Australian Christians and their history

This is a small rant about Australian Christians and their disconnection with their own history. It's a rant because so many assumptions are made on the basis of no information, and because how we see our history determines how we make decisions and live now. What we think of what happened form our 'blinkers' in the here and now. It's always good to know you are wearing blinkers and what they are.

But so many of us don't. We think...

1. That Australia has no Christian heritage to speak of, buying the very successful lie propagated by Manning Clark and others who have crafted Australian history to suit their secular or actively non-Christian agendas. The story of Australia is peppered with many people who were Christian and have a profound impact on the shaping of the nation. David Jones (of department store fame) was an active Christian, for example, and had an impact on society beyond merely economic stimulation. If you take the Christian data into account with the secular data, you bump into Christians all over the place, having an impact on all kinds of sectors in the development of Australia.

2. That Australian Christianity has never done anything. This is frankly ridiculous. If you have a society (as Australian society was in the early 19th Century), which is populated by a bunch of unmotivated, drunk, immoral people, you don't have a healthy society because nobody gives a damn about anyone else and there are no reliable structures which enable society to function well. The one group which consistently challenged this ethos were the Christians. If they hadn't challenged society and put their money where their mouth was and made changes to how society ran, lobbying Britain and sometimes just making changes, it is hard to see how Australia could have been healthy enough to start expanding and developing in the mid-19th century.

3. That Australian Christianity was so tied to the state that it lacked any possibility of impact on society. The only way you can run this argument is by ignoring people like Richard Johnson. Yes, he was a 'government employee' chosen by the Evangelical Anglicans in England. He was supposed to be paid, get a cow (for his family), a church and given various rights within the colony. He wasn't. He built his own house and church, grew his own crops, and got stones thrown at him as he walked down the street. One of the governors marched his soldiers out during his sermons each week. Why? Because he preached the gospel and spoke out against the immorality he saw damaging the people in early NSW. He also taught people how to read and thought Aboriginal people should be treated with dignity, even to the point of volunteering himself as a hostage in an early negotiation between the Aboriginal people and the English.
Sure there were other 'state employees' who did do a fairly dreadful job of preaching the Gospel and probably didn't even believe it. But to dismiss someone like Johnson (and later Marsden and others) is to deny evidence which refutes the conclusion that the state church hindered the work of the Gospel in the colony. Further, the absence of Johnson in the early colony would have rendered the colony without any Christian witness at all.

4. That there are no Australian heroes or heroines. Hopefully Johnson's example has already questioned this, but part of the problem with this is that we don't invest in Australian Church History. Our records are appalling. A basic introductory text on Australian Church History only stays in print for about 3 years and has a small run. Most of them are written by Anglo-Catholics or Liberals with a strong desire to negate evidence of Evangelical presence or impact in Australia. And primary source material has less hope of ever being published. So, we simply don't know very much about the missionaries on the goldfields, the bush preachers (inspired by Spurgeon), the men and women who started churches in the middle of nowhere, the ministers of some of the key denominations in some of the capital cities - the evidence for this is destroyed, lost, locked up in a library somewhere. Who knows what is really there? In America, it would be published. But we don't publish and buy what we don't value. And we don't value our Christian heritage because we refuse to believe it exists.

End of rant. It's hardly going to change anyone's mind, but it made me feel better.