Australia is now a largely secular society with a declining rate of regular churchgoing. However, the Christian religion continues to influence many areas of public and private life. Phrases, words and images derived from the Bible – such as Good Samaritan, thirty pieces of silver and walking on water – can be heard in ordinary conversation, and former prime minister John Howard called his political autobiography Lazarus Rising. Meredith Lake’s book surveys the changing place of the Bible in Australian life since European colonization began in 1788 up to the present. It is, she demonstrates, a rich and surprising history.
For historians of Anglicanism this work is significant. Because self-described Anglicans were until the 1980s the largest religious denomination in Australia, embracing a cross-section of the population, the history of the Bible in Australia is closely intertwined with the history of Anglicanism. Anglican churches, which were located in almost every community, conveyed the Bible through public reading and preaching to a large section of the Australian population, and Anglicans interacted with the Bible in the diverse ways recounted in this book. Scholars outside Australia will find much here that will stimulate and enlarge their thinking.
Lake uses a wide-angled lens. She sees the Bible as having come to Australia in three ‘guises’: the globalizing Bible, the theological Bible and the cultural Bible. The globalizing Bible is the Bible that was brought to Australia from Britain, as part of the process of colonization, with all the cultural assumptions and associations this embodied. The theological Bible is the Bible of the Church, theologians, preachers and people of faith: those who regard it as revealing or containing the Word of God and the path of salvation. The cultural Bible has been the Bible for those who may have no firm religious beliefs but who see it as a great piece of literature and moral teaching, fundamental to the shaping of Western civilization. Lake is attuned to these secular uses of the Bible. The three streams have interacted and each of them has had an impact on Australian society.
Drawing upon an impressive range of sources, Lake shows how Christians in Australia have interpreted the Bible in many different ways; no interpretation has been uncontested. Since the late eighteenth century the Bible has been invoked (for example) to justify and explain European migration and settlement and also the subduing of the environment. It inspired charitable and philanthropic work, gave a vision and a moral language to those who sought to combat injustice and reform society, was used to instil morality into the young, provided justification for war (and for pacifism) and hope and consolation to those who had lost family and friends in armed conflicts. It was called upon to endorse divergent visions of the ideal society, from socialism – appealing to the ethical teachings of Jesus – to one based upon individual responsibility, ‘home’ and family. Since the 1970s it has inspired some Indigenous Australians to become political activists, to promote Aboriginal rights and forge a distinctively Indigenous spirituality and theology grounded in their own cultures. The grammars and vocabularies of Indigenous languages compiled by early missionaries have enabled the modern revival of languages that otherwise would have disappeared.
The place of the Bible in Australian life has fluctuated. Until the 1960s the majority of Australians described themselves at the census as adhering to a religious denomination and expected clergy to read passages from the Bible at their marriages and funerals. Probably the majority of households owned a Bible, even if it was rarely opened, and had some acquaintance with its stories and teachings. The peak of its influence in both public and private spheres was during the second half of the nineteenth century. During the last fifty years, however, as a result of cultural shifts and changed patterns of migration, Australia has become more secular. Regular churchgoing has declined, a rising proportion of the population claims to have no religion, and for many young people – despite innovative repackaging of the Bible in ways that might resonate with groups outside the Church – the Bible is almost unknown.
However, a narrative of decline, Lake shows, does not do justice to the evidence. The Bible continues to have a creative presence in Australia’s cultural landscape. Artists, musicians and writers with no particular religious beliefs have found themselves drawn to biblical subjects and imagery, their imaginations stirred by biblical stories and the moral wisdom they express. Biblical scholarship has been invigorated by a new wave of scholars who seek to interpret the biblical text drawing upon feminist, ecological and liberation frameworks.
Inevitably in a book that covers so much ground, there are areas that might have been examined in greater depth.
One is the place of the Bible among Roman Catholics, who comprised one in five of the Australian population, before the Second Vatican Council. The Bible was not part of Catholic culture in the same way that it was among the Anglican-Protestant majority. Catholics heard extracts from the gospels read (in English from the pulpit after the liturgical reading in Latin) at Mass, and some Catholic schoolchildren had a Bible History textbook that contained selected stories from the Old and New Testaments with illustrations. The clergy, however, did not encourage private reading of the Bible because of its Protestant associations, and before the 1960s few Catholic families owned a copy.
A second area is the use of the Bible in the public defence of traditional morality and in opposition to the social and liberation movements that emerged in the late 1960s. Conservative Christians felt threatened and fought back. Some claimed that because Australia was a ‘Christian country’ its laws should reflect the moral laws of God as revealed in the Bible. In 1977, for example, the synod of the Anglican diocese of Sydney expressed its opinion that ‘the present laws in New South Wales against homosexual behaviour are not unjust inasmuch as they reflect the Creator’s prohibition of homosexual acts which is so strongly expressed in His Holy Word’. As society changed, assertions such as this ceased to persuade much of the population. The next generation of conservative Christian campaigners did not invoke the Bible in the same way and in public debates on ethical and social issues they are now more likely to use evidence and arguments based upon secular sources.
Lake has done an outstanding job in exploring the cultural significance of the Bible in Australia and the ways it has shaped Australian life. The Bible in Australia offers a serious challenge to an influential interpretation of the history of Australia: one that sees Christianity as important for individuals but uncreative and peripheral to the main concerns of society. Lake also shows how the sacred text of Christianity can inform ideas and inspire action far beyond the boundaries of the Church that claims to control it.
