Honest to God was an intellectual prototype of the socially-engaged, anti-racist, Christian humanism which has become the hallmark of mainline Protestantism. As a fossilized residue of the Sixties, Robinson’s book reveals the symbiotic relationship between theological humanism and other powerful social and political forces then working to destroy anything resembling the völkisch theology associated with German National Socialism.984 The “denazification” program operated not just in Germany but throughout the entire Western world.985 Robinson was riding an officially approved wave of revulsion against the historically-embedded, ethno-religious mythology associated with his own ostensibly national church. In other words, it was no accident that Robinson found inspiration for his secular theology in a trio of “Teutonic mentors,”986 Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer — all of whom possessed impeccably anti-Nazi theological credentials.
All four theologians rejected “religion” as idolatry whenever it locates God in a triune unity of spirit, water, and blood (1 John 5:6–8). In principle, their abstract and ahistorical existential theology stood opposed not just to the National Socialist attempt to unite family, folk, and faith in twentieth century Germany but even to Richard Hooker’s sixteenth century Anglican Commonwealth which fused church, state, and community into a triangular unity.987 In that sense, secular theology triumphed in both church and state in both Australia and the United States. But it was to be a hollow victory. Mainline Protestantism sowed the seeds of its own decline by ripping Christian faith from its organic roots in the composted, historical soil of family and folk. Not surprisingly, the secular slide of mainline Protestantism parallels the fertility crisis in Australian and American families as well as the demographic displacement of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant founding nations — the core constituency of those self-same churches — by the rising tide of third world immigration.
The (Micro-) Family Factor
It seems strange, therefore, that two recent books dealing with the decline of the mainline Protestant churches in Australia both overlook the religious significance of that demographic crisis. Neither Tom Frame nor Roy Williams grasp the vital nexus between Christian faith and either membership in a family or the experience of belonging to a particular ethno-religious group. Both writers locate their own Christian faith in the private spaces provided by the established institutional framework of denominational pluralism. They do recognize and discuss a range of discrete ethical issues related to families. But, at the same time they are at pains to display a respectful tolerance towards those whose faith differs from their own on controversial issues such as pornography, contraception, abortion, divorce, feminism, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and now transgenderism.988 In effect, Christians have succumbed to the subversive “culture of critique” hollowing out family life in this and other Western countries.989 Mainline Protestant denominations need to grasp the connection between contemporary culture wars and declining birth-rates among white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (and white Europeans generally).
Mary Eberstadt, however, sees at least part of the problem. As an established, well-connected, American scholar, Eberstadt is, of course, as reluctant as Frame and Williams to recognize that a cultural war is being waged on Christianity, much less to identify the aggressors in that conflict. Nonetheless, she clarifies the nature of the relationship between family decline and religious decline. She clearly identifies the essential elements of the puzzle posed by secularization: how did a demographic crisis become a problem in practical theology? As a first step toward a solution, she shows that “family decline is not merely the consequence of religious decline,” as Frame and Williams appear to have assumed. Rather, Ebertstadt argues “that family decline in turn helps to power religious decline”. In short, her argument is that fewer people feel a need for religion because fewer people have positive experiences of family life. In effect, “family illiteracy breeds religious illiteracy”.990
The missing element in Frame’s gloomy and William’s more upbeat account of the crisis in mainline Protestantism is therefore what Eberstadt dubs “the Family Factor”. Historians of religious decline, she says, have neglected to consider “the active effect that participation in the family itself appears to have on religious belief and practice”. It is, of course, well-known that evangelical Christians and Mormons tend to have larger families. But scholars usually assume that family formation is a “by-product” of religious belief. Eberstadt assembles considerable evidence suggesting that the causal chain runs in the other direction, “that something about the way that people live in families makes people in those families more inclined to church”.991
If Eberstadt is right, if “something about living in families makes people more receptive to religiosity and the Christian creed,” then strong traditions of family life are essential if any Christian nation is to survive and prosper. She shows that “Christianity needs the family in more ways than one”. Without the family, the Word of God cannot easily be transmitted across generations. Christianity also depends upon “the analogy of the family to tell its most fundamental story, the creation of the Son of God as man”. It is through the family that people experience “that elemental, powerful feeling of connection to the supernatural that is a commonplace of the experience of birth for many parents”. Finally, the health and vitality of churches is “boosted by the similarly powerful desire of mothers and fathers to situate their children in a like-minded moral community”.992 It would seem, therefore, that mainline Protestant churches have a vested interest in reversing the demographic decline of the European-descended peoples who invented Protestantism. They do not appear, however, to act in their own best interest.
Eberstadt does more than mourn the willingness of many Protestant churches to participate in their own downfall by ignoring the Family Factor. She condemns such feckless ignorance as a form of “assisted religious suicide”. Denominational pluralism established a conformist culture of civility. Prizing propriety and politesse as the highest civic virtues, theologically gelded church leaders set out “to construct a Christianity with a kinder, gentler, more inclusive face”.993 To that end, progressives promoted a whole raft of doctrinal changes from acceptance of contraception, then abortion and divorce, to feminism and the embrace of active homosexuality. This entire suite of “reforms” helped to destroy traditions and folkways that once encouraged and supported the formation of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant families. Because the churches wanted to reach out to individuals and groups who sought (or demanded994 ) a softening of Christian doctrine, “the churches inadvertently appear to have failed to protect their base: thriving families whose members would then go on to reproduce both literally and in the figurative sense of handing down their religion”.995
In a sense, Protestant churches are simply reaping what they have sown. Denominational pluralism has engendered an almost wilful blindness among mainline Protestants. Most refuse to recognize the mortal threat to their families, folk, and faith. Such determinedly, self-sacrificial tolerance can take on an almost comical character. In the early Sixties, for example, the Anglican Church of Canada commissioned a prominent author, journalist, and television personality, well-known for his free-thinking agnosticism, to “examine the Church as critically as he wished from the viewpoint of an outsider”.996 In response to that invitation, Pierre Berton produced The Comfortable Pew. This short work anticipated many, if not most of the reforms to Protestant doctrine and practice that came to fruition over the next half-century. It also became an overnight best-seller in both Canada and the United States.
One particularly interesting and significant aspect of The Comfortable Pew is Berton’s respectful use of a famous study in social psychology by Theodor Adorno and his associates entitled The Authoritarian Personality, first published in 1950. Adorno was a prominent member of a radical Jewish intellectual movement known as the Frankfurt School. Given such subversive associations, Adorno might seem an unlikely inspiration
for Berton’s reflections on the state of Christian churches in Canada. But, assisted by gullible goyim such as Berton and his readers (including my younger self), Adorno sowed the seeds of cultural Marxism far and wide during the Sixties.997 Without any mention of Adorno’s Jewish identity, Berton cited with approval his warnings about the “latent fascist tendencies” harboured within Christian churches. Adorno worried that people who blindly accepted their parent’s religion (ascription) were more likely to display prejudice and ethnocentric attitudes than those “who accepted religion independently of parental influence as a result of their own conclusions and decisions”.998 In effect, Adorno helps Berton to persuade Anglican church leaders to weaken the power of religion to act as “social cement”: Christianity could not be permitted to become “an agency of social conformity” promoting “subservience, overadjustment, and ingroup loyalty as an ideology that covers up hatred against the disbeliever, the dissenter, the Jew”.999
It was not just the church that Adorno identified as a potential incubator of fascist attitudes. Kevin MacDonald argues that Adorno’s study of authoritarianism assumed that its origins were “traceable to family interactions and ultimately to the suppression of human nature”. Contraception, abortion, divorce, feminism, homosexuality, and pornography were all means by which individuals could be freed from “authoritarian, ‘sado-masochistic’ family relationships and their putative linkages with bourgeois capitalism and fascism”. And Adorno regarded the links between family life, prejudice, and authoritarianism as a source of danger to out-groups not just in local neighbourhoods but even more importantly on the national level where the family was writ large. Today, like the Frankfurt School radicals, Jewish cultural Marxists still believe that “anti-Semitism is associated with gentile movements for national cohesiveness”.1000 Accordingly, Jewish intellectual, cultural, and political movements have mounted countless relentless campaigns to discourage any and all forms of white Christian ethno-nationalism
The (Macro-) Family Factor
The ongoing campaign to deconstruct the Anglo-Celtic core identity of the Australian nation-state has been a major factor in the decline of mainstream Protestant denominations. Eberstadt’s Family Factor operates powerfully at the macro-level of the ethno-nation (though she does not so much as mention that aspect of the problem). The experience of giving birth to a child engenders an intuitive religiosity within parents in the nuclear family. Similarly, the sense of belonging to a particular people generates an essentially religious spirit of ethno-patriotism. Ethno-national identities draw upon myths of descent which locate the origins of the community in a particular place at a definite time and trace the descent of members to a common ancestor. According to Anthony Smith, ethnic groups are by nature “family-centred”. They “embody the sense of being a large, unique family” in which members are bound together by “the cultural heritage which is their family inheritance”.1001 No wonder then that the apostle Paul told his Athenian audience gathered at a meeting of the Areopagus that God “made every nation of men…so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him” (Acts 17:26–27). As a Jew, Paul had no difficulty in grasping the essential connection between religion and national identity.
Prior to the Sixties, most Australian Anglicans also saw the Christian faith as an essential feature of their ethno-national identity. According to Brian Fletcher, between 1901 and 1962, the Anglican Church “endowed empire, monarchy, and race with a religious sanction”.1002 Many Anglicans rejected the charge that the White Australia Policy was “racist”. They insisted that efforts to preserve Australia’s British identity “rested not on notions of inferiority, but on a recognition of difference”. One Anglican archbishop who had served as a missionary in China declared that “God is the lover of variety in all he has created, and the rich variety of racial types, each with its own special culture, when honoured and consecrated to the Family of Mankind, make one harmonious whole”.1003 In the first half of the twentieth century, many if not most Australian Anglicans laboured long and hard to promote and preserve a proudly British fusion of their ethnic and their religious identities.
Not surprisingly, therefore, when Anglican and other Protestant church leaders joined with Jewish activists in a successful campaign to abolish the White Australia Policy,1004 they effectively detached Christian belief from blood and belonging. The historic Anglo-Australian ethno-nation was forced to express the spiritual dimension of its collective identity outside Christianity or not at all. Once the religious sanction for a white, predominantly British Australia was withdrawn, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants steadily lost interest in the merely “mythological” faith of their forefathers. To all intents and purposes, “English” Christianity became an alien creed. This, in a nutshell, is the story behind the collapse in Christian commitment among the Anglo-Protestant peoples in Australia and New Zealand, as well as in English Canada and the United States.
The ecumenical Protestant movement played a significant role in efforts to “refine” Australian national identity into a modernized, civic nationalism cleansed of its atavistic ethno-religious origins. Ecumenical organizations grew legs in the midst of the Second World War when the United States replaced Britain as the imperial hegemon in Australia. Certainly Australian church leaders were delighted to receive substantial official support from the American government and overseas ecumenical church groups favoured by the State Department. Progressive Protestants looked forward to the post-war construction of a globalist, international order in which the church would “hold fast at all costs to its supra-national character”. Rising above, ethnic particularism, Christians would demonstrate “practically that there is no insuperable barrier to common thinking and common action between men of all colours, all races, and all nations”.1005 It was not long before most Protestant public intellectuals came to espouse this internationalist gospel with the same, if not greater evangelical fervour.
Ernest Burgmann, the outspoken “Red Bishop” of Goulburn, was one of the first to urge Australians “to realise that they were no longer part of a British Empire but of an Asia-Pacific world wherein their destiny was to be found”. Perhaps his German-Irish parentage and isolated bush upbringing left Burgmann without familial or emotional connections to the British race patriotism shared by most Anglo-Australian Protestants before the Second World War. In any case, by war’s end he was campaigning for a civic model of Australian nationalism in which responsibility for national identity was vested exclusively in the central government: “Canberra must become the obvious centre of national culture and development and the governmental heart of a great Commonwealth”.1006 Not long after Burgmann’s death in 1967, the Commonwealth government abandoned the White Australia Policy and entrenched civic nationalism in official policies promoting multiculturalism and prohibiting racial discrimination. By that time, even mainstream Anglicans worried that they might be left behind “as an Anglo-Saxon sect” in a multiracial society. Church leaders therefore quickly resolved to fashion a “new and dynamic national church” open to people of all races and ethnicities.1007
Now, of course, as Roy Williams proudly observes, all Australian churches “sponsor missions and charities overseas, and congregations are updated regularly about their activities”. He also suggests that nominal Christians who give public expression to “racist or xenophobic” attitudes are inward-looking, “religiously (and socially) apathetic,” and morally backward. “I would go this far,” he says, “if you are a racist in the twenty-first century you cannot be a true Christian”. Even William’s own “deeply conservative” Presbyterian Church takes an “impeccably progressive” approach to issues of race.1008
Like the mainline Anglicans and the Uniting Church, Australian Presbyterians extend a warm welcome to large and growing numbers of first- and second-generation Asian immigrants. Indeed, with unconscious irony, Williams remarks that in recent decades an “unusual consensus has developed…between regular churchgoing Christians and
far-Left secularists of activist bent”.1009 In accordance with the civil religion of inter-faith tolerance, Williams grants every Trotskyite splinter group honorary membership in the secularized club of religious denominations. Not even the Anglican Church in Australia seeks to anchor the Christian faith in the particularistic folkways of an Anglo-Australian ethno-nation. Conversely and as a consequence neither the Anglican Church nor its dissenting offshoots any longer inspire a sense of religiosity among the large, partly-inbred, extended family of ordinary Anglo-Australians.
Denominational pluralism has encouraged Australian (and American) Protestants to turn a blind eye to the (ethnic) Family Factor in the decline of their churches. Mainline denominations like to pretend that because ethnicity doesn’t matter to them, it doesn’t matter to anyone else either. For fear of seeming impolite when in mixed company, well-mannered Protestants are also reluctant to raise the thorny theological issues dividing Jews and Christians. They are doubly loath to deal with the irreducibly ethnic nature of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
Conclusion
Such fears of giving offense lead both Williams and Eberstadt (and Frame to a lesser extent) to employ the “Judeo-Christian” meme in an annoyingly repetitive manner, almost like a nervous tic. Williams in particular repeatedly credits “Judaeo-Christianity” with European cultural achievements such as the rule of law or the scientific method in which Jews played little or no part.1010 Embedded within a self-abnegating culture of civility, both Williams and Frame are anxious not just to “cleanse” themselves of their Anglo-Australian ethno-cultural identity but also to repress the traditional teachings of the Church on the Jewish Question.1011 Meanwhile, the denominational pluralism established in the name of Christian tolerance permits Jews to perpetuate their own ethnic solidarity under religious auspices.1012
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