Dissident Dispatches
Page 53
Ethnicity is not irrelevant to religion for Jews. Cuddihy explains how secularization has enabled Jews to use “the religious identification label as a means of perpetuating the terminal value of ethnic solidarity”. Among Jews “religious” institutions are supported because in a gentile society they are a necessary façade behind which “the more fundamental — and, to the Jew, more ‘religious’ — community nexus of common ethnicity” can be maintained, as it were, in secret.1013 Not only do Jews seek to maintain the unity of family, folk, and faith, their scholars frankly reject the myth of a unitary Judeo-Christian tradition.1014 Judaism as a “religion” did not exist prior to the advent of Christ. In fact, the Jewish religion did not take on its present Talmudic identity until several centuries later. Indeed, in the first century AD, “Judaism” signified not a religious creed but the open advocacy of Judean ethnic interests.1015
Simple realism should drive Christians to recognize that Jews are demonstrably a socially cohesive population group or race with a fused ethno-religious identity. They also possess a more or less conscious, group evolutionary strategy to protect and advance their particularistic needs and interests.1016 The failure of mainline Protestant denominations to recognize that reality amounts to unilateral moral disarmament in the sometimes-harsh world of inter-ethnic resource competition. Meaning, value, and purpose are always among the most important spiritual resources at stake in the ancient and continuing ethno-theological struggles between Jews and Christians.
In Australia these days, such ethno-religious conflicts do not typically involve the use of physical force in tactical manoeuvres. Rather postmodern religious wars proceed on a strategic and moral level in which Australian Jews have been on the offensive while Protestant churches sit empty and idle. Jews clearly play a leading role in fostering the ever-multiplying, anti-Christian coalitions which have successfully demoralized mainline Protestant denominations. Enjoying positions of considerable influence in the media, academia, and law, Jews have used their networking skills to promote a socially corrosive culture of critique. Believing that such a project is “good for the Jews,” they have gone a long way towards the deconstruction of traditional family life, religious faith, and the Anglo-Celtic core identity of this once Christian nation.1017
Until Protestant church leaders summon up the courage to acknowledge that they are in a cultural war against real enemies, their congregations will continue on the slow slide towards oblivion. So far, they have shirked the sacred duty to fight for the collective soul of the Anglo-Australian nation. If Jews are free to seek and, perhaps, to find God in the “depths” of their own ethno-religious history, why must explicitly ethno-religious Christian churches be shunned and reviled as an affront to common decency? The Anglo-Australian people have been disowned by their own religious leaders. However unjustly, they now suffer the consequences: demographic decline and spiritual decay.
9: Postscript: It’s a Womanist’s World!
The final assignment topic for THL 231 Christianity in Australian Church History was described as follows:
What were the reasons for the decline of mainline Christian denominations from the 1960s onwards?
Rationale
This assignment is designed to assess your understanding of how religious life in Australia has been shaped by historical developments.
Marking criteria
• demonstrate a grasp of major issues in the development of Australian communities in a specified time period
• demonstrate an understanding of the impact of major historical developments on religious life in twentieth century Australia
• demonstrate an ability to obtain, evaluate, synthesise and organise information from a range of texts
• demonstrate an ability to communicate information effectively in written mode, using logical analysis and argument
Grade
In writing my paper I sought to show that the decline of mainline Christian (especially Protestant) denominations from the Sixties onwards was the product of a complex, ongoing historical process already at work not just in Australia but also in England, Canada, and the United States. For example, in all of those countries, long-term cultural and demographic changes which came to fruition in the “denominational pluralism” of the post-war period established the essential preconditions for the theological revolution of the Sixties. The lecturer in Australian church history, Dr Patricia Curthoys, took a more restrictive view of the topic. She insists that the reasons for the current decline of mainline Christianity must be identified by reference to post-Sixties developments. Accordingly, in grading my paper, she made repeated, brief, usually one-word marginal notes throughout the body of the essay dismissing this or that passage as irrelevant to the topic.
The most substantive of these comments came in response to my suggestion that the nineteenth century English writer, John Westlake, anticipated the trend-line of religious developments in late twentieth century Australia. There she remarks, “I don’t know whether I agree with your argument here, Drew. I don’t actually think the current decline is directly part of any long-term process; that is, I think there are specific reasons for it which arose out of the specific circumstances of the 1960s”. Surely, however, the whole point of studying history is to determine whether and how the specific circumstances prevailing in a particular place or period have been shaped by “any long-term process”. In employing that approach, I implicitly invoked the warrant provided by Dr Curthoys’ own stated marking criteria which explicitly encourage students to consider “the impact of major historical developments on religious life in twentieth century Australia”. Can it be that the specific circumstances of the Sixties impacted on Australian religious life in a historical, geopolitical, and spiritual vacuum? How can one explain the pivotal significance of any one decade in the history of Christianity in Australia without placing the period in its historical, ethno-religious, and civilizational context?
In her final comment on the essay, Dr Curthoys offers this answer:
Unfortunately, Drew, extensive reading and more than double the prescribed word count/ length do not always result in stronger essays. The suggested word count length is both a guide and a discipline to the sort of essay I wanted you to write — a fairly short, tightly argued one in response to the essay question. While described in the subject outline at one point as topics, the essay questions are, in fact, not topics to be expounded upon, but questions to be answered, in the light of your reading.
Not only is your essay far too long, Drew, but much of it is irrelevant to the essay question — the 19th century history of religion in Australia, much of the American references, the biblically based criticisms of Robinson, etc. — there was just not enough room in an essay of 2500 words for this material. You needed to focus much more directly on the post-1960s period.
As well, your essay becomes increasingly polemical, culminating in remarks in your conclusion which are not only historically inaccurate, in the Australian context, but verge on appearing anti-Semitic.
CREDIT 39/60 Patricia Curthoys
Once again, I leave it to readers to judge whether Dr Curthoys’ critique is fair and reasonable. I must, of course, plead guilty to the charge of having exceeded the word limit. In mitigation, I merely observe that other lecturers at UTC appear to tolerate excessive word counts if the result makes for an interesting read.
Dr Curthoys’ veiled accusation of anti-Semitism is much more interesting. Here she reveals her bedrock allegiance to disingenuous white liberalism. Clearly, she is keen to minimize the ethno-religious significance of Jews and Judaism. In an earlier comment, she took issue with my suggestion that from the Sixties onwards, in both Australia and the USA, Jews have been ranked among the three major religious denominations (along with Protestants and Catholics). Her criticism: “I don’t think it is accurate to describe Judaism as a majority religion in the Australian context”. Now, of course, everyone knows that Jews in Australia are a r
elatively small ethnic minority. They therefore lack the raw numbers necessary to establish Judaism as a “majority” religion. But Dr Curthoys’ acute discomfort with a student paper that might possibly “verge on appearing anti-Semitic” is in itself evidence that Jews in Australia have been major beneficiaries of the culture of tolerance associated with denominational pluralism.
Jews now punch far above their demographic weight for precisely the reasons identified by John Murray Cuddihy. Protestants and Catholics employ the Judeo-Christian meme as a linguistic ritual acknowledging Talmudic Judaism as the putative elder brother of Christianity. Judaism now enjoys (and expects, given the theology of the Holocaust) recognition alongside Protestants and Catholics as a religious denomination of world-historical significance. Such a status is not altogether consonant with the ancient etymology of the word “Judaism” (Ioudaismos). In the first centuries before and after the advent of Jesus Christ the word was used only rarely and never to denote the religion, culture or legal system of the Judean people. Ioυδαϊσμός was not used as “a general term for ‘Judaism’ but rather [signified] a certain kind of activity over against a pull in another, foreign direction”.1018 In other words, “Judaism” was the linguistic by-product of a Jewish resistance movement, a form of ethnic activism set in opposition to both cultural Hellenism and Roman imperial rule (and later to the nascent Christian movement). It retains that character in our own time. But in a pluralistic, secular society lacking a national church, Judaism presents itself as a religion, all the better to legitimate the collective identity and particularistic ethnic interests of all Jews, religious and secular alike.
Dr Curthoys prefers to ignore any suggestion that Judaism serves Jewish ethnic interests. She, therefore, makes no effort to deny that Jews have been major players in the transnational culture of critique. Dr Curthoys is not alone in that form of learned ignorance. Most Christian theologians and church historians reflexively reject as a vile, anti-Semitic canard any suggestion that Jews or Judaism have subverted the spiritual foundations of Christian societies. Small wonder then that writers such as Tom Frame and Roy Williams pay no attention to the role of Jews (in the media, law, politics, and academia) in the decline of the mainline Christian denominations from the Sixties onwards. In the rarefied realm of academic theology, the culture of critique and the inter-denominational culture of tolerance are now two sides of the same coin.
Jewish women have been massively over-represented in the intellectual leadership of the modern feminist movement. Accordingly, feminism has been a major medium through which the culture of critique was introduced into theological discourse. Jewish feminism had as just one of its malign consequences the vicious circle of demographic decline and spiritual decay. Shulamith Firestone was one Jewish feminist who actively promoted such an outcome. In her well-known book, The Dialectic of Sex she fondly recalled a friend who likened childbirth to “shitting a pumpkin” when the author “inquired about the Great-Experience-You’re-Missing”. Firestone took it as axiomatic that “[t]he heart of woman’s oppression is her child-bearing and child-rearing role”.1019 Like Firestone, Dr Curthoys casually dismisses “[really?]” the idea that the experience of giving birth to a child engenders an intuitive religiosity within parents in a nuclear family. Similarly my reference to the religious spirit of patriotism generated within the large, partly-inbred, extended family constituted by an ethnic group is met with another snide parenthetical “[really?]” from Dr Curthoys. To the extent that feminist theology, generally, shares such anti-natalist attitudes, it must contribute to pandemic family decline and spiritual collapse in Australia and elsewhere.
Spiritually speaking, the post-modern divinity school is a womanist’s world. My experience at UTC in Parramatta and St Mark’s College in Canberra suggests that women (and non-white) students and teachers serve as ideological commissars, policing the boundaries of acceptable discourse in and outside the classroom. WASP men studying or teaching theology are probably no less concerned than women to repress racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism but they appear to be marginally more open to a well-constructed ethno-theological critique of the conventional academic wisdom.
Prior to this academic year, none of my lecturers in theology were women. But in 2015 three out of the four units I studied were taught by women. All are WASPs and avowed feminists. As such, they appear singularly resistant to deviant theological ideas emanating from the dissident reactionary or racialist right. They have been captured by the cult of the Other. Typically, therefore, they ritually affirm the profoundly spiritual character of group identity among Jews and other non-white peoples while denouncing any suggestion that Christianity is the ancestral blood faith of the European peoples and must so remain if those nations are to survive.
The spiritual gynocracy presently reigning over the mainline Protestant denominations has become a major obstacle to the reconstruction of Christian nationhood. If Jesus were alive and teaching theology today, he would encounter the historical Satan not just in the ancient form of the Jewish Question but first and foremost in the morally malleable guise of the modern “liberated” woman. Modern Christian men, the theologically-emasculated disciples of the last Adam, abdicated lordship over the modern Eve. Soon afterward the serpentine Other slithered in to work his wily ways upon the feckless feminists left holding sway over the moral high ground in progressive Protestant churches and their de-mythologized theological seminaries.
God help us!
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