After Christendom: How should we then live?†

* School of Law, University of Queensland. The views expressed in this lecture are, of course, just personal opinions.

***

We in the West are facing a dystopian picture on two fronts: first, in the state of family life, and secondly, in the erosion of our freedoms of speech, religion, association and conscience. What does this mean for how Western Christians should now live?

The changes in attitude towards marriage and family life over the last fifty or so years have had deleterious consequences for children and young people. What has been lost in the embrace of the sexual revolution, no-fault divorce, the acceptance of de facto relationships, and numerous other changes, is the stability of family life. A couple of generations ago, 20% of all children would experience their parents living apart by the time they reached adulthood. Now it is 40%. And as I showed elsewhere,[1] stability matters to children. There is a clear association between adverse mental health and the erosion of family stability. Children suffer through their parents’ conflicts. If we are concerned about the mental health of our children and young people, we need to be concerned about the health of our adult relationships, and particularly the relationship between parents. We need to be better at learning how to deal with conflict, practicing the grace of forgiveness, valuing fidelity, and working through the hard times in marriages. Our children’s mental health is our responsibility.

The second concern is in the erosion of freedoms. I have argued that four freedoms— freedoms of speech, religion, association and conscience—are indivisible.[2] You cannot separate them. Without freedom of speech and association you have no freedom of religion. Without freedom of conscience, a society shows no respect for religion. As I sought to demonstrate in the second lecture, those freedoms are being rapidly eroded. We have never been so free to speak in one sense. Everyone has a megaphone; but we are severely constrained in what we can say by the angry mobs who seek to silence dissenting opinions, by the expansion in the notion of hate speech, by the weaponisation of complaints mechanisms, and other factors. Disproportionately, these impede freedom of religion and the expression of religiously-based points of view.

And so we turn to a fundamental question—at least for Christians, but I think for all people of faith—how should we then live? This is the title of a book, published 45 years ago, by the great Christian writer, Francis Schaeffer, who analysed the cultural trends of his time. It is a question we need to revisit afresh in our post-modern, post-truth and post-marital society.

Christendom is over

First, as Christians, we need to accept our declining power to influence society. We must face new realities. To the extent that the Churches have engaged in cultural battles to preserve Christian values as norms for the broader society, we have lost every battle, sooner or later. In terms of family life, we have seen the emergence of no-fault divorce, the equation of marriage and non-marital cohabitation, and same-sex marriage. In terms of the value of human life, restrictions have been removed on abortion, while increasingly, euthanasia is permitted.

To every claim that people of faith make that x and y should be prohibited or restricted, there is a compelling answer. ‘No-one is compelling you to have an abortion; no-one is compelling you to marry someone of the same sex. If you believe in marriage, good for you; but you must accept the freedom of others to live together outside of marriage.’ These tend to be compelling arguments in the public square against the notion that our religiously-based values should dictate how others live.

This does not mean of course, that we have no arguments to offer in the public square. We can and do argue to protect the defenseless and the vulnerable: the unborn child, the frail elderly woman who feels she is a great burden to her family. We need to continue to argue for the defenseless and the vulnerable, even if our views are unpopular, even if we are attacked for our values and beliefs.

However, we should have a realistic appreciation of our capacity to influence the society around us. We may win some battles, gain some concessions; but we should not be surprised if our society continues to reject Judaeo-Christian values. The tide is still going out on Christendom. Our influence will continue to recede, and the extent to which our laws reflect Christian values and beliefs will continue to diminish. That is in no small part the consequence of our declining numbers. Nominal adherence to a Christian tradition remains quite high in Australia; but it is not reflected in church attendance.[3] Those who pray regularly to the living God and who seek to live by Christian codes of behaviour are only a small fraction of those who will tick that they are Anglican or Catholic on a census form. Christian influence is receding because faith is receding.

It has not been easy for Church leaders to accept the loss of cultural authority and influence. You see this in the United States, where evangelicals have invested so much hope in the appointment of reliably conservative judges[4] like Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. This desire to cling to power, whatever the cost, whatever the collateral damage, is misplaced.[5] To quote Psalm 146:3, we must not put our faith in princes— neither presidents nor judges. Blessed, says the psalmist, are those who trust in the Lord their God.

Determining how then we should live requires us to recognise that many of the influencers in the society around us are increasingly overt in their hostility to faith, increasingly open in trying to shut down points of view with which they disagree, increasingly pushing for laws that restrict or remove religious freedom. If we cannot or will not face those realities, we will find it difficult to cope with change and adversity.

The Benedict Option

In the United States, there has been much lively and productive debate about Rod Dreher’s book, The Benedict Option, published in 2017. Its subtitle is: A strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation.[6] New York Times columnist David Brooks described Rod Dreher’s volume as the most discussed and important religious book of the decade.[7]

Dreher, who is of the Eastern Orthodox faith, sees analogies between our time and the fall of the Roman Empire—the collapse of a civilisation as we know it. He says we are on the losing side of the culture now. We need to see ourselves as a people in exile.

Benedict was born in 480, four years after the last Roman emperor in the Western empire abdicated. Benedict sought how to live for God in a society which had fallen to barbarians. His famous Rule for living a monastic life was about how to order one’s life around the constant pursuit of the Lord.

Dreher argues that as Christians, we have a decision to make. We can continue to live in this post-Christian world as if nothing were wrong, nothing has changed, but risk losing our distinctiveness as Christians. The alternative, he says, is to withdraw to some extent from secular society, building strong communities in which we can be educated and discipled in our faith. If we do this, he says, then we have a chance of surviving, just as Benedict, all those centuries ago, created a means to keep alive the traditions of the faith in the monasteries.

Dreher’s book has been much misunderstood. He does not advocate that we form monasteries or head for the hills. We are called as lay people to live in the world, but if we are to survive in that world we need to spend sufficient time away from it, holding on to what we have been given, building our communal bonds. This, he emphasises, is not a retreat from society. The monasteries that sprang up during Benedict’s lifetime thereafter became repositories for the gospel in local communities. They also taught people about the art of living, which they had forgotten in the barbarian world after Rome collapsed.

Dreher calls for a similar focus on building strong communities of faith to preserve Christian truth and values. He argues that these are the days for building strong arks for the long journey across a sea of night.

Differences between the US and Australian contexts notwithstanding, I agree that in the West, we are seeing a Fall of Rome moment. Of course, when we speak of a ‘moment’, we use that word against the long backdrop of history. Great buildings do not collapse suddenly. Their final demise may be sudden of course, but that collapse tends to be the result of long-standing erosion within—the crumbling of stone, the weakening of weight bearing pillars, and in Australia, the steady feasting of white ants. We are not at the stage where great buildings are collapsing, but the signs of erosion in the fundamental pillars of our society are all around us.

An important sign of that irreversible decay is that the foundational principles of the western tradition, notions of liberty and the rule of law, are under attack from both conservative and progressive factions within our polities.[8] In the United States, fundamental values are being attacked from both the left and the right of politics. The dominant narrative on the left of politics is one of victimisation and oppression, which overall paints a negative view of modern Western civilisation.[9] On the right of politics in the US, there is a profound disconnect between the values that are espoused and the actions of those in power. The right of politics, under the current presidential administration, is trashing almost every value that the Republican Party once believed in.[10] The same is true in other countries, for example Poland.[11]

A society which has few foundational beliefs cannot long remain unchanged.

Turning inwards to turn outwards

Adapting Dreher’s idea of the Benedict Option to the Australian context, I believe we need to turn inwards in order to turn outwards; we need a renewed focus upon strengthening the foundations of our own communities of faith. If it is a withdrawal, then it is a tactical withdrawal only, in order to strengthen those communities to better witness to the God who so loved the world that he sent his only Son.

Rather than the image of the monastery, let me offer another image—that of a city set on a hill that cannot be hidden (Matthew 5:14-16). That is how the Church should be—a visible witness to others of the kingdom of God.

If we are to be that in our day and age, we need to make sure our foundations are strong and secure, to make sure that the city set on a hill is a shining example of what a caring community can be. In terms of family life, that means first of all, working within our communities to support safe, stable and nurturing families.

Re-evangelising the flock

A few years ago, before same-sex marriage was made lawful by decision of the US Supreme Court, I spent a few days in Washington DC talking with people about religious freedom. One of them was a top official of the American Catholic Bishops Conference. I asked him how the Catholic Bishops were responding to the debates on same-sex marriage which were then dividing the nation. He said: ‘we must re-catechise the flock’ about what marriage means and why it is important. By this he meant that the Bishops needed to persuade their own people afresh about Christian teaching on marriage, and win the debate at least amongst their own people.

That debate on same-sex marriage is over now. In Australia, as in America, the nation has chosen its pathway. Churches, mosques and synagogues, as well as those of other faiths, are free to make their own decisions on whether to solemnise a same-sex marriage. We should not be seeking to continue that argument. Christendom is over.

But it is worth thinking about that expression, to re-catechise the flock. To re-catechise is to educate afresh, to persuade believers of the fundamental wisdom of Christian teaching on sex and family relationships. I prefer to say that we need to re-evangelise the flock. This is a task of positive persuasion. It does not involve attacks on anyone, criticisms of anyone’s lifestyle, denigration of same-sex couples, single parents or anyone else. No. It is a positive story we need to tell, good news, not condemnation. As Glynn Harrison has written, we need to tell a better story, why adhering to a Christian understanding of marriage, involving the union of a man and a woman for life to the exclusion of others, offers a pathway to happiness that may well elude those who have abandoned Christian values.[12]

In the past, the way we have taught about family life has involved explaining rules. Rules about sex before marriage, rules about sex outside marriage, rules about the grounds for divorce, rules about same sex relationships.

There are two problems with rules. The first is that the Bible’s teaching is not always all that clear. Take the Bible’s teaching on divorce. Of course, the central message of Jesus is unequivocal. Marriage is intended to be a lifelong commitment. ‘What God has joined together, let no-one separate.’ (Mark 10:9)

But Jesus clearly allowed an exception for adultery. Paul had an exception for desertion by an unbelieving spouse, and anyone working with families will know that there are other situations, particularly continuing domestic violence and child abuse, where maintenance of the marital relationship is quite simply unsafe for one or more of its members.

The second is that a focus on rules emphasises only the negative. We have to persuade, not just to prohibit. Titus 2:10 talks about making the teaching about God our Saviour attractive. We need to find ways afresh to make the teachings of Christ attractive, to show young people in particular why Christian teachings provide such good and important rules for life. Emphasising the prohibitions is part of the story, of course, but perhaps we have done too much of that over the last few centuries, without making Christian teaching about marriage attractive.

As Christians, we have a very good story to tell about the wisdom of Christian teaching; but it involves a paradox—we need to give up in order to gain. To make a commitment to a man or woman for life to the exclusion of others involves a major level of sacrifice. We need to talk about the value of commitment, pushing through the tough times and adverse circumstances, to a time beyond when our relationships will again sail through more tranquil waters. We need to talk about the rewards that come from the discipline of denial.[13]

The evidence of those rewards is there for all to see in the data on the benefits of marriage to happiness and wellbeing. A survey of nearly 10,000 people in 11 countries in North and South America and Europe and including Australia, all of which have a predominantly Christian heritage, found that women in highly religious relationships are about 50% more likely to report that they are strongly satisfied with their sexual relationship than their secular and less religious counterparts. They also have higher satisfaction with their relationships generally.[14]

But we need to put every effort into supporting family relationships to be stable, safe and nurturing. That same survey found that men who were highly religious were not significantly less likely to engage in violence against their partners, or less likely to commit adultery than men who have no religious faith.

So in turning inwards, we need to re-evangelise the flock and to persuade people afresh of the wisdom of Christian teaching. We also need to address relationship destroying behaviour, in particular, violence and abuse.

Turning outwards to support struggling families

A city set on the hill can be a place of refuge for those outside of the city, and a source of sustenance to the needy in the surrounding areas. We do not strengthen the foundations and structures of our city only for our own sake, but for the society around us.

When it comes to family relationships—the stability and nurture which so supports the mental health of children—we have a better story to tell to the community. Churches can take a lead in community education and the support of families going through difficulties. To do this effectively, we need to look for the golden moments in people’s lives when they are open to receiving information and changing the way they view things. One innovative program in the USA that has had some success is the Becoming Parents Program.[15] It was designed for couples who are having their first child together and is based upon the preparation courses that community health centres offer to prepare soon-to-be parents for the process of birth and caring for the newborn child. The program was designed by a nursing expert in Seattle, Dr Pam Jordan. It includes the kind of information that midwives will provide. However, it seeks to go far beyond the traditional program that prepares couples for childbirth. The goal is to prepare them for parenthood and to help strengthen the couple relationship at a time when they are particularly open to information and advice, and seeking to build a long-term family life together.

Local churches can also be involved in supporting struggling families. Nearly thirty years ago now, I was involved in a little Uniting Church congregation in Blaxland, in the Lower Blue Mountains. As a church, we saw the need to reach out to the local community around us, and supported by an initial grant from Wesley Mission, we established the Lower Mountains Family Support Service to support local families who were struggling. Initially, this relied to a considerable extent on volunteers who would provide practical support to single mums, and offer friendship to people in need. It ran workshops, including programs for people going through divorce. Now it is known as Gateway Family Services, and provides support all across the Blue Mountains and Penrith areas.[16] It has 22 staff and over 100 volunteers working with it in various ways.

There is no doubt a multitude of other examples we could cite of the Church in action which involve local churches reaching out to local communities.

This model of local church involvement in meeting community needs is perhaps a different one than the Church has embraced in the past. We have tended to concentrate our social outreach in large welfare organisations, for example, UnitingCare, CatholicCare, Anglicare and BaptistCare. These have done great work, but precisely because of their size and heavy reliance upon government funding, they have struggled to remain overtly Christian. They may also be somewhat disconnected from local churches that seek to reach out to the community around them.

For this reason, these very large welfare organisations, while they do great work, have a limited role to play in this new vision I want to offer of local churches that turn inwards in order to turn outwards. We need new models, new ways of doing things, new initiatives, new inspiration.

Building communities

It is important that we focus our attention on safe, stable and nurturing families, but we need also to find ways to build community, particularly for those who are not in family units. These communities can then better welcome others.

If current marriage rates continue, around 30% of young people in Australia will never marry.[17] Some will form de facto relationships for a period of time; a small number will form same-sex relationships, but in the last census these comprised less than one per cent of all couples.[18] The consequence, putting this all together, is that our local communities will necessarily comprise a lot of people who are single, separated or divorced; not just young adults who have yet to form a marriage partnership—the traditional focus of churches—but people of all ages who are single by choice, single because they have not found a suitable partnership, or single by shipwreck, because for whatever reason, their relationship has crashed onto the rocks.

For many people in this situation, the greatest problem they face is loneliness. To be sure, all of us have a family of origin, but in a highly mobile society, that family may be distant, perhaps on the other side of the world. Loneliness may not be a crushing problem when we are in the midst of busy working lives, but when the busyness of day to day existence recedes, for many that loneliness will be more keenly felt. Christian communities will need to find new ways of including those who are single, but not by choice, in the lives of families. To quote Psalm 68:5-6 (NIV):

A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
is God in his holy dwelling.
God sets the lonely in families.

Religious freedom revisited

It is essential for this new orientation, this way of reaching out to our local communities, that we retain the freedom to be Christian organisations. I would say the same of course, for groups from other faiths in our multicultural society.

The freedom of faith-based organisations to be faith-based organisations is under serious threat in Australia from a misguided and fundamentalist idea of equality.[19] Underlying the campaign against religious exemptions are two dogmatic beliefs. The first is that all limitations on who is eligible to apply for particular jobs should be abolished or severely restricted in the name of (one conceptualisation of) ‘equality’, even if most other jobs in the community are open to that person. This position involves taking a very restrictive approach to ‘genuine occupational requirements’ as a ground for exceptions to general anti discrimination provisions.[20] The second belief is that the only human rights that should be given any real significance are individual ones and not group rights. This can make advocates disregard the competing claims of groups which would justify a right of positive selection of staff in order to enhance the cohesion and identity of a religious or cultural organisation.

The result is a serious threat to faith-based institutions, including Christian schools and welfare organisations. The argument is that all jobs ought to be open to all people, that there should be no discrimination against anyone on the basis of their faith or the lack of it. Advocates for this position concede that a Christian school ought to be able to insist upon having a Christian school principal, if they so wish, and that the Chaplain should be a Christian too; but they cannot understand why the maths teacher needs to be a Christian, or the school counsellor, or the receptionist at the front desk. In other words, they fail to understand how the Christian school is an outworking of Christian community, a visible manifestation of faith.

The threat to religious freedom is real, and serious. In 2010, the Labor government of Victoria enacted the Equal Opportunity Act in such a way as to severely limit the freedom of Christian schools to prefer Christian staff.[21] 

It was overturned by a Coalition government which came into power in 2011; but in 2016, the Andrews government in Victoria tried again. It introduced a Bill to restore the original version of the Act. Mark Sneddon, Executive Director of the Institute of Civil Society, explained some of the difficulties this would create:

[T]he bill undermines the freedom of association of citizens to establish and maintain voluntary associations which express and promote particular views of what is good and right. Those views may be based on ethnic, cultural, religious or political values.[22]

The Bill was a fundamental attack on the freedom of association of religious organisations. Fortunately, it was narrowly defeated in the Upper House; but these attacks on freedom of religion and association will come again. The attacks by a state Labor government on freedom of religion and association, and similar noises being made in the federal party, are a significant reason why so many people of faith, and not just Christians, felt uncomfortable about supporting Labor in the last federal election. Labor’s vote increased significantly in many inner city seats, but went backwards in constituencies with a large number of adherents to a religious faith.[23]

For people of faith, this freedom of association is an existential issue. And it is also an existential issue in terms of what it means to be a multicultural society. As Joel Harrison and I explained in an article[24] a few years ago, anti-discrimination laws have an important role to play in the commons of our national life. There cannot be discrimination in employment, education or other sectors in the areas of our life where we meet on common ground. However, beyond the commons are those ethnic, cultural and religious communities which are so important as places in which people can find community, acceptance and support for their values and beliefs. There is no reason of public policy why a Croatian social club should not prefer to employ Croatians; or an environmental organisation should not insist that all its employees share the beliefs and values of the organisation; or that a Muslim school be entitled to maintain its Islamic culture and ethos by choosing, or preferring, staff who adhere to the Islamic faith.

If we abolish, or severely restrict, freedom of association, then we do much to damage what it means to be a multicultural society; and we reduce the capacity of faith communities to meet the needs of local communities around them in the way I have described. We will not set up organisations to reach out to the poor, or the vulnerable, to care for families who are struggling, to provide support for those who are lonely and isolated, if we cannot do so as Christian organisations expressing the love of Christ through our actions.

And the same freedom of association that is an existential issue for Christians is an issue for Jewish organisations, Muslim organisations, Hindu organisations and others beside. It is critical to having a healthy and successful multicultural society. This is what today’s religious freedom arguments are all about. They are arguments about what it means to live in a harmonious multicultural society.

Conclusion

Comfortable as we are in Australia, wealthy as we are, or at least were before the pandemic hit, and successful as we are in so many ways, we have not chosen wise pathways when it comes to family life. This is reaping a whirlwind of consequences in terms of the mental health and wellbeing of our nation, in particular, our children and young people. We are also experiencing growing, and ever more serious threats to our freedoms—freedom of speech, of association, of religion and of conscience.

It is a different time now, and we must adapt to it, not fearfully, but realistically. We need to accept that we are no longer living in a society sympathetic to the Christian faith. We need to realise that the problems we are seeing in family life are issues also for the churches. We need to re-persuade our flock of the wisdom of Christian teaching on sex and family life while acknowledging and responding to issues such as domestic violence and child abuse. We need to be like a city set on a hill which cannot be hidden, a shining example of a community which supports safe, stable and nurturing families.

This is what Rod Dreher describes as the Benedict Option, but it is not a matter of running to the hills. We need to turn inwards in order to turn outwards, to reach out to our local communities in meeting the variety of needs there are around us; but to do this we have to preserve freedom of association, a right which is threatened by those who have a narrow and deficient understanding of equality.

There is much to be done; but we have enormous capacity, and a God who will empower us to adapt and succeed.

Professor Patrick Parkinson AM is the Academic Dean and Head of School for the T.C. Beirne School of Law at the University of Queensland.

ENDNOTES

[1] P. Parkinson, ‘The erosion of marriage: Family and faith in a multicultural society.’ 2020 New College Lecture Series, Lecture 1, September 22, 2020. Available abc.net.au/religion/ patrick-parkinson-erosion-of-family/12691648

[2] P. Parkinson, ‘The erosion of freedom: Family and faith in a multicultural society.’ 2020 New College Lecture Series, Lecture 2, September 23, 2020. Available www.abc.net.au/ religion/patrick-parkinson-erosion-of-freedom/12711302

[3] mccrindle.com.au/insights/blogarchive/a-demographic-snapshot-of-christianity-and-church-attenders-in-australia (all URLs accessed November 2020).

[4] thewayofimprovement.com/2020/06/16/when-evangelicals- put-their-faith-and-trust-in-presidents-and-supreme-court-justices/

[5] Peter Wehner, ‘The cost of evangelical betrayal’. The Atlantic, July 10, 2020. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/white-evangelicals-gambled-and-lost/613999

[6] Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation (Sentinel, 2019).

[7] David Brooks, ‘The Benedict Option’. New York Times, March 14, 2017. nytimes.com/2017/03/14/opinion/the-benedict-option.html

[8] Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society (Simon & Schuster, 2020).

[9] Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2017).

[10] George Packer, ‘The President is winning his war on American institutions’. The Atlantic, April 2020. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/04/how-to-destroy-a- government/606793

[11] Wojciech Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown (OUP, 2019).

[12] Glynn Harrison, A Better Story: God, sex and human flourishing (IVP, 2017).

[13] The discipline of denial is discussed at length in the 2020 New College Lecture Series, Lecture 1, op. cit.

[14] World Family Map, 2019. An International Report from the Institute of Family Studies and Wheatley Institution. ifstudies. org/ifs-admin/resources/reports/worldfamilymap-2019- 051819final.pdf

[15] www.becomingparents.com

[16] www.gatewayfamilyservices.org.au

[17] See the proportion of 35-39 year olds who had never married in different census periods: Lixia Qu, ‘Families Then and Now: Couple Relationships’ (2020) at aifs.gov.au/publications/couple-relationships. Around 30% had not married at the 2016 census.

[18] ABS 2071.0 - Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia - Stories from the Census, 2016 www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Same-Sex%20Couples~85#:~:text=The%202016%20Census%20counted%20just,first%20became%20available%20in%201996.

[19] P. Parkinson, ‘Christian concerns about an Australian Charter of Rights’. Australian Journal of Human Rights, Vol 15(2), 2010, pp83-121. www6.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/journals/AUJlHRights/2010/4.html

[20] For a discussion see Rex Ahdar & Ian Leigh, Religious Freedom in the Liberal State 2nd ed (Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 10.

[21] Equal Opportunity Amendment Bill 2010 (Vic) Amended Explanatory Memorandum, p43. www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/legis/vic/consol_act/eoa2010250/s1.html

[22] Mark Sneddon, ‘Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Act: Inherent requirements and the problem of discrimination.’ ABC Religion and Ethics website, 22 September, 2016. www.abc.net.au/religion/victorias-equal-opportunity-act-inherent-requirements-and-the-pr/10096504

[23] P. Parkinson, ‘Religious faith and the 2019 federal election’. Freedom for Faith website, 29 May, 2019. https://freedomforfaith.org.au/library/religious-faith-and-the-2019-federal-election

[24] J. Harrison&P. Parkinson, ‘Freedom beyond the commons: Managing the tension between faith and equality in a multicultural society’. Monash University Law Review, Vol 40(2), 2014. www.monash.edu/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0004/232636/harrison-parkinson.pdf