By Barney Zwartz
RELIGION
God is Good for You
Greg Sheridan
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
God is Good for You. By Greg Sheridan.
Five of our past six Prime Ministers, as well as Prime Minister-in-waiting Bill Shorten, have been men who claimed a strong Christian faith that has guided their values if not their political decision-making.
John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull are among a slew of politicians who confide in journalist Greg Sheridan in his God is Good for You (Scott Morrison's ascent came too late), along with Andrew Hastie, Penny Wong, Mike Baird, Kristina Keneally, Kim Beazley, Peter Costello and others.
It is fascinating to see how they believe faith shaped them, each in different but important ways. Sheridan asks each whether they pray, producing revealing answers.
Baring their souls in this way, even carefully, takes courage, as it does for Sheridan himself who goes deep into his own Catholic formation and faith. It takes courage because although people with religious convictions are statistically over-represented in Parliament they are under-represented in the media who report on them, and faith is increasingly unfashionable.
Sheridan notes that Australia is on the cusp of becoming, if it is not already, a majority atheist nation (although agnostic would be more accurate), and that will bring profound change.
Human beings are formed in a culture, and a culture without God will form different human beings. The loss of Christianity and religion will change us in ways we cannot imagine, and that prospect is one he finds deeply disturbing. We have a lot to lose.
Yet although there is certainly rising hostility to religion, indifference and ignorance are far more prevalent – Christianity has lost its hold on the culture, for many reasons from clergy sex abuse to affluence. As Sheridan laments, "it's wrong to reject Christianity without having any idea of what it is actually saying. That's what the West is in the process of doing now."
Christians themselves have an ever-shallower understanding, with many relapsing into what American writer Rod Dreher calls moralistic therapeutic deism. This holds that there is a God, but he exists to solve your problems and make you happy, a therapist who murmurs that, "really, you are a very, very special person".
This is very much a journalist's book, which is both its strength and weakness. The strength is that it is highly accessible, engagingly told, intelligent, with a fine journalist's ability to set the scene by way of anecdotes and illustrations. It is full of astute observations. Any journalist is as good as his sources, and Sheridan's are impressive – he has read and discussed widely. The weakness is an occasional tendency to skate across the surface when there could have been more reflection on the ramifications of what he is saying. There is also a certain self-indulgence, when Sheridan occasionally follows his interests rather than the logic of the argument.
He moves from a semi-conventional apologetic in the introduction to a discussion of why the new atheists are "false prophets", the Judaeo-Christian contribution to civilisation, an honest admission of Christianity's problems, such as suffering and the sins of Christians, then a fascinating discursus into the Old Testament, particularly the books of Ruth and Jonah.
The second part moves from Christianity to Christians: the politicians, new trends that Sheridan believes offer hope and opportunity, and accounts of individual Australian Christians whose stories he finds instructive.
He concludes, rightly, that the more Christianity loses its social cachet, the purer and stronger it will become, recovering the contrast from broader society of the early centuries. "Christians in the West now live in exile. They have been banished from Christendom, however imperfect and unsatisfactory Christendom was when it existed. Their situation is perplexing, full or paradox …"
Sheridan writes that the Christian movements that display most life have three particular features. First is intense, passionate belief by their leadership. Second is "willingness and ability to communicate vigorously, unapologetically, and with great self-confidence, a coherent, central message". Third is "expression and worship which is humanly intelligible and which also suggests the moral beauty of its teachings through the aesthetic beauty of their expressions". Faith's future is as a "bold minority".
Barney Zwartz is a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity and was religion editor of The Age from 2002 to 2013.