Australian spirituality stats

I flew to Auckland for a day the week before last in order to attend a conference run by the Church Life Survey people. It was valuable both in terms of meeting people and in hearing the plans for the next survey coming up in 2011.

I spend a good deal of my average week working with stats, both church and government (and any other kind I can lay my hands on), so I have some idea of the state of Christianity in New Zealand. The Church Life Survey is one source of such information. It has some connections with a similar group in Australia, and I've just been reading an article by Rowland Croucher which shows that the church/spiritual/Christian stats in Australia are pretty similar to those here in NZ.

Rowland's complete article is here, but those figures are culled from Shaping Australia's Spirituality: a Review of Christian Ministry in the Australian Context, by Philip Hughes and others (2010). This is a 150 page book (with some proof-reading errors, according to Rowland - the result of a publication date not leaving enough room for thoroughness) and, as Rowland says: ...you won’t find more interesting summary-data on modern Australia and its religions, especially Christianity, anywhere else in one small readable volume.

The book was produced by the Christian Research Association in Australia - we used to have a similar body here. You can buy a copy from CRA themselves, or from some Australian bookshops (not Koorong, as far as I could see).

Two views, one subject

As so often happens two different blogs I read came at the same issue from different perspectives: on Prodigal Kiwi(s), Paul Fromont quotes a writer called Amy Hollywood, who begins an essay called Spiritual but Not Religious: The vital interplay between submission and freedom in this way:

“Most of us who write, think, and talk about religion are by now used to hearing people say that they are spiritual, but not religious. With the phrase generally comes the presumption that religion has to do with doctrines, dogmas, and ritual practices, whereas spirituality has to do with the heart, feeling, and experience. The spiritual person has an immediate and spontaneous experience of the divine or of some higher power. She does not subscribe to beliefs handed to her by existing religious traditions, nor does she engage in the ritual life of any particular institution. At the heart of the distinction between religion and spirituality, then, lies the presumption that to think and act within an existing tradition—to practice religion—risks making one less spiritual. To be religious is to bow to the authority of another, to believe in doctrines determined for one in advance, to read ancient texts only as they are handed down through existing interpretative traditions, and blindly to perform formalized rituals. For the spiritual, religion is inert, arid, and dead; the practitioner of religion, whether consciously or not, is at best without feeling, at worst insincere…

On the Out of Ur blog, Gordon MacDonald writes a gentle post about Anne Rice, her denunciation of 'Christianity', and about other people who have left the faith for various reason.   He begins in this way: 

Best selling author Anne Rice has quit Christianity. She is not quitting on Jesus Christ or the Bible, she says, but she is quitting organized Christianity.  Ms. Rice announced her quit-decision not through a resignation letter (where would one send it?) but through her website and TV interviews.

Anne Rice’s decision to go public with her decision is not the only way people quit Christianity. Some do it quietly, gradually dropping out of the programmatic activities of religious institutions and out of personal contact with people whose devotion to the faith seems solid. One day someone notices an empty seat in the sanctuary and says, “I haven’t seen Bob (or Jennifer) around for a while. Wonder what’s happened to him (or her)?”

He goes on to discuss what's behind people leaving the church, the faith, (and sometimes everything else in their lives too).   He seems to be looking at the same question as Amy Hollywood: can you have faith in Christ apart from His Church?  

The complexity of belief

Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola’s recently released a study called, “Preachers Who Are Not Believers.” LaScola is a social worker and Dennett, a philosopher, is one of the original New Atheists (and the “Four Horsemen”), well-known for his vitriol against religion.

In an article relating to the study, Daniel Silliman writes that Dennett and LaScola have mostly missed the point in relation to the five Protestant ministers who took part in the study. The authors want to see preachers who are secretly atheists; the ministers themselves see their situation are vastly more subtle and complex. These are people who have struggled long and hard with belief and doubt, and who continue the struggle. As one of the men says, “We are not ‘un-believers’ in our own minds.”

Silliman goes on to say:

All of the preachers in the study have struggled, primarily, with denominational dogma that tries to strip down belief much as Dennett does. They have wrestled not with God so much as with particular doctrines, particular understandings of God, and, especially, with the conventions about what can and can’t be discussed openly in church. Three of them insist that, though they have rejected their denominations’ dogma, they still believe in God; they just say it’s complicated. The other two seem to accept that they, in fact, are unbelievers, that the line drawn by fundamentalists and the New Atheists is right, and they fall on the side of not believing.

Wherever they end up in their answers to the question of belief, all five of these men have taken belief seriously. They have not simply accepted or rejected imposed definitions of what faith means. They have struggled and tried to be honest about it.

Virtue Reborn

Bill Kinnon, in reviewing a book by Tom Wright called Virtue Reborn (apparently entitled, After You Believe - why Christian character matters in the States) notes late in his review:

What a call for each of us as the church - to work at this life of character building - leading to virtues that will cause us to do the right thing, when the moment comes, as it will for each of us. Where and when only God knows, but when it truly matters will we know it in our bones, marrow, hearts and brains - and do the right thing, make the right decision, becoming Christ-like in our character. Are we the signposts and beachheads of God's future kingdom in this current world? It is not just a matter of "luck" (grace) but rather preparation and work and decision-making so that doing the right thing becomes automatic. (The emphases are his.)

Kinnon sums up the book in this way: [Wright] does a masterful sweep of ethics and its various roots and streams, calling us back to working at Christian virtue - identifying and then avoiding the extremes of grace and works - those two polarizing positions of Christian history. In fact, the book gives us a broad enough and thoroughly orthodox way forward - to begin to become who we already are, in Christ - doing so framed within the church, communally, for the sake of the world, missionally.

The Presbyterian Stats

A report has just been released by The Presbyterian Panel, a research group that serves the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) [PCUSA].

The panel's report is presented as a "Religious and Demographic Profile of Presbyterians, 2008." The report contains relatively few surprises, and is filled with data about the beliefs of Presbyterian laypersons and clergy.

Albert Mohler, who is no doubt regarded as a Conservative in the Christian scene (though with kudos and plenty of insight and wisdom) opens his blog post on the topic with these words:

"Liberal Protestantism, in its determined policy of accommodation with the secular world, has succeeded in making itself dispensable." That was the judgment of Thomas C. Reeves in The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Protestantism, published in 1996. Fast-forward another fourteen years and it becomes increasingly clear that liberal Protestantism continues its suicide -- with even greater theological accommodations to the secular worldview.

His focus is on this point: the most significant theological question concerned the exclusivity of the Gospel and the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ for salvation. On that question there was great division, with over a third (36%) of PCUSA church members indicating that they "disagree" or "strongly disagree" with the statement that "only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved."

A much more detailed look at the stats involved appears on the GA Junkie site (GA for General Assembly, of course, and a site focused on the politics of Presbyterianism in the States). This writer looks at the actual question asked (Please indicate the extent to which you agree or disagree with...the following statement: only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved) and debates the case from there.

I won't go into the details of his arguments here, since they take up a fair amount of space on the original post, and he has a better head for interpreting statistics than I do.

Suffice to say, the two different perspectives expressed are both worth considering, and are perhaps not that far apart. And how does it all apply to the NZ scene?

It's worth noting the following (from Mohler's footnotes): The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was formed in 1983 as the union of the Presbyterian Church in the United States and the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. It is the largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States. More conservative Presbyterian bodies include the Evangelical Presbyterian Church [EPC] and the Presbyterian Church in America [PCA].

That Mosaic Generation

The Barna Group has recently published the results of their ongoing research into the biblical worldviews of young American adults - the Mosaics, as the Barna Group calls them.
Though the results have not changed substantially for better or worse since the last poll four years ago, they are not particularly encouraging amongst the 'born-again' component of the survey, who appear to be almost as prone to believing what they prefer to believe as the non-born-again component.

The Barna Group notes:

Varying numbers of Americans embrace the different aspects of biblical worldview thinking. The survey found that:

• One-third of all adults (34%) believe that moral truth is absolute and unaffected by the circumstances. Slightly less than half of the born again adults (46%) believe in absolute moral truth.

• Half of all adults firmly believe that the Bible is accurate in all the principles it teaches. That proportion includes the four-fifths of born again adults (79%) who concur.

• Just one-quarter of adults (27%) are convinced that Satan is a real force. Even a minority of born again adults (40%) adopt that perspective.

• Similarly, only one-quarter of adults (28%) believe that it is impossible for someone to earn their way into Heaven through good behavior. Not quite half of all born again Christians (47%) strongly reject the notion of earning salvation through their deeds.

• A minority of American adults (40%) are persuaded that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life while He was on earth. Slightly less than two-thirds of the born again segment (62%) strongly believes that He was sinless.

• Seven out of ten adults (70%) say that God is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe who still rules it today. That includes the 93% of born again adults who hold that conviction.

Suicides and Attendance at Church

The following paragraph comes from the Washington Times.
Psychiatric researchers at the University of Manitoba have established a link, they say, "between a person´s attendance at a religious worship service" and the desire to commit suicide.
No, this doesn't quite mean what it appears to say. Here's the next paragraph:
"The main finding of this study is that religious worship attendance is associated with a decreased risk of suicide attempts," said Daniel Rasic, who led the research. The findings were based on health surveys of 37,000 Canadians which included information about their spirituality - and specifically - their church attendance.
The article goes on to say that it's the people who actually attend church, rather than those who just consider themselves 'spiritual' who find themselves less inclined towards suicide. The study doesn't come to any conclusions as to why potentail suicides should be less suicidal as a result of attending church, but it's a good point to note, all the same.