- FECA
Fellowship of Evangelical Churches of Australia
- JRH
Journal of Religious History
- NYPS
Nazarene Young People's Society
‘to a number of people [the Church of the Nazarene] … is just another “queer” sect from over the pacific [sic] … So far, any mention I have made of [it]… has not been received on the whole with a great deal of pleasure … I am endeavouring to break down the idea that it is not just the starting of another sect but the introduction of a Church here that God can use … for the propagation of … holiness’.Footnote 1
When North American Wesleyan-Holiness Churches began to arrive in Australia in the years immediately following the Second World War, they faced considerable opposition from Australian Christians who, to some extent, resented American influence on the religious scene.Footnote 2 During the war, minority religious groups, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, with beliefs that disallowed bearing arms in defence of the state, were declared illegal.Footnote 3 There were limits to how welcoming Australians in general would be of Americans. P. L. Beals notes that ‘the Sydney people rose up and [refused] their large city hall’ to ‘Judge’ Rutherford, the leader of the Jehovah's Witness organisation. This was one American who was a little too much for them.Footnote 4 The activity of these groups may also have led to suspicion towards the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches which allowed their members to take the position of conscientious objection on religious grounds, unpopular in the immediate post-war years.
A moderate Reformed theology has historically been the most influential element in Australian evangelical Christianity. It has been the theology of the influential Anglican diocese of Sydney, of many Baptists, as well as of the more conservative evangelicals in the Presbyterian Church. The strength of this tradition has sometimes been expressed in a decidedly anti-Arminian way and for this reason, among fellow evangelicals, the Holiness Churches have been seen as theologically suspect. David Bebbington sees the debate between Calvinists and Arminians in Britain as ‘dying down’ by the early nineteenth century, partly on the basis of a desire among evangelicals to set aside differences of less importance and work together in evangelistic work.Footnote 5 Certainly evangelicalism cannot be seen as entirely dominated by Calvinism, and the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition remained a distinct tradition within evangelicalism, although to some extent set apart by a distinctive doctrine and discipline.Footnote 6 Whatever may have been the case in the previous century, Holiness church leaders in the 1940s certainly saw Australian evangelicalism as dominated by Calvinism, with its insistence on the irresistibility of grace and a ‘once-saved-always-saved’ position, so at odds with the Arminian insistence on free will and the possibility of falling from grace. Calvinism's stress on human depravity and inability made the Wesleyan claim to ‘Christian perfection’ seem a hopeless pipe dream and, more than this, a dangerous heresy. Stuart Piggin has told the story of a sinless perfectionist movement that developed among leaders of Sydney's non-denominational organisations in the late 1930s.Footnote 7 Memories of such extremes have no doubt influenced the responses of evangelicals to any form of perfectionism. Piggin sees the negative impact of this movement continuing to the present: ‘So discredited have the Wesleyan and Keswick views of holiness become that the churches seem to be little interested in holiness at all. Even Pentecostals seem to be interested in every aspect of the Holy Spirit except his holiness.’Footnote 8
Wesleyan perfectionism had been an important part of Australian Methodism from its early nineteenth-century beginnings, but Australian Methodism did not give rise to the kind of interdenominational Holiness revival that emerged out of the Methodist Episcopal Church in mid nineteenth-century America. There were Holiness conventions, Holiness sermons and Holiness articles in the Spectator, but nothing like the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness to launch an American-style interdenominational Holiness movement. If the American Holiness Movement Churches could have established a strong denominational presence in the 1920s, they might have been able to capitalise upon what was left of the Methodist interest in the Holiness message and of the Keswick Convention movement. The fact that they emerged in the 1940s, at a time when such interest had considerably waned, meant a lost opportunity. In order for the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches to gain acceptance in the post-war years they would have to negotiate difficult and unfriendly territory. In this paper attention will be given to another basis for opposition to these new groups, the fact that they had their origins in the United States.
‘Alexander's racy hymns and Americanism’
A longstanding anti-American attitude has existed in Australia throughout its history, alongside a positive attitude of fraternity and co-operation. During the nineteenth century many colonial Australians, including Henry Parkes and Alfred Deakin, argued that Australia would be the ‘United States of the future’. Many looked with envy at America's educational system, its patronage of high culture on the part of the wealthy and its federal constitution.Footnote 9 Mark Twain, when conducting a lecture tour in 1895, had seen little difference between Australians and Americans. Their ‘easy, cordial manners’ were essentially American: ‘English friendliness with the English shyness and self-consciousness left out.’Footnote 10 The approach of the American constitution to religion was the subject of much discussion during Australia's constitutional debates, resulting in there being close parallels between the two documents on the subject of the relationship between religion and the state. The lengthy campaign to include the ‘recognition’ clause in the preamble, described in detail by Richard Ely, demonstrated a knowledge of questions of ‘religious liberty’ drawn from the American experience.Footnote 11 Mainstream Protestants could even, like their American counterparts, sound decidedly theocratic in their conception of government and use language reminiscent of the ‘manifest destiny’ rhetoric of early American Puritanism.Footnote 12
Neville Buch has examined the way in which Australian Baptists in the years following the Second World War began increasingly to look to the United States for their inspiration.Footnote 13 Pastors frequently travelled to the US to receive exposure to and training in methodologies and approaches successful in that country, but with perhaps dubious benefits ‘down under’. The traffic also ran in the other direction, as American pastors visited Australia where they were usually well received as successful pastors with proven know-how.Footnote 14
For all the positive connections between the two countries it is clear that anti-Americanism has also been a part of the Australian consciousness for some time, and the religious world has not been exempt from such sentiment. In 1872 Victoria, an Anglican newspaper attacked Wesleyan camp meetings at Queenscliff as ‘an undesirable United States import likely to be subversive of home discipline and social order’, and this is probably not atypical.Footnote 15 Anti-American sentiment may to some extent have been fuelled by a strong sense of loyalty to British cultural roots. America had produced numerous sects and new denominations in its relatively short history, whereas the makeup of most Australian denominations is pretty well in proportion to the original migration of English, Scots and Welsh.Footnote 16 The old-world character of the religious communities established in colonial Australia was something vigorously conserved. Grocott cites the comments of a Methodist minister made around 1863 that Wesleyan services in Sydney were ‘so truly English, that one might have imagined they were held in the heart of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, or Lancashire, rather than fifteen thousand miles distant from our shores’. Another marvelled at how ‘home-like’ were the services, buildings and ecclesiastical furnishings of the Australian churches.Footnote 17 The preservation of ethnic and cultural identity was actively encouraged by the various religious traditions. According to Leicester Webb, the nineteenth-century Church of England in rural New South Wales and Victoria was ‘the Church of a dominant social class of landowners who consciously attempted to reproduce in Australia the conditions of an English rural parish’.Footnote 18 As late as 1924 the Catholic Archbishop, Mannix, was convinced that ‘the more deeply Catholics breathed the Irish atmosphere the stronger and more vigorous would be the Australian faith’.Footnote 19 According to Hilary Carey, ‘Australian churches became palimpsests of home chapels, churches, cathedrals, synagogues, and religious schools so that the migrant felt a sense of return when visiting them.’Footnote 20 If there were distinctive features of Wesleyan-Holiness groups perceived as American, and therefore not ‘home-like’ this too may have contributed to the suspicion and hostility shown toward them.
Hugh Jackson distinguishes between the American Methodist evangelist William ‘California’ Taylor as a ‘folk evangelist’ whose largely rural meetings numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands, and those later ‘overseas practitioners of the hot gospel’ who, aided by rapid transport and new methods of mass media, increased throughout the 1870s and '90s.Footnote 21 The pioneers of this new approach were also Americans – Dwight L. Moody and Ira D. Sankey, who took their ‘kindlier’ message of the Gospel of God's love to Britain in 1873–5. Reports of the success of their campaign reached Australia and gave rise to concerted revivalist prayer meetings in Sydney and Melbourne.Footnote 22 Many longed for Moody and Sankey to come to Australia and repeat their successes. They never came, but in 1902 Reuben A. Torrey, superintendent of Moody's Chicago Bible Institute, did, accompanied by Charles Alexander to play the musical role earlier performed by Sankey. J. Wilbur Chapman, one of Moody's converts came in 1909 and again in 1912, also accompanied by Alexander.Footnote 23 Significant was the fear on the part of some clergy of the day, such as the Revd A. Burt, that the converts of such crusades would be converted to ‘Alexander's racy hymns and Americanism’.Footnote 24
Jill Julius Matthews has identified ‘an extensive and long term campaign of denunciation of Americanism’ in the years following the First World War, on the part of business, civic, social, educational, industrial and political groups.Footnote 25 Particularly distasteful to these groups was the cheap American culture conveyed in the cinema, jazz, dancing, advertising, radio and pulp fiction. In 1922 the movie mogul Will Hays, expressed a confidence that American films correctly depicted American culture and the cultures of other countries, and that this depiction would go far in promoting world peace. According to Matthews, ‘[t]his imperial will to exploit the world, to explain the world to itself, and to be boastful about having done so, seems to have been widely resented among Australians’ and expressed both in public humour and in political and economic retaliation, through lobbying for the application of tariffs to American goods.Footnote 26
The strongest anti-American feeling in the years following the ‘Great War’ seems to have come from the Church, as both Catholic and Protestant ecclesiastics cried out against those forms of imported popular culture that were seen to be a threat to the purity of the nation's families. The 1936 encyclical of Pope Pius xi warned against ‘the damage done to the soul by bad motion pictures’Footnote 27 and everybody knew that the worst culprit was Hollywood. Protestant ‘wowserism’ was equally vehement in its denunciation of the motion picture. Secular critics were little more sparing in their warning against the moral dangers of Americanisation. They turned their venom against Americanisms in speech, against jazz, crooning, sex and crime films, and the overall lowering of community standards through exposure to such things. ‘It is America's mission’, warned Beatrice Tildesley, ‘to vulgarise the world.’Footnote 28 The responses of social critics and church leaders should not obscure the fact that Australian culture itself is a remarkably pluralist one, welcoming US and other cultural imports enthusiastically.
Curtin looks to America
The war in the Pacific introduced a new and intensified phase into Australian-American relations. World War II saw a shift to the left in Australian politics with the years of Curtin, Evatt and Chifley a kind of ‘Golden Age’ in Labor tradition.Footnote 29 Menzies's preoccupation with British foreign policy led to a loss of support and Labor had been elected in a landslide in 1943. Now, wartime conditions favoured a strong centralised government, an idea at odds with the philosophy of the conservative parties but well suited to a Labor government, providing ‘a new legitimacy to labor’.Footnote 30
Curtin made a public declaration of Australia's dependence on the United States to secure its freedom from Japanese aggression in the Pacific: ‘Australia looks to America free of any pangs as to our traditional ties or kinship with the United Kingdom.’ This speech is often cited as indicating a ‘turning point’ in Australia's orientation away from Great Britain and toward the United States. This hypothesis maintains that during the war Australia became ‘an imperial satellite of capitalist powers which swapped its British master for American ones’.Footnote 31 ‘No longer was Australia an imperial Antipodes, but the New Frontier down under.’Footnote 32 There are earlier precedents, however, which to some extent challenge the ‘turning point’ theory. In 1909 Alfred Deakin had proposed a Pacific pact that included America, as did Lyons in 1935 and 1937. Even the Menzies government had established an Australian legation in Washington following a 1939 Cabinet decision. Menzies had pressed Roosevelt in May 1940 to commit the US to greater support of the empire. So Curtin was by no means the first to ‘look to’ the US. After an initial burst of enthusiasm at the onset of the war, relations cooled and Australian leaders began to take a more independent stance, or even to look again toward a revived British empire.Footnote 33
‘The man with the turned-up hat and the feller with the tucked-in tie’Footnote 34
However the argument over Australia's supposed ‘turning point’ may be settled, one thing is certain: a very large number of Americans were about to arrive on Australia's shores. When Curtin insisted, against Churchill's wishes, that the 1st Australian Corp be returned from the Middle East to defend the homeland, the returning diggers encountered a ‘friendly’ alien in their own backyard, the American GI, for American troops began to arrive in increasing numbers from December 1941. 25,000 US troops were reposted from the Philippines to Australia. Between 1942 and 1945 an estimated one million American servicemen would pass through Australia, though never more than 200,000 at any one time.Footnote 35
The early Nazarene leader, Doug Pinch, remembered the ensuing chaos as American troops moved into Brisbane:
With startling suddenness American servicemen with their tanks, jeeps, trucks and earth-moving equipment, the like of which had never [been] imagined [to] exist, filled the streets of that Queensland city. Everything, for the moment, seemed to be in chaos and confusion. Trains were requisitioned for the transportation of military vehicles. The whole pattern and life-style of a city was changed overnight.Footnote 36
The Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Military Forces, Sir Thomas Blamey, had little respect for the American troops and MacArthur reciprocated with regard to the Australians. There was so much concern about clashes between American and Australian soldiers that the Intelligence Branch recommended that Brisbane be fully lit up at night, a relaxing of the standard ‘brown out’ that was designed as a protective cover against Japanese attack. A dispute between an American MP and an Australian soldier escalated within an hour to a riot involving 4,000 people.Footnote 37 Though this was the most significant incident, others took place in places as far apart as Townsville and Melbourne.
Reasons for the Aussies' hatred of the ‘Yanks’ were many. They had higher pay, better uniforms, were big tippers and emerged from the American Postal Exchange with such luxuries as ice-cream, chocolate, hams, turkeys, cigarettes, alcohol and the nylons so prized by the women. Most grievous of all, however, was that they attracted the Australian women.Footnote 38 Rosemary Campbell, in Heroes and lovers, sees the presence of American troops as a threat to ‘a national identity based on the rugged masculine world of the bush’. The Americans were refreshingly different from the ‘toughened, beer swilling bushmen, diggers and shearers’. They were sensitive, romantic, ‘smooth-talking, considerate [and] polite’, and women found this very attractive.Footnote 39 Syd Harvey remembered that ‘The Yanks were very popular with the girls – they used to go around with a bunch of flowers in their hand and we used to think that was bloody stupid.’Footnote 40
Dorothy Hewitt was not impressed: ‘I scorn the Yanks, pasty faced boys who seem to think an orchid or a box of chocolates can buy them anything … Nobody can buy me … I prefer Australians, who give neither orchids nor chocolates, who are inarticulate but seem to promise love and even silent understanding.’Footnote 41
J. H. Moore in Over-sexed, over-paid and over here, argues that while Americans were at first warmly received as ‘heroes and saviours’, most Australians ‘were not sad to see them leave’. The series of murders committed by Private Edward Leonski, who was tried and swiftly hanged for the murder of three women in Melbourne in 1942,Footnote 42 and the brawls between Australian and American troops in Australian cities no doubt soured the relationship somewhat.
George Johnston's wartime Pacific partners has the rather naïve, and perhaps propagandist, view that while ‘[t]here were brawls and fist fights – 99 per cent of them over women – [they] caused no more serious damage than a few blacked eyes and bleeding noses’.Footnote 43 He describes one fist fight that ended, ‘apart from the two battered faces’, with ‘nothing to indicate that they hadn't always been the best of friends’.Footnote 44 This in spite of the fact that in February 1943 mounted police dispersed brawls between Australian and Americans in Melbourne, and in January 1944 more than 1,000 Americans and Australians rioted in Perth.Footnote 45 Gunner Edward Webster, formerly of the 2/2nd Anti-Tank Regiment, 7th Division AIF, was killed by US military police officer, Private Norbert J. Grant, on 26 November 1942. Eight Australian servicemen received gunshot wounds and eleven Americans were injured. The Americans involved, including Grant, were fully exonerated but three Australian privates spent up to six months in jail. The ‘man with the turned-up hat’ and the ‘feller with the tucked-in tie’ were on unstable terms at best.Footnote 46
The sanctified soldier boys
One factor rarely touched upon in the literature is the religion of the American GI. Among the soldiers stationed in Australia were members of the American Holiness Churches, the sanctified soldier boys. The arrival of American troops in Brisbane is remembered by Dorothy Hewitt as sending ‘a shudder through middle class sensibilities. With visions of young crew-cut, gum-chewing doughboys. scattering “hi's” and “babe's” [sic] throughout the house and “cutting a rug” in the lounge, and that ultimate vulgarity, jazz music, many parents instructed their daughters to have nothing to do with the Americans. There were to be no exemptions, even for officers who looked like Cary Grant and sounded like Clark Gable’.Footnote 47 But there were other young Americans, equally as handsome and dashing, but possessing a different set of values to those portrayed in Hollywood and, in fact, more strongly opposed to secular American pop culture than the mothers of those girls who may have seen them as a threat to their daughters' purity.
Both the Church of the Nazarene and the Wesleyan Methodist Church gained their initial impetus through contact with such American service personnel during the latter stages of the war.Footnote 48 Australian Christian leaders with a desire to see Wesleyan-Holiness work commence in Australia provided the earliest leadership after contact with Americans who sparked off the interest. The Wesleyan Methodist Church of America began work in Australia in 1945, when, after meeting a Wesleyan Methodist serviceman in the Pacific, the RAAF chaplain Kingsley Ridgway offered himself as a ‘field representative’ for the Australian work.Footnote 49 The young soldier gave a clear-cut testimony to ‘entire sanctification’ and this was just the kind of thing that would have filled Ridgway with memories of his days in the Canadian Holiness movement, into which he had married in 1929. Approaching the young serviceman he found that he was a Wesleyan Methodist of the more ‘radical’ type, represented by conferences such as Allegheny and Ohio, and by God's Bible School in Cincinnati. This did not faze him however as he knew the radical wing of the Holiness movement well and, although aware of its extremes, recognised it as his own spiritual ‘homeland’.Footnote 50
In a similar way a thirty-five year old Australian army officer, Albert Berg, came into contact with the Church of the Nazarene. Although Melbourne was the first city to see a large-scale arrival of GIs, garrisoning 30,000 by early 1942, by September of the following year, after MacArthur transferred his HQ to Brisbane, 96,000 of the 119,000 American soldiers in Australia were stationed there.Footnote 51 Brisbane in 1942 was ‘a frightened city invaded by a friendly, though foreign, army’.Footnote 52 Ted Hollingsworth, a Nazarene licensed minister from Little Rock, Arkansas, contracted a tropical disease while serving with the US Army Medical Corps in New Guinea. After a period in the military hospital in Townsville he was moved to Brisbane where, after two months recovering, this handsome young zealot was back on his feet and searching around for a place to worship. Through the Gospel Book Depot in downtown Brisbane, he came into contact with the Mount Pleasant Gospel Hall (Plymouth Brethren). Here he met Berg, and others who were attracted by Hollingsworth's testimony to entire sanctification.
The ‘soldier boy’Footnote 53 preached on Holiness at the Gospel Hall, urging the people there ‘not to rest short of … the sure knowledge of a personal Pentecost’.Footnote 54 Berg had in fact now met three different American servicemen who were members of the Church of the Nazarene, although the identity of the others is unknown.Footnote 55 When Hollingsworth returned to America, after being discharged from the army, he enrolled at Bethany-Peniel College, but did not forget his time in Australia. He prepared a report for presentation to the Board of General Superintendents, which enthusiastically approved the idea of establishing a Nazarene presence in Australia. Meanwhile the June 1944 Convention of the Nazarene Young People's Society (NYPS) independently adopted a resolution to raise $50,000 over a four-year period ‘for the evangelization of Australia and New Zealand’.Footnote 56 Appeals to the American Church for funds presented a view of Australia as being either without Christ or at least without any Holiness witness. It was viewed as a harvest field that was ripe for a revival of Holiness religion.Footnote 57 The Michigan NYPS urged its constituents to ‘Beat Southern California! [in a missions fund raising drive] and give Christ to Australia.’Footnote 58
American Nazarenes seemed unaware of the history of revivalism in Australia and there was a tendency to interpret Australian religious history in extremely bleak terms.Footnote 59 Nelson Mink maintained that ‘Australia has not had any great revival or evangelical background, such as other British Commonwealth nations have enjoyed.’Footnote 60 When General Superintendent Dr G. B. Williamson visited Australia at the end of 1951 he claimed in his report that there had been no effective Holiness ministry in Australia in the thirty-five years prior to the establishment of the Church of the Nazarene. This is certainly an overstatement. Holiness teaching was not as widely forgotten or neglected among Methodists as the Holiness people thought it to be. It is understandable that, coming as they did largely from Brethren and Baptist backgrounds, early Australian Nazarenes were encountering the doctrine of ‘entire sanctification’, understood as a distinct second work of grace, as something entirely new. More conservative Methodists, Pentecostals and those involved in the Keswick Convention movement had earlier promoted varieties of ‘Holiness’ teaching in their own ways.
The Keswick Convention movement began in England, when a tent was erected in the grounds of St John's Vicarage, Keswick, in 1875, in order to hold meetings for the ‘deepening of the spiritual life’.Footnote 61 A British expression of American Holiness movement teaching, its terminology was adopted to Reformed convictions, although its spirituality and ethos were very similar to the Holiness movement. Where the Wesleyans spoke of the ‘eradication’ and ‘destruction’ of sin, Keswickians preferred to speak of its ‘counteraction’ and ‘suppression’, toning down the more radical emphasis on sin's eradication.Footnote 62
In 1869 the prominent Baptist minister, Silas Mead, influenced by Pearsall Smith, was leading a Holiness movement in Adelaide. A Holiness rally was held in Melbourne in January 1875 under the leadership of Hussey Burgh Macartney of St Mary's Church of England in Caulfield, a Keswick advocate who had travelled to England to speak at the convention there in 1878.Footnote 63 The paper he established in 1873, The Missionary at Home and Abroad, had a Holiness emphasis. Methodists held Holiness conventions in the 1880s and formed a Methodist Holiness Association in the middle part of that decade.Footnote 64 Methodists in New South Wales published a Holiness paper, as did the Salvation Army, which had held Holiness Meetings as their main Sunday morning service since they first arrived in Australia in 1880.Footnote 65 Well into the 1920s the Methodist Local Preachers' Association held an Annual Holiness Convention in Melbourne and the Cliff College-style Holiness revivalism of the 1928 Norman Dunning campaign was well received among Methodists in at least four states.Footnote 66
The Geelong ‘Christian Convention’ was organised by Macartney along Keswick lines in 1891, followed by another in Sydney which drew nearly 2,500 people to a meeting at the Centenary Hall, and another thousand in ‘overflow meetings’. An equally successful convention was held in Launceston attracting another 2,500 people. According to Jackson, ‘Thereafter hopes of a national revival with holiness conventions as the chief instrument began to fade. Holiness conventions that continued to be held into this century … maintained a Keswick piety in an evangelical pocket. But there was no significant outreach to the bulk of churchgoers much less the unchurched.’Footnote 67 Periodically there was Pentecostal-type behaviour at these conventions, such as ‘tongues speaking’ at the Belgrave, Victoria, convention in 1910, and some emphasis on faith-healing through the laying on of hands,Footnote 68 but these were exceptional and often caused controversy. According to Breward, the convention movement in Melbourne, and especially the teaching of C. H. Nash on the relationship to Christ and Holiness ‘widened the appeal of Evangelicalism [as] every year hundreds gathered to hear the Bible expounded … and calls to discipleship and holiness [were] made. Similar conventions in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains were also influential in sustaining Sydney's Evangelical networks’.Footnote 69
In spite of these earlier precedents, as David McEwan points out, for these early Nazarene pioneers the absence of Holiness teaching in Australia was at least ‘subjectively’ true, and the hostility they received from other Churches could only confirm their suspicions.Footnote 70 The older and more radical Wesleyan view of entire sanctification as a cleansing from inbred sin had been considerably toned down within Methodism and become a more generalised call to holy living. The Keswick movement similarly toned down the Wesleyan message for a non-Wesleyan audience and in any case, by the 1940s, had all but disappeared as a significant shaping force in Australian evangelicalism. A strident declaration of the older teaching on the part of newly arriving American players in the immediate post-war period met with a cold and sometimes hostile reception.
‘The oddities of the yank deportment’: differing religious origins and styles
Holiness religion was different in its expression from more mainstream Christianity. Many of the differences were perceived as ‘American’ and thus proved a sticking-point for some enquirers as the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches sought to find a place in the existing religious scene.
It is a commonplace that Australia's first settlers were not the religious idealists that made up America's first parishes. According to Carey, ‘in terms of church-going, deference to clerical authority, and acquaintance with theological principles, the convicts of Botany Bay made a poor showing’.Footnote 71 According to Hans Mol, since the nineteenth century, at least, ‘Australians were born into a religion rather than changed by it, as happened in particular episodes of American history.’Footnote 72 This view of Australian Christianity as lacking the ‘charismatic events’ that characterised American revivalism, however, has recently been challenged by historians who have researched significant periods of religious revival in places like the Victorian gold fields and the coal-mining communities of the Hunter Valley.Footnote 73
Gary Bouma has characterised Australia's religious style as ‘military chaplaincy’ religion, which has its roots in the colonial experience.Footnote 74 According to this view, the military and landowning classes in colonial Australia looked on religion as something done for one by a religious professional. This is significantly different from the evangelical Protestant voluntarism that prevails in the United States, in which one takes personal responsibility for one's religious commitment and activism. Similarly, Mol contends that ‘religious affiliation seems for a significant number of Australians to be ‘ascriptive’, that is something one is born with. Contrary to the USA, where in Protestantism the ‘voluntarism’ of religious affiliation is stressed, ‘to belong does not imply that one supports the religious institution with one's time and talents'.Footnote 75
But this older view is open to question. For one thing Anglican evangelicalism characterised much of the religious ethos of early Australia, bringing with it the voluntarist ethic. Indeed, Hilary Carey goes so far as to say that evangelicalism was ‘the religious success story of the Australian colonies’.Footnote 76 Richard Johnson and Samuel Marsden were both evangelicals and, because of the absence of non-conformist sects, at least in the earliest period, evangelical Anglicans were not threatened by much religious competition. This meant that they were ‘keener and more visible in their practice of religion than most other Christians and accordingly they were able to set the colonial religious agenda’.Footnote 77
Australian religious expression has always been notably more muted than in North America. During the debate over whether to insert a clause into the Australian constitution which would recognise a reliance on ‘the blessing of Almighty God’, the Tasmanian Adye Douglas, in opposition, asserted that ‘[While] we all rely upon … God in our daily transactions, we do not talk about it.’ He informed the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1898 that the Lord's Prayer was at one time used in the Tasmanian Legislative Council but that ‘it had become a matter of such indifference that the custom was given up’. When Alexander Peacock made the point that the Lord's Prayer was used in the Victorian Legislative Council, Alfred Deakin quipped, ‘And nearly all the members know it now’.Footnote 78 Douglas then gave testimony that he was ‘ordinarily as religious as any member of this Convention’, but added, ‘I do not make a parade of it.’Footnote 79 It might be argued that Douglas's reticence in displaying his religious convictions typifies Australian religiosity. If so, this stands in stark contrast to the more demonstrative American religious style.
Nazarenes believed that Australians were more receptive to American ideas and practices than to British ones.Footnote 80 But Australian church leaders, as well as the general populace were often suspicious of American denominations. Even Nazarene leaders recognised that there were differences in style between American and Australian Christians and that these had the potential to cause difficulties. The ‘oddities of the yank deportment’ were something Australians would find hard to understand.Footnote 81 Some would-be American visitors had received a courteous ‘no’ from Berg because of the element of risk involved in their ability to adjust to ‘our local psychology’.Footnote 82 As much as possible, Australian and American workers should labour side by side so as to learn from each other.Footnote 83 As much as possible promotional material is to reflect a peculiarly Australian ethos. It should reflect the Nazarene message ‘in a true Australian fashion’.Footnote 84 At the same time, Berg sees the Nazarene constituency as ‘Nazarene firstly and Australians secondly’.Footnote 85
When E. E. Zachary arrived from the United States in 1946 to chair the first Nazarene Assembly, the ‘peculiarities’ of his style of preaching were seen by Pinch as something that the people needed ‘the Lord's help’ to ‘rise above’. The ‘altar call’ (kneeling at an altar of prayer in a public meeting) so typical of American revivalism, seemed something of a novelty.Footnote 86 When Dr Weaver Hess, the Oregon district superintendent, preached in Sydney in January 1948, the tears that rolled down his cheeks were perhaps indicative of the approach to preaching of American revivalists, but were not immediately intelligible to the average Australian evangelical, whose expressions were characteristically more reserved. Upon seeing these tears, Pinch recalls that ‘We Australians were unaccustomed to this’.Footnote 87
According to David Bennett, when the altar call first emerged in British Methodism early in the nineteenth century ‘it was dubbed “the American custom”’. Thus it was perceived as an import, rather than a home-bred practice, and was certainly not seen as a strategy used by the English founder of Methodism.Footnote 88 As a distinct and intentionally planned system it seems to have had its beginnings in the American camp meeting revivals of the first decade of the nineteenth century.Footnote 89 Bennet concludes that ‘Methodists seem to have been its only regular users until the 1870s. From then it was promoted to a wider audience by various itinerant evangelists, but there is little evidence of it being widely used in denominations of non-Methodist origins in the nineteenth century.’Footnote 90 What use, or memory, of this practice there may have been among evangelicals of the 1940s is uncertain but the fact that those in early Nazarene meetings encountered it as a novelty seems to suggest that it was not a widespread practice.
American servicemen in Geraldton found themselves without Coca Cola, a drink not known in Western Australia at the time. They did, however, have a supply of the syrup available so they struck a deal with a local soft drink manufacturer to add the carbonated water and begin local production.Footnote 91 There may be a metaphor here for religious importation. Certain forms of religious expression may be imported from America on a global scale, and yet they soon begin to be produced locally as well, blending local distinctivenesss with the original ‘product’ to produce home-grown varieties. Yuri Lotman has proposed a five-stage model of cultural importation which begins with the assumption that cultural imports are superior to local product, and then moves through various stages of engagement and modification between local and imported cultural expression, culminating in local culture defining itself with little reference to outside cultural influences, ready to transmit meaning on its own terms.Footnote 92 Australian evangelicals did not so much find the altar call something ‘superior’ but they did accept it and incorporate it into their own practices until it was no longer seen as, or even remembered as, an American import.
Neither the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America nor the Church of the Nazarene perceived their Australian work as a mission field. Perhaps because of the similarity between the two cultures, the new work ‘down under’ came under the jurisdiction of the ‘Home’ rather than ‘Foreign’ Missions department. The Revd J. R. Swauger, visiting secretary of Home Missions, was present to chair the first conference of the ‘Wesleyan Methodist Church of America in Australia’.Footnote 93 A letter of greeting was read from the president of the General Conference in America, the Revd Roy S. Nicholson. Ridgway referred to Swauger's coming as ‘a great blessing to the Wesleyan cause in Australia, and we are assured the interests of Australia will be well represented by him in the councils of the home church’.Footnote 94 It may seem unusual for the Church in America to be referred to as the ‘home church’ when nobody at the conference, apart from Swauger, could call America ‘home’. Ridgway was also able to refer to the American Church as ‘the parent church’Footnote 95 and the Committee on Resolutions even spoke of the ‘Mother Church’.Footnote 96
Yet the obvious American influence does not seem to have been exerted in an overly controlling manner. From the beginning the need to indigenise was encouraged and pursued. The Australian Wesleyan was founded as ‘the official organ’ of the Church at a special session of the 1947 conference, with Kingsley Ridgway as editor.Footnote 97 This was followed by the Wesleyan Witness, later to be discontinued in favour of the American publication, the Wesleyan Methodist, which was sent to subscribers only, and initially drew a poor response.Footnote 98The Australian Nazarene served a similar function. Berg stressed the importance of Australian material in a letter to G. B. Williamson, Nazarene general superintendent: ‘[A]rticles written [for the pages of The Australian Nazarene] by American or any other Nazarenes are well accepted. But I am working on a greater percentage of articles written by Australian Nazarenes and appreciate your understanding attitude in this connection.’Footnote 99
In 1949, after thanking the Wesleyan Methodist Church of America for its generosity toward the Australian Bible College, Kingsley Ridgway asserted the need for a self-supporting work to emerge: ‘We cannot expect … that financial help on such a munificent scale will continue. Let it be our earnest endeavour to make our work self-supporting; and that as readily as possible.’Footnote 100 The Light and Life radio programme was in use by Wesleyans from 1954. This was ‘canned’ material from the Free Methodist Church, a sister Holiness body in the United States, and so the public voice of the Church was an American one. This quarter-hour programme was broadcast each Sunday morning at 8·30 on 3XY.Footnote 101 The Nazarenes also used ‘canned’ material for their radio broadcasts. ‘Of course’, wrote Berg, ‘we have to omit references to the U. S. in any material we publish and often are not able to broadcast a “Showers of Blessing” programme in so far as it directly concerns the American nation and this would sound very strange to Australian people.’Footnote 102
The Revd Roy S. Nicholson, president of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, visited the Australian Church in 1953 and conducted a series of meetings in three states. As he sat in Melbourne's Botanic Gardens, in the shade of Government House, during Christmas week, the mercury rose to 100 degrees, and a strong hot breeze was blowing.Footnote 103 Christmas Day and the day following were also very hot. The winter snows of his home in Indiana must have seemed a long way off. In his final report from Australia, he gave his summary conclusions of the situation in Australia:
This continent needs the Wesleyan message of full deliverance from sin … Formal religion is in evidence everywhere, and those with a spiritual hunger seem to suspect the denominational programs, many of which are shot through with theological liberalism and worldliness. That fact has encouraged hundreds of independent groups who hold ‘fellowship’ meetings apart from all denominational contacts … God had vindicated us and those who feared our intentions (which had been misrepresented to them) have discovered that instead of being heretics out to spread error, we are earnest Christians seeking the lost. Some of them welcome us as ‘fellow helpers to the truth,’ but, of course, with some others there is no fellowship or co-operation, because our views or essential doctrines and principles are so far apart. In Australia, as in many other lands, it costs one something to separate from an older church group and affiliate with a definitely holiness group. It is doubly costly to unite with one having the ties to American leadership that our Church has. We are gaining favour, however, with those who have become well enough acquainted with us to appreciate our principles, purposes and practices.Footnote 104
The 1959 Billy Graham Crusade had a profound influence on the Australian religious landscape. Hilliard describes Graham's visit as ‘the religious event which encapsulated more than anything else the religious themes and preoccupations of the 1950s’.Footnote 105 In many ways the involvement of the Wesleyan Methodist Church of Australia in the Graham Crusade was a watershed moment in the history of that Church. The Wesleyans had been the only denominational member of the Fellowship of Evangelical Churches of Australia (FECA), a fundamentalist conglomerate of small independent churches, which followed Carl MacIntyre's lead in the US in boycotting Billy Graham's ministry.Footnote 106 In refusing to boycott Graham, and breaking ranks with the FECA, the Wesleyan Methodists in a sense, ‘came of age’, choosing to throw in their lot with mainstream evangelicalism, over against reactionary fundamentalism. Graham had himself broken with the extremist fundamentalist wing back home shortly before coming to Australia. He received strong mainline church support in Australia, as he did in the US.Footnote 107
I object … to Billy Graham was a pamphlet produced by Howard Guiness, rector of St Michael's Church of England in Vaucluse, as an apologia for the Graham crusades, with cartoons drawn by Frank Benier, a popular political cartoonist. One of the objections it sought to answer was ‘I object to my religion being imported from America.’Footnote 108
The standing orders of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference of 1958 urged that ‘each pastor and charge enter wholeheartedly and energetically into the visitation programme of the Billy Graham Crusade’.Footnote 109 The conference president, Robert Mattke, was able to speak of the crusade as having a ‘spiritual impact … upon [the] continent’ and urged that Wesleyans ‘do everything humanly possible to follow through with every contact. Let us make the most of this historic opportunity’.Footnote 110 Kingsley Ridgway represented the Wesleyans on the executive committee of the Billy Graham crusade in Victoria. He thanked God for ‘the great door and effectual’ which the campaign had opened for Wesleyans in that state.Footnote 111 In the wake of the event, Mattke spoke of the crusade as having brought to Australia ‘a spiritual atmosphere which was probably unique to [its] history … [bringing] to the masses a certain awareness of God’.Footnote 112
Stuart Piggin sees Australians as displaying an uncritical disposition toward all things American during the 1950s, as America ‘began to replace Britain in the affections of Australians’.Footnote 113 At the final crusade, Graham read a greeting from President Eisenhower which was warmly received. Along with this came a diplomatic letter from Richard Nixon. Graham was a well known anti-Communist, considered to be a powerful ally on the American side of the Cold War. All of this resonated well in the anti-Communist atmosphere of Australia at the time. Anti-American sentiment waned in Australia in the post-war period, especially on the part of conservative intellectuals. American culture was far to be preferred to those totalitarianisms which threatened the peace of the ‘free world’. Left-wing intellectuals, on the other hand, saw the day coming when Australia would be just another American province.Footnote 114 The perception, on the part of the left, of a sudden move toward American cultural influences was unfounded, according to Waterhouse, since Americanisation had been a part of the cultural scene in Australia since the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 115
As Wesleyan-Holiness Churches sought to move from ‘outsider’ to ‘insider’ status they have tended to reflect those broader aspects of Americanisation that have been integrated into Australian evangelicalism, and to minimise those that have not. When the Graham-style altar call was being used by Anglicans, Baptists and Presbyterians, in the post-crusade era of the early 1960s, Wesleyan-Holiness use of this device would be far less conspicuous, and would not mark them out as a ‘fringe’ group. On the other hand, more uniquely ‘Holiness’ expressions, such as waving the handkerchief in the air as a sign of being ‘blessed’, or shouting ‘glory!’ were minimised in Holiness churches, partly because such behaviour was identified with Pentecostals, a group from which the Holiness people were keen to distance themselves.
‘Sheep stealers’ and ‘sinless perfectionists’
In spite of the good will generated by Graham, anti-American sentiment among Australian evangelicals survived at least into the 1970s as is clear from the experience of members of the Church of God (Cleveland) and the Church of God (Anderson) who entered the Australian scene in 1973 and 1960 respectively.Footnote 116 Bill and Winnie McAlpin, pioneer Church of God (Cleveland) missionaries, were not well received by other Christians who considered them ‘sheep stealers’. Even among the Pentecostal Churches they were viewed as outsiders.Footnote 117 Lack of cooperation from other Christians made their work more difficult. Not only was there no denominational connection, and little fellowship with others, they were told in no uncertain terms that they were not welcome in Australia. Viewed as being ‘sinless perfectionists’, whose presence was detrimental to the Christian cause, they were urged to ‘denounce’ their affiliation to the American Church.Footnote 118
The Church of God (Cleveland) seemed neither fish nor fowl. It belonged to the Pentecostal-Holiness family of Churches, a group that emerged in the Southern United States (the expression of religion among the Appalachians was markedly more frantic than in the North). The precursors of modern-day Pentecostalism, they adopted a ‘three-stage’ way of salvation, seeing ‘speaking in tongues’ as a sign of a special ‘baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire’, subsequent to both conversion and entire sanctification.Footnote 119
The history of the Church of God (Cleveland) in Australia is marked by a striking ethnic diversity. Members of Church of God congregations in other countries would emigrate from their home countries and establish congregations in their new homeland soon after arrival in Australia.Footnote 120 Like the Church of the Nazarene, the Church of God (Cleveland) attracted significant numbers of Aboriginal Australians into its ranks. Tent meetings were regularly held amongst Aboriginal communities in rural New South Wales from 1979 and throughout the 1980s.Footnote 121 By 1991 the New Testament Church of God (as it was then known in Australia) had grown from one family to a total of twenty-one churches and missions with approximately 1,300 members. Its website currently lists thirty-five churches.Footnote 122 Here is a Church energetically established by American, Aboriginal, White Australian, Fijian, Romanian, Spanish and Filipino congregations which seemed able, despite their cultural differences, to unite. Perhaps their unity, in spite of the divergence of their cultures, arose out of a shared sense of dislocation, as well as a shared religious experience.
Paul Brodwin has traced the manner in which members of the Haitian diaspora in the US gathered into Pentecostal Churches, which provided ‘a form of collective defense and remoralizing’ that protected them against a loss of social cohesion in the face of the temptations of secularism.Footnote 123 Harold McLoud recalled that the immigrant Church of God congregations in Australia held much stricter views than American Church of God adherents on matters such as dress codes, use of alcohol and tobacco, and the prohibiting of ‘worldly’ entertainment.Footnote 124 In Brodwin's study, the immigrant Haitians tended to reflect the more conservative features of earlier formative Pentecostalism. Immigrant Church of God communities in Australia would seem to bear out this thesis.
Perhaps the growth of the Church of God (Cleveland) was also enhanced by the fact that the immigrant communities did not necessarily share the anti-American sentiment of many Australians. Winnie McAlpin remembers that her husband Bill's style of pulpit ministry was totally different from the Australian style and that he made no effort to change. According to Mrs McAlpin, preaching style at that time in Australia was more muted than in America. It was ‘more like a Sunday School teacher … teaching rather than preaching …[in preaching] the American manner was a little more demonstrative, a little more forceful … that was … a little bit frightening to some people coming in seeing this vast difference. Some people really loved it. Some people were scared to death’.Footnote 125
When the McAlpins held evangelistic meetings in Busselton, Western Australia, soon after their arrival in Australia, some of the members of this conservative rural farming community of about 10,000 people disapproved of the emotionalism of the meetings. When about twenty children were ‘moved to tears of repentance’ at an altar service some parents withdrew their involvement. Attendances after that were small.Footnote 126 Bill was told, ‘We've heard about you American preachers. You have some sort of powder that you put on the kids. It affects them and makes them do crazy things. We didn't see you but you must have done that.’Footnote 127 The Church of God had the practice of a ‘concert of prayer’, during which everybody prayed out loud all at once. Australians did not appreciate this practice, thinking it was fanaticism. When asked whether there was anti-American sentiment on the part of Australians, the McAlpins answered strongly in the affirmative.Footnote 128 Harold McLoud also found it important not to wear his American identity on his sleeve.Footnote 129
Malcolm Hughes remembers the strength of the opposition to the Church of God (Anderson):Footnote 130
We were often misunderstood, and … viewed as another one of those strange American cults, sects, and at that time there were … a lot of problems … with people being kidnapped and taken into cults, and all of that sort of thing, and there was all the rescuing and deprogramming going on, and so forth, and I think that when you put the sign on the door that said Church of God, primarily a lot of people assumed that we were another one of those strange groups, and it took a lot of one on one communication, a lot of convincing, that we … really had very little to differ from Methodist and Church of Christ people and a lot of other Wesleyan groups, that we have a lot of the same roots.Footnote 131
The relationship between Pentecostal, Holiness and Charismatic movements
The relationship between the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches and the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements has been a somewhat adversarial one, despite their similarities as renewal movements. Paul Conkin has dismissed the historical significance of the Holiness movement as ‘largely a way station on the path to Pentecostalism’.Footnote 132 Those within Holiness Churches are more likely to see Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement that followed it as the aberrant and illegitimate offspring of the Holiness movement. Charles Edwin Jones notes that the Holiness and Pentecostal movements ‘are sometimes regarded as one movement by outsiders because of their common emphasis on the present work of the Holy Spirit’. According to Jones, however, they are ‘a mother and daughter estranged by mutually contradictory beliefs concerning the purpose and sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit and by mutually incompatible modes of devotion and worship’.Footnote 133 It is observable in social interaction that arguments within families are often more bitterly contested than those with strangers. The Holiness, Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches have much in common but it is this very commonality which makes their differences stand out in such bold relief.
The doctrine of a three-stage way of salvation (salvation, followed by sanctification, and then the ‘baptism of the Spirit’ as a third ‘blessing’) was the earliest form of Pentecostalism, and was taught by ‘the whole Pentecostal movement in America’ until 1908.Footnote 134 According to Vinson Synan, ‘the historical and doctrinal lineage of American Pentecostalism is to be found in the Wesleyan tradition’.Footnote 135 Yet a divide opened up in the Wesleyan-Holiness movement, leading to two quite distinct streams – that which affirmed that ‘speaking in tongues’ was a sign of the ‘baptism of the Holy Ghost’ and that which retained the older Wesleyan view of the ‘baptism’ as an experience of sanctification. Some Holiness congregations opened up to the new doctrines and expressions, while others closed ranks and made a concerted effort to distance themselves from the ‘tongues’ movement.Footnote 136 Wesleyan-Holiness denominations increasingly identified themselves over against Pentecostals and ‘anti-tongues’ stances became denominational policy.Footnote 137 The emergence and growth in the 1960s and '70s of the Charismatic (neo-Pentecostal) movement, which brought behaviour previously considered ‘marginal’ such as ‘tongues speaking’ and ‘divine healing’ into the mainline Churches, served only to harden Wesleyan-Holiness resistance.Footnote 138 This was true even among those Churches which held on to the three-stage way of salvation, the ‘Pentecostal Holiness’ Churches, such as the Church of God (Cleveland) who affirmed both a Wesleyan and Pentecostal identity.Footnote 139 Church of God leadership was standoffish, if not positively hostile, to this new development, which saw members of mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches claim to have received the ‘baptism of the Spirit’ and spoken in ‘tongues’, but without the preparatory work of entire sanctification.Footnote 140
Bill and Winnie McAlpin, as Church of God missionaries to Australia, sought to associate with Pentecostal groups such as the Assemblies of God, but felt that they were coldly received. They recalled no involvement at all with Wesleyan-Holiness groups such as Nazarenes and Wesleyan Methodists.Footnote 141 According to Harold McLoud, General Overseer of the Australian work from 1984 to 1995, the Pentecostals would not associate with them because they were considered too Holiness, and the Holiness Churches would not associate with them because they were too Pentecostal.Footnote 142 There was theological opposition to the doctrine of sanctification held by the Church of God on the part of other Pentecostals, who believed them to be not quite orthodox and too rigid in their lifestyle prohibitions. McLoud found that he gained greater acceptance among some Uniting Church and Catholic Churches than from the Assemblies of God, which seemed to have held the Church of God at arms length because it was perceived as an American group in competition with it. As a result, Church of God leaders were not invited to participate in any multi-Church crusades or organising committees.Footnote 143 The story of the emergence of the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia demonstrates that religious movements with similar approaches and values are not necessarily drawn closer. Instead, the differences that exist around shared values and beliefs, although they seem small to the outsider, may serve to alienate constituencies from one another.
American imperialism or the production of modernity?
Were the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches examples of a kind of American religious imperialism? Or were they authentically Australian religious communities that looked to the United States as an older sibling able to give them a head start and provide connection to a broader international community?
The question of whether the charge of ‘American imperialism’ is a valid one lies at the heart of Philip Bell and Roger Bell's treatment of ‘Americanisation’. Where Philip Adams and Donald Horne raise concerns about Australia being a victim of both British and American imperialism, Bell and Bell contend that Australia's relationship with America is ‘embedded in more general processes of modernization and globalization’.Footnote 144 Charges of American cultural and political ‘imperialism’ are often simplistic and often overstated.Footnote 145 Those things labelled as instances of the ‘Americanisation’ of society and culture may in fact be no more than examples of cross-cultural and internationalist modernisation. Modern nations, such as Australia, share with the United States, and other nations, in an emerging global culture, some aspects of which might be expressed in ways seen to be ‘American’ but whose American origins are only secondary to their significance as expressions of a global movement.
Giles Keppel points to the way in which ‘evangelical movements … have been denigrated as representing the obscurantism of a bygone age’ and resists this ‘widespread view’ as ‘quite inadequate’. Conservative religious groups contain, he says ‘a high proportion of people, young or not so young, who have been through a secular education, with a marked bias toward the technical disciplines’. They have ‘habits of thought acquired in schools which are themselves the product par excellence of the modernity whose course they now wish to alter’. They are those ‘intellectuals of a proletariat cast’ spoken of by Max Weber, who conclude in the final analysis that ‘the modernism produced by reason without God has not succeeded in creating values’.Footnote 146 In 1960 only 7 per cent of American evangelicals had had a university education. By the mid-70s that number had grown to 23 per cent.Footnote 147
Conservative Christians are not anti-modern. They avail themselves fully of the technologies and modes of discourse produced by the contemporary era.Footnote 148 They are not Luddites raging against the machine, but are making the machine serve their own ends. They are moderns, but are not modernists. A modernist is at home in the shifting realities of modernity; modern evangelicals are not really at home but ‘passing through’ to another land. To the extent that they settle down more comfortably in the land through which they are passing, they lower their tension and move to the church end of the church-sect continuum. Australian evangelicalism is one form of that modernity (or perhaps post-modernity) of which America is another. According to Appadurai and Breckenridge, most of today's societies ‘possess the means for the local production of modernity’.Footnote 149 Australia, then, needs not be seen as the target of Americanisation, but as a creative partner in a dance of mutually-enriching post-modern cultural expressions.
However much evidence might confound the ‘Los-Angelisation of the world’ hypothesis, the anti-American sentiment that formed much of the resistance to Wesleyan-Holiness Churches was real and would only begin to be broken down as broader evangelicalism itself became Americanised in the wake of Billy Graham-style revivalism.
Stuart Piggin sees Anglican evangelicalism's hegemony as a distinctive feature of Australian evangelicalism. Its suspicion and rejection of ‘the highly individualistic theology of the indwelling Spirit’ is ‘a vital point for understanding the differences in the ambience of American and Australian spiritual life’.Footnote 150 This is significant, for it is just this ‘highly individualistic theology of the indwelling Spirit’ that has been a hallmark of the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches. The Anglican evangelical establishment has always been opposed to what it has labelled ‘sinless perfectionism’, and Piggin sees the retreat into ‘second blessing’ Holiness on the part of some Anglicans at Moore College in the 1950s as an unhealthy response to encroaching liberalism, and as a threat to healthy evangelicalism.Footnote 151
In an earlier essay, Piggin sets out a number of important questions:
Was Australian evangelicalism shaped primarily and definitively at the time of the origins of Australian settlement? Or have exogenous factors constituted the nature of Australian evangelicalism either by continuing to influence it as it grows or by repeatedly reintroducing varieties of it after other implants have died or grown too sickly to reproduce? What have been the patterns of interaction between evangelicalism and social and cultural forces in Australia, and how do they compare with such interactions in Britain and America?Footnote 152
Such a comparative study is not within the scope of this paper, but it may safely be asserted that ‘exogenous factors’ have indeed shaped Australian evangelicalism and that one of those factors has been American evangelicalism. David Hilliard has traced the reception of religion in post-war suburbia and found that though suburbanisation threatened denominational ties and church attendance, ‘the spread of Sunday Schools, outdoor rallies, and American-based evangelism’ helped to counter this drift.Footnote 153 It is interesting to note that all three of these methods were widely utilised by the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches. In fact, through much of the early history of the Wesleyans and the Nazarenes, Sunday School attendance in the suburbs far outstripped adult church attendance.Footnote 154
Yuri Lotman's model of cultural importation presupposes a fairly stable or even passive ‘receiving culture’, which is acted upon by an outside culture perceived as superior to the local product. Australian evangelicalism was no such static culture. It cannot be understood as something ‘floating above’ or ‘suspended over’ the cultural, political and social forces that shaped Australia broadly during this, or any historical period. It may be argued that it was ‘Americanised’ in the post-war years only to the extent that everything else in Australia was ‘Americanised’. The case of the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches in Australia differs from Lotman's model in that the cultural import (American evangelicalism) was not at first considered a superior product. In fact, it was viewed with suspicion. The engagement and modification that took place over time, however, led to a gradual tendency to admire American approaches, especially the well-oiled machinery of American evangelistic techniques, and to adopt them in Australia until their American origins were either forgotten or not seen as important.
It is doubtful that the Wesleyan-Holiness Churches themselves have had a significant shaping influence on Australian evangelicalism. They have been too small in number and too marginalised to be granted much leverage. However, they emerged as a new expression of the Holiness impetus that had been present in Australian evangelicalism earlier, primarily through Methodism, and also the Keswick Convention movement, but which had all but died out. As much as they would like to think otherwise, the doctrine and experience of ‘entire sanctification’ as a second work of grace was not introduced into Australia by the American Wesleyan-Holiness Churches, although it was revived by them. Other evangelicals influenced by earlier forms of ‘Holiness’ teaching were drawn to the new Holiness groups because they recognised an echo of this older, but now almost forgotten tradition. These Churches were not instances of American religious imperialism, but authentic movements of Australian Christians finding in their American cousins willing ‘sponsors’ who could provide legitimacy for their efforts by means of links with recognised and established denominations. The fact that these ‘sponsoring’ denominations were American, far from being seen as an advantage, was seen by Australian and American church leaders alike as a liability. These groups continued to be marginalised because of their perceived American origins and control. Only as features of American evangelicalism began to be more widely accepted among Australian evangelicals, and seen as authentically Australian and not an American import, did the Holiness Churches become less ‘queer’ and less sect-like.
