Evangelical crusades and revivals have been with Australians since before the Gold Rush. They focussed on simple pragmatic doctrines balanced by a fervour for community harmony and service. Evangelists were often gifted with more charisma than formal education, and understood the plight of their congregations. Billy Graham entered Australia with the same properties, but his style led to a new flavour of Evangelicalism that will be the key characteristic for Evangelicalism in that century and the next. Graham’s works had earned him many devotees in North America, and arrived down under with a large capital outlay to produce large musical and dramatic events in our capital cities, that drew unusually large crowds (Breward, 1988: 77). With Graham came the idea that the spectacle is as important as the message.
Graham’s crusade, like other evangelistic pursuits to follow, was worded in the language of new media of the period, television. Schofield Clark (2003: 30) notes the four main tenets of Evangelicalism are:
- That humans are in need to salvation
- That Christians are charged with bringing others to the faith
- That the Bible is free of errors and must be understood literally, and
- The Rapture will mark the end of days, vindicating the plight of believers.
As television became the dominant form of mass media in Western culture, the late twentieth century saw both religious and secular polities increasingly submissive to its discursive structure. Television was, as it still is, a medium packed with stories of good versus evil, where even journalism shows contain a narrative and ritual structure that is filled with drama. The Evangelical Gospel found a comfortable place among the messages beamed into homes of this period.
Australian broadcasting regulations of the 1960s onwards allowed a space for religious programming, even if it were just among the screening of commercials. Mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches lacked a voice of authority for the new media environment, and struggled with how to approach it ethically and structurally. The Christian Television Association was developed to deal with these issues on the behalf of the major denominations, and became a well-known Christian presence in Australian television, until regulations were relaxed in the 1990s, making Christian broadcasts more expensive, having to compete for air-time in the same way as other community and commercial organisations. Now the newly named Christian Television Australia focuses its resources on a digital channel, with rarely run special programmes on free-to-air.
It seems now that the once-small Evangelical Christian voice is the great winner in Australian broadcasting deregulation. Its energies are not wasted by the strict authority regimes and ethical debates that confronted the mainstream churches (Lehikoinen, 2003: 165-166). American televangelism, such as the ministries of Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Marilyn Hickey and Benny Hinn, had enough resources to buy air time on Australian television. Their common message was the Bible is given directly by God and so must be read with a literal eye, that prayer brings rewards to the true believer, who is persecuted by a secular world unprotected from Satan’s influence, and is called to bring moral regeneration until the end of days, which are imminent. Though a very marginal Christian worldview, the rituals contained within the television programming, together with the ritual acts adopted by its consumers, helped legitimate the religious identity of viewers as part of a global movement. (Alexander, 1994: 3-5).
Evangelical Christianity has, since Billy Graham, been seen as a rapidly growing movement with a strong successful voice in Australian society, to the shame of Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism. Television has helped, not just by carrying the message, but by reinforcing the shape of the Australian religious milieu as a market, where religious identity is built by consumption, and where the success of an organisation is dependent, albeit somewhat, on the marketability of its products. This is indeed the basis of criticism of Australia’s “megachurches”, such as Hillsong in Sydney and Adelaide’s Paradise Church, labelled by some in the emerging church movement as more akin to businesses than religious communities.
Television is not the only transforming force of changes in Australia’s Christian landscape in the mid and late twentieth century. While ecumenical activities engaged dialogue between established denominations with increasing fervour, political debates asked Christians to take sides, producing divides within denominational structures. Whatever differences divided Christians into Catholics and Protestants would become less important than those that defined a “left-wing” and a “right-wing”, or a Liberal versus a Conservative Christian.
The Second Vatican Council spanned three years and involved two Popes, ending in 1965. It changed the face of the Roman Catholic Church, opening its doors to alternative methods of theological inquiry, greater freedoms of expression for congregational brothers and sisters, and interest in inter-denominational and inter-faith dialogue. In response to its global power, Catholics in Australia found a seat in the Australian Council of Churches (now known as the National Council of Church in Australia) and involvement in joint theological training organisations, such as the United Faculty of Theology and the Melbourne College of Divinity. Economic prosperity, social mobility, free education and urban sprawl since the 1950s closed distances between Catholics and Protestants in both geography and class. Pure Catholic families were growing at a slower rate, inter-denominational marriages were becoming normal. (Breward, 1993: 67)
But one Papal Encyclical would cause a disagreement among Catholics, creating a divide that is not yet resolved. Humanae Vitae, subtitled “On The Regulation Of Birth” was written by Pope Paul VI and released in 1968, reaffirming traditional teaching and unequivocally condemning contraception and abortion. Many Catholics began to question the infallibility of the Papacy, and clergy met those confessing to the sin of using contraception with acknowledgment that it was a matter of personal conscience (Breward, 1988: 73).
In Australia as in other parts of the world, political movements evoked responses by Christians that separated them from others. They would include the anti-war movement and feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalism and the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Wuthnow (1989: 32-34) describes the distinction between pro and con among believers as arising out of a perceived gap between political values and behaviour. The Liberals attacked the behaviour of government while the Conservatives critiqued values. Conservatives wanted out of political involvement, focussing more on changing personal beliefs, while Liberals saw this was not enough for the Church’s witness to the world.
Generations in this half of the century had grown more educated than those before, and had allowed themselves to question the authority of their denominational patriarchs. Not surprising then, that 1963 saw the peak of participation in traditional religious communities in Australia. The Death of God movement of the 1960s, informed by the works of Barth and Bonhoeffer, led in part by the 1963 publication of Honest to God, written by John Robinson, then Anglican Bishop of Woolwich, criticised contemporary Christian theology and claimed that while traditional images of God were absent in the secular world, a sense of the sacred can no longer be found among the cloisters of the Church (Altizer and Hamilton, 1966: 28-36, 39). Instead, the Christian way of life should be found by leaving the church and into secular life. Radical liberal groups, including the Australian Student Christian Movement, claimed the failure of Australia’s mainline churches to listen to and speak to the world (Breward, 1993: 169).
While Liberal Christians laid their attacks on the Church for distancing itself from society, in later decades radical Conservatives set their aim for governments. Organisations such as Catch the Fire Ministries and the Australian Prayer Networks did well to catch the attention of state and federal politicians in their claims for a presence of Christian spirit and fervour in the running of the country. Some Christians organised themselves into political parties, calling for Australia’s moral and spiritual renewal, and a return to “family values”. Such parties include Family First and the Christian Democratic Party. Due partly to the strong presence of Evangelical churches in mainstream media, prominent politicians have found in them a support for a conservative agenda, not least the country’s previous Prime Minister, the Hon John Howard, and Treasurer, the Hon Peter Costello. Mainstream news media has responded to politicians’ interest in these groups, to turn their own attention to religious debates happening in denominations and the impact on Australian life. The place of religion in political life, especially in the face of a growing Muslim immigrant and refugee population, and terrorism post-9/11, is a popular article for consideration by any radio or television news program.
It is growing apparent that Australians define the Christian identity less by their involvement in a denomination and more by their stance on a variety of political, religious and social issues, like abortion, sexual morality, the ordination of women and homosexuals, stem-cell research and our responsibility to the environment. People draw from a large market of sources for resources to form religious identity, outside their local religious community and its parent denominational authority. These views are still dividing people within traditional institutional structures and encouraging alliances among previously separated groups.
