been getting bigger and bigger. This year 30,000 people crowded into Martin Place for the dawn service. Australians love to turn out for group events. We do crowds extremely well. Whatever the reason, it seems we yearn to feel feel united and to experience community. The Sydney Olympics was the second games of the modern era whose opening ceremony was a kind of religious liturgy. The other was Berlin in 1936. In 1936, the Germans were having a national conversation with themselves - about who they were and what they wanted to be - while the rest of the world looked on. Here in Sydney we did the same. One big difference, of course, in that the Nazi monologue was based on racial exclusion, whereas the Australian monologue was based on racial inclusion. This demonstrates that we are finally learning that we don't have to experience our Australianness as a kind of fear. The indigenous component in the early part of the opening ceremony came within reach of being high art. It also confirmed that we are beginning to see a marked shift in the kind of indigenous imagery we're responding to, a shift towards the coastal imagery of the far north, the world of the Bangara dance company and Christine Anu (My Island Home is perhaps the true national anthem of a new generation). Here is Australia as a Garden of Earthly Delights, a place of surf breaking on reef, of mangroves and giant flowers and exotic fish. It seems the Australian natural religion may not just be a religion of the sun, or a religion of the earth, but also a religion of the sea. This wasn't lost on Americans watching the Olympics on TV. Speaking on ABC Radio National's Late Night Live, David Books, senior editor of The Weekly Standard, said that Americans had begun to see Australia "as a very spiritual country, a country with a spiritual connection to the ocean. Lots of pictures of misty-eyed Aussies looking out at the sea.a spiritual, very communal nirvana". Reconciliation This is why the reconciliation movement is far more than just something for the chattering classes even though there's still a long way to go before those crowds on the Harbour Bridge translate into an electoral majority. White Australians do feel an intensely spiritual connection with this place. We want to belong here. We want to be natives, too. This is why in the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics we were acting out a future in which indigenous Australians are not only visible, but tribal elders for the entire nation. Australians are yearning for community. That is the true lesson of the opening ceremony and of those magical two weeks back in September. They gave us a glimpse of Australia as a spiritual home that we can all share, and reminded us of the utopian social experiment that Australia can yet be. 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Title: article [long]: religion/reconciliation/race
