Christianity In Anglo-America And Australasia Research Paper

1. Historical Considerations

From the outset, we should not underestimate the extent to which Anglo religious life continues to be fundamentally shaped by two historical realities, first, a Protestant background, and thus a theological heritage of resistance to religious authority and, second, a common experience and trajectory in the encounter of religion and modernity in the West. Obviously the two are closely related. The Protestant Reformation unleashed religious energies previously contained in medieval Catholicism and loosened the hold of ascriptive loyalties, thereby giving rise to greater autonomy of the individual in matters of faith and morals. Greater religious choice was accompanied by an elaboration of religious forms and styles, or a further working out generally of what is often referred to as the ‘voluntary principle’ within Protestantism. This principle is most pronounced in the United States, but elsewhere with Anglo influence, even in England itself, religious establishments have functioned in the modern period in an environment of considerable individual freedom. Protestantism has both given shape to, and been shaped by, high levels of individual freedom. In fact, three quite distinct historical waves of Protestant dissent legitimizing greater individual autonomy may be identified: first, the Calvinist movements; second, the Methodist revivals; and more recently, the Pentecostals. As David Martin observes (1978), the three religious waves correspond to shifting, ever-widening spheres of social influence. Unlike the Calvinists who were limited mainly to social elites, the Methodists empowered working-class and middle-income populations, and the Pentecostals reached still lower social strata, and did so–and still does–in places and contexts often beyond the reach of the other two. For all three, the emphasis on the individual, on education and hard work, and on taking charge of one’s life and making the most of it resulted in upward mobility, and with that, a re-focusing of theology and moral principles giving greater weight to the role of an individual’s choice and conscience.

The encounter with modernity in the West led to a wide array of consequences, but most notably, to a loosening of the binding character of tradition and memory and an increased awareness of religious pluralism. Both of these mesh well with the mounting importance of individual autonomy and reliance upon personal choice as articulated religiously. With all this came foundational shifts, or what Peter Berger (1979) describes as a ‘loss of ontological certainty.’ Broadly speaking, the challenges to religious authority and increased pluralism ushered in an era of greater negotiation in matters of faith and commitment in the face of a widening array of choices. As the term ‘secularization’ is often used, it is much too encompassing and glosses over the nuances of religion’s encounter with modernity to adequately describe what happens in this situation, but suffice it to say that the latter as a historical and increasingly global process, creates ruptures in shared religious views and forces upon ordinary people a posture of cognitive bargaining. Organized religion’s monopoly over religious and spiritual questions is easily undermined. Religion’s presence in the public arena undergoes a qualitative shift. For our purposes here, what is important is not just the parallels between Protestant influence and religion’s encounter with the Enlightenment but the fact that, as Berger and many other commentators point out, Protestantism has confronted the modern situation longer and to a greater extent probably than any other religious tradition. That of course is rapidly changing in the contemporary world where no religious tradition can insulate itself from the pluralizing and individualizing trends. Yet for this very reason, the mainline Protestant experience is important and indeed paradigmatic of what other religions are now facing. Indeed, the fate of Protestantism in the modern West is what people of other faith traditions are quick to notice and worry about as perhaps their own. What they see are deep internal strains within the tradition and disputes between liberal progressives, on the one hand, and conservative traditionalists, on the other, over moral and religious principles and how to forge responsible religious styles in the contemporary world.

Having said all this, it is not necessarily the case that ‘Protestant’ translates to ‘Anglo’ and certainly not that Anglo faith traditions can claim any superiority in their responses to modern life. The spiritual malaise that has currently fallen upon the historic, so-called ‘mainline’ Protestant institutions throughout much of Anglo-America and Australasia augurs against any such claim of superiority. Nor is there any necessary presumption that other faith traditions must inevitably follow the Protestant trajectory in its confrontation with modernity; there are multiple passages and courses of development. Even to argue that the Protestant experience, given its strong Anglo connections, is paradigmatic for other religious traditions is to risk the charge that this is still another, albeit subtle claim to hegemony—alongside a history of racism, sexism, and capitalist exploitation. But we need not draw this latter inference, especially considering the visible, widespread examples of ‘Protestantization’ within other faith traditions, presumably the choice of conscious believers from within those traditions. Rather, we should look to the various countries described in this research paper as case studies in which to describe Anglo religious trends, and to examine how these old Protestant establishments view themselves and extent to which they still define and shape religious life within their environments. Writing some 30 years ago, sociologist Charles H. Anderson 1970 observed that ‘The decline of the white Protestant majority and of white Protestant hegemony in twentieth century America has encouraged the growth of self-conscious Protestant community’ (1970, p. 3). It is an observation about religious identity which applies, in varying degrees, to Anglo-Saxon populations in all the daughter societies of England, and thus a good reason why we should take a close look at these societies.

2. United States

We look first at the United States. It is the prime example of a country with a strong Protestant legacy where the religious norms of individualism are now widely diffused and where the historic, so-called mainline Protestant denominations are mired in a deep spiritual malaise. Some would argue that the United States is the society that has undergone the greatest impact with modernity, that in many respects its beliefs and values are highly secular, or more precisely, that religion in this country is secularized ‘from within,’ and thus a model of sorts of what to expect in the modern world. Yet, as is commonly observed, by almost any standard of comparison the United States remains distinctive among modern nations given its high levels of church-going and religious membership. Despite significant shifts in religious styles, levels of religious participation for the country as a whole have not greatly changed over the past four decades. Protestant values encouraging the responsible practice of faith on the part of ordinary believers, and not just by religious elites or by politicians seeking votes, remains deeply ingrained in its public life.

It is widely accepted that the religious distinctiveness of the United States is explained by ‘supply-side’ thinking, that is, by a history of separation of church and state (the heritage of ‘voluntarism’) and a culture encouraging innovative, competitive religious leaders to gather followers around them and to organize new churches. Innovation in recruitment methods, in developing new organizations, and in the framing of religious messages coincides with a culture that stresses rational choices on the part of individuals. The fact that so many Americans ‘switch’ religious affiliations and move in and out of religious organizations frequently underscores a high level of choice and social accommodation. Indeed, there is much to support the rational-choice perspective on individuals and their religious affiliations and styles. In religion, as with the mass marketing of goods and services of all kinds, Americans respond to skillful packaging and presentation of the product. ‘Selling God’ is taken for granted in an economically-driven culture as the selling of anything else, despite the fact that preachers, priests, and rabbis often resist any notion that theirs is a message that in any way would or should be sold.

But there are other considerations involved in accounting for religious trends and dynamics in the United States. An important example is the downward spiral of the ‘old-line’ Protestant churches, some of them with histories dating to colonial times. It is much too massive a restructuring of American religious life to explain simply by the rise of televangelism or the use of any other innovative techniques for recruiting. Episcopalians, Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ (formerly, the Congregationalists), the Disciples of Christ, and the United Methodists all began to lose members in the mid-1960s and have continued to do so in the intervening years. The declines appear to be slowing down and may possibly be bottoming out, but the fact is that this switch in fate for these culturally established churches—made up largely of white, middle-class, Anglo types—came so suddenly and involved religious organizations so strikingly different in theological heritage and polity could only signal something deeply troubling in the culture at large. To begin with, the low and declining birth rates (well below the replacement level) finally caught up with these churches. The birth rates were already lower than for other traditions, but after the birth control pill became available to the public the rates dropped even further—indeed, so low that many of these churches in the late 1960s and 1970s had so few teenagers they could not provide very effective programming. A ‘generation gap’ emerged as large numbers of the post-World War II generation effectively dropped out of active involvement. In fact, the best predictor of declines in these churches were the diminished church school enrollments 10 years earlier: fewer children were brought up in the churches, beginning in the early 1960s, which later translated into significant declines in worship attendance and financial contributions. The decade of the 1960s was itself an important turning point in a broader cultural sense. John F. Kennedy was elected the first Roman Catholic president, an event significant symbolically to a Protestant sensibility and its fears of losing power and influence. The antiestablishment ethos of that period brought on by the struggles over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and gender role and family changes likewise made for a distinct change of mood and outlook, working against those religious institutions that had long been closely identified with the mainstream values.

It is sometimes said that these old Anglo institutions have depleted their theological resources, that the problem is one of ‘tired blood.’ Certainly the institutions do suffer from a loss of energy and direction and for a long time have ridden on inherited cultural capital. The shift in demographics was itself not inconsequential: the size of the Protestant majority steadily decreased in the twentieth century, as did the ethnic consciousness and identity underlying many of the Protestant communities. Anglo populations and cultures generally feel the squeeze resulting from growing Hispanic and non-Christian faiths. Yet despite the erosions of consciousness and institutions, in a very real sense these churches triumphed to a degree within the culture: many of their goals arising out of the Social Gospel movement were achieved and, more to a theological point, the Protestant principle about believing for yourself and taking responsibility for your actions long inculcated within these traditions now emerged in, admittedly, a far more radical and liberated form. In the 1960s and 1970s, young people—many of them nominally Protestant—turned inward and explored religious alternatives; they sought after experiential faith in a more direct, intimate sense than they had usually found in the dry rituals of the established churches; they felt free to create their own personal collages of belief drawing from a variety of sources and traditions, and worried less about theological consistency and more about the deeper meanings of whatever beliefs they held. Words like ‘soul’ and ‘spiritual’ which in the 1950s had all but disappeared in public discourse now returned with excitement. In this and so many other ways, signs pointed to a spiritual ferment which in its early phases that was not so much opposed to religion as alienated from existing bourgeois religious forms, and increasingly so for many college-educated, middle-class youth.

With the declines of the older religious institutions came other developments that point to major restructuring of American religion. One is the deep cleavage between liberals and conservatives, the latter having been rejuvenated in its crusades to restore a Christian society along the lines as defined by evangelicals and fundamentalists. Since the 1970s the latter have grown often picking up dropouts and dissidents from the oldline Protestant churches, and not without subtle appeals often—in the most conservative sectors—to reclaim an older, Anglo-based moral and religious order. While the thesis of a ‘culture war’ is easily overstated, there is much tension and occasionally overt conflict over unresolved issues like abortion, homosexuality, and prayer in public schools. Such disputes arise out of seriously conflicting, indeed incommensurate, notions of moral and religious authority—whether out of humanistic conceptions of the self and metaphorical views about truth in search of personal truth and happiness or literal interpretations of Biblical authority and a monarchical view of a transcendent God who commands people to obedience.

A second and related development is the rise of a full-blown spiritual quest culture that now permeates much of the nation’s population—among mainline Protestants who find their own rituals and worship services in need of rejuvenation, among many ‘seeker-minded’ evangelicals who know very little about Christian tradition but are eager to adapt faith to their needs and concerns, and among secularists who turn to New Age religions (or more broadly, the ‘New Spirituality’) in search of inner truth and enlightenment (Roof 1999). This quest culture drives some Protestants to rediscover and reclaim their heritages; for the great majority, it seems to raise their levels of spiritual sensitivity more than their actual commitments to institutions. At present, there is considerable exploration not just of what was once called ‘alternative religions’ but of psychological teachings and inspirational literature, often of a rather generic quality; much influence of popular television programs and films that address spiritual themes directly, and many new entrepreneurs operating in the religious marketplace offering their versions of spiritual wisdom, holistic thinking, and mind-cure. In fact, many people who are interested in the New Spirituality have no difficulties acknowledging a Protestant past, which means that large numbers of Americans today combine old religious identities and new spiritual sensitivities with great ease, and in ways that appear to be personally rejuvenating but which to their grandparents would no doubt be incomprehensible.

3. Canada

Similar patterns of post-World War II Protestant decline are evident in Canada, despite the fact that the religious situation is very different in that country. Canada is historically less pluralistic, though that is now rapidly changing, and much more shaped historically by the presence of two large religious constituencies, Catholic and Protestant, each vying with one another for power and influence. Catholics have long been numerous in Lower Canada and the Protestants, especially Anglicans and Scotch Presbyterians, are sizable in Upper Canada. For the country as a whole, Protestants for a long time numbered more than Roman Catholics. But as of the national census in 1991, Roman Catholics, benefitting from a higher birth rate, edged above them with roughly 12,500,000 members, concentrated largely in Quebec. The United Church of Christ (a merger in 1925 of Congregationalists, Methodists, and some Presbyterians) is the next largest at approximately 2,000,000 members, concentrated in Ontario and Prairies; the Anglicans (plus the Orthodox) have substantial numbers, around one million. Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Pentecostals, and assorted other conservative Protestants are the next largest groups, most of them below a million members each. Birth rates for Mormons, the Salvation Army, and for conservative Protestant groups generally are higher than for the more established Protestant denominations.

But the fate of Protestantism in Canada differs in some important respects compared with the United States. Mainline Protestants have suffered membership declines there, losing both to the conservative churches and to Roman Catholic parishes. Proportionately they have lost more to Catholicism than is probably the case in the United States where just the opposite pattern appears to be more prominent—that is, somewhat greater losses to the religious conservatives. Statistically this is what one would expect: the larger the competing population, the greater the likelihood of mainline Protestants switching in, as a result of marriage or by religious choice. The conservative religious presence in Canada is neither as well-institutionalized nor as publicly visible as in its neighbor to the South. Sociologist Reginald W. Bibby (1993) argues in fact that the alleged recent growth of conservative Protestantism in Canada is largely a misperception, more really a ‘circulation of the saints,’ or movement from one evangelical church to another, than a case really of active and successful recruitment from other churches. Protestants on the whole, and conservative Protestants in particular, tend to be converted over and over again—as a result of social and geographic mobility, marriage, divorce, friendship patterns, preference for religious leaders, and congregational activities. Bibby’s research suggests some slight increase in the recruitment of outsiders into the conservative fold over the past two decades, but even with these increases the actual number of converts remains small.

Overall, levels of religious participation in Canada are moderate—higher than those of most European countries but lower than found in the United States. Conservative Protestants have higher levels of weekly worship attendance than other Protestants and Roman Catholics, but because of their relatively small size proportionately and tendency to circulate among themselves their impact is not as widely felt as in the United States. The liberal–conservative cleavage within Protestantism is certainly evident, but the ‘culturewar’ infrastructure in Canada is weaker than in the United States, and therefore less of structural feature within the society. The conservative-moralist flavor of evangelical Protestantism never had sway over Canadians in the way historically it did, and to some extent still does, in the United States. Of greater significance is the influence of the New Spirituality which functions less as a separate enclave than to permeate religious communities of all kinds, and especially the more moderate-to-liberal communities. Again, to quote Bibby, Canadians are very much into ‘religion a la carte.’ Or, as he explains, ‘New Age religion seems to follow the pattern of most new entries into the Canadian religion market, offering consumers optional item that can be added to more conventional religious beliefs and practices’ (Bibby 1993, p. 52). It is not clear whether this is more true in Canada than in the United States; in both countries great numbers of people interested in New Age and metaphysical thought continue to identify, to a considerable extent, with an inherited faith tradition—as Protestant or Roman Catholic. This represents a major convergence for the two countries in the adaptation of religion to modernity. In both of these highly individualized settings, religion is not so much abandoned in some strict sense as it is privatized and modified to fit into people’s life-situations at any given time.

4. Australasia

The very term ‘Australasia’ signals a confrontation and mixing of cultures, of East and West, a term quite fitting to both of our remaining countries, Australia and New Zealand. Both countries have a heritage of European settlements and Anglo dominance over aboriginal cultures, with the practices and structures of that heritage reflected in their social institutions. Both countries know the tensions arising out of an expanding religious pluralism, brought on largely by successive waves of new migrants. Both are often described as increasingly secular societies, especially in political and civic life.

Yet there are significant differences. Australia has seen fewer new religions or even new versions of older religions than has New Zealand. Religious history for the former is more a telling of stories about a European past unlike for the latter where such stories are shaped more by local conditions and cultural and religious admixtures. Even Anglican church history differs. In Australia, the Anglican Church began as a convict church served by chaplains for whites, whereas in New Zealand, the Anglican Church was at first, and for a long time afterwards, a Maori aboriginal church served by missionaries. It was not until the mid-1800s that the Pakeha, or white Anglicans, began to outnumber the Maoris. The Maori Ratana and Ringatu faiths are two examples of New Zealand’s popular mixing of religious and cultural themes, combining aboriginal and Christian elements. This difference between the two countries need not be exaggerated, but it does register in religious and spiritual styles.

Australia’s religious profile today is as follows: Roman Catholics, 27 percent; Anglicans, 22 percent; Presbyterians, Methodists, and Uniting Church, 13 percent; other Christian, 11 percent; other Religions, 3 percent; no religion or not stated, 23 percent. The Catholic ascendency over Anglicans emerged about 50 years ago. The old, well-established religious communities—the Anglicans, the Uniting Church, the Presbyterians, and Lutherans—have all suffered declines in absolute numbers during the past two decades. The Christian or Christian-derived groups growing include the Pentecostals, Oriental Christian, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Mormons. Non-Christian groups rapidly increasing but still relatively small proportionately are Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims, representing the latest of migrating populations into Australia. The greatest change in religious identification since World War II, and particularly among those who were born in this period, is the increase in people having ‘no religion’ or choosing not to state a religion in the national census. Since the 1970s this population has doubled. Likewise, religious attendance has declined in most of the churches while, somewhat paradoxically, stated interest in spiritual well-being appears to have increased.

In New Zealand, the Anglicans remain the largest single constituency considering that both the Pakeha and the Maoris are included. Roman Catholics are the next largest population, followed by Presbyterians with a continuing, strong Scottish heritage. About 50 percent of the population identify with one of the major Christian churches; by contrast, the evangelicals and Pentecostals appear not to have had as much success in recruiting in New Zealand as they have in Australia. Recent migrant religious communities are growing but are infinitesimal in size compared with all others. There have been substantial declines in religious affiliation and congregational involvement since World War II, especially for major churches, and mostly as a result of trends among younger whites. A third of the population currently report having ‘no religion’ or object to stating what it is. That the white and non-white populations are on somewhat different religious trajectories is apparent, evident most in the Anglo trends toward reduced organizational involvement; for the Maoris with their folk traditions and close spiritual attachments to the environment, organizational participation was never held up as a religious norm in quite the same way it was for Anglos.

Both Australia and New Zealand have experienced enormous changes in the past half-century, as they evolved from being made up predominately of villages and tribes to becoming more urban and multicultural in character. Religion has lost much of its power to integrate life experiences and has become one among many life-worlds in which people may or may not participate. Anglo religious traditions have suffered in the process. There, as elsewhere in modern societies, we observe greater eclecticism and pragmatism. However, compared with Canada, and even more so with the United States, two things stand out making the religious responses to modernity in Australasia different: one is that fundamentalism seems to attract fewer people and offers less of a viable alternative, and the second is there is less movement generally from one faith tradition to another, the more common movement being simply to leave organized religion in favor of ‘no religion.’

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