Sydney, Australia - Australians might not be looking for traditional religion as much as a new spirituality. Barney Zwartz reports.
IN A kitchen behind a suburban town hall, about eight volunteers gather daily at 6pm to make soup, sandwiches and cordial, and package them along with cakes, fruit and bread. By 7.30, they are on the road in soup vans, taking food to the homeless and to surrounding boarding houses.
This soup van, run by the St Vincent de Paul Society, or Vinnies, is the responsibility of Annette, who has been a volunteer for six years. Raised a Catholic, the sales administrator now rarely goes to church, but she sees helping as her faith in action. The driver is Bill, also a Catholic, who hasn't been to Mass for 25 years, and helping to carry and serve tonight are Kate, a year 12 student, and Matt, a young IT specialist with a thriving city firm. He's not religious, he just feels lucky and wants to put something back into society.
Annette is matter of fact about the way she relates naturally to men many would consider the detritus of society. "I enjoy doing it. I've known a lot of these guys for a long time, and they like a bit of a chat. They're just people who maybe have been unfortunate or drink too much. It feels as though I'm doing something [useful]."
Melbourne soup van supervisor Leo Holt, also a volunteer, says he has a roster of about 80 people, mostly under 30, and numbers have never been higher. Throughout Sydney and all over the country, volunteers are doing the same, or running refuges for victims of domestic violence or the homeless, or providing counselling, or visiting the sick or prisoners or people in trouble, helping out with food, clothing, furniture and power bills. There's 44,000 such people on the Vinnies books alone.
Although mainstream churches in Australia are struggling, does that mean spiritual commitment is waning, that the nation is becoming more materialistic, selfish and consumerist? It seems not: that faith, broadly defined, plays a more powerful role in people's lives than ever. And one of the main ways it is manifested is in helping others.
The Old Testament's Book of Proverbs says that where there is no vision the people perish, notes Dr John Falzon, the St Vincent de Paul Society's national director, social policy. "That's what I would say, not only on the faith level, but values, more generally. If there isn't a social vision, people have nothing to hang on to or invest themselves into, something bigger than themselves.
"If the dominant discourse is all about accumulating wealth and consuming as conspicuously as possible, then values such as fairness, equity and inclusiveness don't really have a place in the moral economy."
Falzon believes the Federal Government is leading people towards an individualistic vision rather than the older notion of a common good, but despite this Australians have not abandoned their ethic of "a fair go". People are still volunteering, though charities now face competition. Most schools, for example, can no longer function without help from parents, and the economy relies on people who "volunteer" unpaid overtime.
So a mixed message is emerging: institutional religion is in trouble, but not all of it, and faith of one sort or another is driving more Australians than ever.
The 2001 census provides a grim picture for many churches, especially the Anglicans (outside Sydney) and the Uniting Church, the nation's second and third biggest denominations. For example, 3.8 million people identified themselves as Anglican, yet only 178,000 are in church each week, one in three of them over 70. Only one in 10 Uniting Church members worships on Sundays, half of them older than 63. Catholics, at 764,800, provide just over half those in Australian churches each week, but that's only 15 per cent of the nation's 5 million Catholics, and a drop of 13 per cent from 1996.
Gary Bouma, a professor of sociology of religion at Monash University in Melbourne, believes that for many churches the decline is terminal. "Quite frankly, the Anglican churches I look at in Melbourne would have 10 to 15 years of life at the very best before they will all be dead," he says.
Philip Hughes, of the Christian Research Association, says the section of the population attending church dropped from 9.9 per cent in 1996 to 8.8 per cent in 2001, with the once-a-month figure about twice that. Because of the number of attendees over 60, this figure will drop to about 6 per cent over the next 20 years.
A Trinity College theologian, Andrew McGowan, predicts that the place of religion, especially Christianity, will become more marginal. "It often seems to me, as a church historian, that we are running the film backwards from the fourth century, when the church turned itself from a persecuted minority to the imperial religion," he says.
Citing an FM radio station promotion this Easter to find a Jesus look-alike, with the prize a "resurrection weekend" on the Gold Coast, McGowan says there is a casual disrespect today for Christian traditions that Australian society once regarded as worthy of respect. And it's going to get worse.
He regrets this not so much for the church as for the unchurched. "There's a cultural ignorance about religion which is to the detriment of individuals who recognise their need for faith, and impoverishes society as a whole." Such people finding themselves in circumstances where they need to draw on faith are more susceptible to "inauthentic or crass" forms of religion, he says.
Despite all this, church planners and observers are optimistic. "The church is not going away," says Hughes. Many denominations, especially such conservative evangelicals as Pentecostals, Baptists and Sydney Anglicans, are growing.
Bouma, who is also an Anglican priest, is even more positive. "Religious resurgence or revitalisation is happening in Australia, as it is around the world. Those that believe are believing more intensely."
He is dismissive of today's churches. "What gets done in most churches is so intelligence-insulting that people run away from it. Day by day, these people are being challenged intellectually, ethically, morally, but when they go to church are they challenged? No! They are given bland pap by the liberals or issues of sexuality by conservatives," he complains.
But Bouma predicts a grassroots revolution, even in the mega-churches, in which the congregations will lead the leaders where they are not yet ready to go, in a more engaged spirituality that articulates the issues.
McGowan seems a glimmer of hope for failing Anglicans. The diversity of expressions of faith is giving the more traditional forms a glimmer of new life. "There's a growth of interest in traditional spirituality, ritual, images and symbols. That will be an interesting trend to watch. Sometimes it takes one part of the church to revive another." While many churches will close, those that remain will be stronger.
Bob Dixon, chief researcher for the Catholic Church in Australia, detects a fair bit of excitement around parishes today. Inner-city and middle-suburban parishes have a struggle, but churches on the outskirts of Sydney and Melbourne are tremendously vital, he says.
"You need vital, active, intelligent, engaging leadership. It's best when there's a good age spread, and a fringe suburb is ideal for that because you have a lot of people in their high-energy years - young families, children, adults in the mid-20s to 50s.
"Another highly relevant factor for vitality is an ethnic mix. Many new arrivals are highly involved in their churches, and the parish is buzzing because of them. It's a way of making connections - Christianity is a communal religion."
Muslim and Jewish Australia seem confident of their places. Islam is expanding vigorously, both in numbers and engagement. Although most Muslims are not particularly religious according to Waleed Aly, a spokesman for the Islamic Council of Victoria, the second generation is more religious than the first. It's quite common to have secular parents with religious children, Aly says. Part of it is to do with identity: Islam has become so politicised in Western societies that it encourages young Muslims to a more intense identification.
"You can see it happening with kids who are isolated at school. At university they flock to Islamic societies because they find a place they belong. It's very different with Christian kids," Aly says.
"One of the great tragedies of the 'war on terror' phase is that Islam has been reduced from a great world faith to a narrow political ideology, and that robs it of a lot of its richness. So it's utterly unsurprising to get more passionate religiosity among young Muslims."
Rabbi John Levi, the elder statesman of the Melbourne Jewish community, says identity and self-consciousness has deepened in Australian Jewish life. He suggests that a good 90 per cent of Australian Jews, religious or secular, would be involved in some celebration, however unorthodox, of Passover, which began on Wednesday night.
"The community has become much more diverse. There's certainly a search for spirituality, and a certain siege mentality, too. You can't really be Jewish and ignore the fulminating [this week] of the Iranian President … who seems to be determined to be the new pharaoh except he wants to kill everybody, not just the males." (This is a reference to Moses leading the Israelites to escape from Egypt 3500 years ago, which Passover celebrates.)
Synagogues, like churches, face declining attendance, but not declining faith, he says. The old "cathedral synagogues" are in trouble, but the small community ones are flourishing.
Is he worried, like other ethnic communities, about dilution through assimilation and mixed marriages? "We've been worried about it for 2000 years! But in Australia, certainly Melbourne and Sydney, people bring their partners into the community."
Levi says his childhood memories of being Jewish in Melbourne are of a tiny community striving to show it was as good as anyone else. "Today Australian Jewry has matured. It doesn't feel this now. It produces its own museums, cultural life and education, for our own sakes. We have departments of Jewish studies at universities. It's a huge revolution. That's multicultural Australia."
It seems the key to understanding religious trends in Australia is to look well beyond the institutions. As the Anglicare national chairman, Ray Cleary, notes, it's a mistake to draw a parallel between declining church attendance and declining faith. "I find people have a strong commitment to faith but are not too happy with the institutional church," he says, a refrain constantly heard from church and welfare leaders.
Canon Cleary says that while Christianity has no monopoly on morality or justice - Anglicare volunteers include people of other faiths or no faiths - about 70 per cent of volunteers are broadly Christian. Here, faith and works come together, and Australians seem pretty keen on both.
Even the mega-churches, sometimes criticised as comfortable clubs for aspirational Christians, are acutely aware of the social side of the Gospel. Brian Houston, the founder of Hillsong, Australia's largest church with 20,000 members, says 60 per cent of Hillsong's budget is spent on ministry, such as Teen Challenge, helping people fight drug addictions or eating disorders, and community programs.
People want purpose, he says. They want to live their Christianity in a way that goes beyond themselves, they want a Christianity that is not self-indulgent. And Hillsong wants to make them effective.
IN THE end, according to Louise Newman, the director of the NSW Institute of Psychiatrists, faith is essential, whether religious or not. "We are talking about individual systems of belief, meaning, an understanding of human existence that structure personal behaviour and social ideas. These are critical sets of ideas and belief, and are quite independent of church attendance. Many people have clear belief positions, including theistic ones, but might not self-identify as religious," she says.
The postmodern suspicion of meaning can bring emptiness.
"If you look at the rise of Hillsong, what they offer is not just a set of beliefs, they offer a whole lifestyle and social structure, whatever your age. They are creating social structures and meaning."
While such an absolute view can be a concern, today's fragmentation of traditional structures has brought a proliferation of beliefs, some destructive. For some young people, it's fashionable to claim they have no beliefs, which is dangerous and distressing for those who feel a lack of connectedness and meaning, she says.
Like all those the Herald spoke to, Newman doubts that Australia is becoming more selfish. "There are more survival pressures around, and people look after themselves and their family circle. That doesn't mean they have lost their moral sense. In fact there's a great yearning for it. Meaning is the essential connection."