Evangelicals and the End of Christendom

Religion, Australia and the Crises of the 1960s

Hugh Chilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138087781
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351615471
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: 20th Century History

Exploring the response of evangelicals to the collapse of 'Greater Christian Britain' in Australia in the long 1960s, this book provides a new religious perspective to the end of empire and a fresh national perspective to the end of Christendom.

In the turbulent 1960s, two foundations of the Western world rapidly and unexpectedly collapsed. 'Christendom', marked by the dominance of discursive Christianity in public culture, and 'Greater Britain', the powerful sentimental and strategic union of Britain and its settler societies, disappeared from the collective mental map with startling speed.

To illuminate these contemporaneous global shifts, this book takes as a case study the response of Australian evangelical Christian leaders to the cultural and religious crises encountered between 1959 and 1979. Far from being a narrow national study, this book places its case studies in the context of the latest North American and European scholarship on secularisation, imperialism and evangelicalism. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, it examines critical figures such as Billy Graham, Fred Nile and Hans Mol, as well as issues of empire, counter-cultural movements and racial and national identity.

This study will be of particular interest to any scholar of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century. It will also be a useful resource for academics looking into the wider impacts of the decline of Christianity and the British Empire in Western civilisation.

1
Citizenship

Fred Nile, political activism and the World’s Christian Endeavour Convention, 1962

‘A fundamental struggle’

Fred Nile’s maiden speech was a declaration of war. Elected to the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1981 after a successful ‘election crusade’, the 47-year-old Uniting Church minister later described the speech as ‘a call to arms in the battle against the world, the flesh and the devil’.¹ The increasing influence of ‘secular humanists’ on Australian politics signalled

a fundamental struggle between absolute values and relative values, between the Judeo-Christian ethic and the humanist ethic, between compassion and greed, and between spiritual values and materialism. That struggle is occurring in every area of our society – our schools, streets, prisons, welfare organisations, the media, universities, and even, dare I say, within political parties.

This almost Manichaean clash of worldviews after the lost hegemony of Christendom was, for Nile, a mandate for vigorous Christian political engagement. The soul of the nation was at stake. ‘I believe sincerely in the separation of church and state,’ he went on. ‘But I do not accept the separation of faith and state. No nation can live or survive for very long in a spiritual and moral vacuum.’ Rather than retreat in the face of the ‘permissive society’, he sought to be ‘a crusader against crime and corruption’, making the Parliament, ‘with the help of God, a pulpit and a platform to promote justice and decency for God and the family’.² In that maiden speech, Nile articulated his conviction that, though a minister of religion, he could best advance the cause of Christ by upholding ‘the Judeo-Christian ethic’ with its ‘absolute’ and ‘spiritual’ values from within the political arena. Heckled in another early speech by, in his recollection, a ‘loud-mouthed’ member of the Australian Labor Party with the taunt, ‘Anyhow, where is your parish?’, Nile replied, ‘Right here, brother! Right here!’³

Few Australian political figures have attracted as much controversy as Fred Nile. He has been criticised by the press, in the Parliament and from the pulpit as ‘obnoxious’ and ‘bigoted’, ‘moralistic’, ‘inciting prejudice’, a ‘tedious cleric’.⁴ On the same day as Nile’s maiden speech but in the lower house, while debating the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the Labor Attorney-General Frank Walker derided Nile as the leader of a band of ‘fanatical fundamentalist friends’, incapable of ‘rational arguments’. In a graphic reference to Nile’s campaigns against pornography as the National Coordinator of the Australian Festival of Light, Walker likened him to ‘a deranged derelict frantically searching through rubbish bins for items which satisfy some peculiar craving for filth’.⁵ Although he received such a virulent reception in Parliament, Nile had good reason to feel confident in his standing with the people. Almost one in ten New South Wales voters sent him into office in 1981, and sufficient numbers saw him retain and expand his independent foothold in the Legislative Council at every succeeding election, making him, at 2019, its longest-serving member. In the early twenty-first century, Nile’s profile grew even larger. His opposition to Muslim immigration, classroom ethics courses and gay marriage legislation were but a few of the issues on which he courted considerable controversy.⁶

Yet despite his prominence as the standard-bearer for the so-called Christian Right in Australia for over three decades, little attempt has been made to historicise Nile’s trajectory into public life and explain the reasons for his self-described crusading stance without reverting to clichés.⁷ Treatments of Nile’s politics and the evangelical political activism he represented have almost invariably cast him in American or British moulds. While he can be compared with the new evangelical political coalitions that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Moral Majority in the United States and the Nationwide Festival of Light in Britain, there are particularities of the Australian experience of post-Christendom political engagement which chafe against simple conflations.⁸ As the conservative backlash against the libertarianism of the 1960s and the politicisation of evangelicalism continue to attract strong historical and popular interest, further attention is needed on the contours of these movements outside the North.

So who was Fred Nile? What drove him to enter politics? What shaped the perceived threats to the nation during the long 1960s and called for the crusading posture evangelicals ought to take in response? A clue lies in the word Nile used most frequently in his maiden speech: ‘citizen’.⁹ Nile saw himself as a Christian citizen. Two months before the speech, the freshly elected clergyman had made this clear. Describing his Call to Australia Citizens’ Movement (which in 1997 became the present-day Christian Democratic Party) as a ‘citizens’ action group’, he added, ‘and I don’t want to be seen as a politician but as a Christian citizen in Parliament who is also an active ordained minister’.¹⁰ This chapter examines one of the strongest sources of Nile’s intellectual history in the early days of his so-called ‘fundamental struggle’ against the libertarian impulses of the 1960s: the Christian Endeavour movement. Nile’s schooling in the movement, his leadership of it (particularly at its last great moment, the 1962 World’s Christian Endeavour Convention in Sydney), and his transition into parliamentary politics centred on a particular conception of the nation which was radically challenged by moral liberalisation. That he entered Parliament in the immediate afterglow of the 1970s, and that his worldview was deeply shaped by the evangelical milieu of the late 1950s and early 1960s together with the ‘permissive society’ of the 1970s, makes Nile in some ways a fitting representative of the trajectory of evangelicalism and national public culture across these decades. Charting the declining fortunes of Christian Endeavour and the rise of Fred Nile, this chapter puts in stark relief the moral crises of the 1960s and the reasons for this particular ‘crusading’ response, a response which has had remarkable durability in Australia after Christendom.

Christian Endeavour and the making of Christian citizens

Christian Endeavour, or ‘CE’ as it was affectionately called, was the world’s first Church-based, interdenominational evangelical youth training organisation.¹¹ Founded in 1881 in the United States by Francis Clark as the Williston Congregational Church Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavour, CE represented a new approach to youth ministry. Frustrated by failed attempts to motivate young Christians to be ‘more useful in the service of God’, Clark attempted to ‘try something more serious’ than prayer meetings and social gatherings by establishing a society based on commitment, participation and accountability.¹² Boys and girls were called to make a pledge of loyal service to Christ and their local church, specifically entailing regular personal Bible reading and prayer, and attendance and active participation at every meeting of the Society. The hope was that this would strengthen their faith – their Christian endeavour – as well as train them for life-long service to God, Church and country. Evangelical conversionism and activism were centre-stage, framed by strong holiness teaching and a group identity reinforced by rituals such as the pledge made by new members and symbols such as the CE lapel badge.

The idea seemed to work amongst Clark’s youth, and as he described and disseminated his efforts, the Christian Endeavour model was quickly replicated. New societies sprang up in churches of varying denominations all over the United States, their membership doubling annually, with 253 societies and 14,892 Endeavourers by 1885. In that year, Christian Endeavour societies were formed in Foochow, China, and Jaffna, Ceylon, followed by South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria. By 1892, with over 22,000 societies and 1.25 million members – many from beyond the traditional centres of Christendom – the Southern Presbyterian could claim that ‘[t]here is scarcely a land on the face of the earth without its societies of Christian Endeavor’.¹³ By 1906, at its peak, the movement reported four million members in 67,000 societies across 80 denominations and 50 countries.¹⁴ Though membership statistics throughout the movement’s history seem to have been somewhat exaggerated, it was undeniable that CE quickly became a global, interdenominational evangelical youth movement, one of the largest voluntary associations in the world.¹⁵

From the outset, Francis Clark organised local and national conventions to promote the work of CE and show its value in buttressing the nation against the dislocations of modernity. It is, in fact, hard to understand both Christian Endeavour and evangelical identity more broadly without countenancing the central importance of conferences and conventions. At the first All-American Convention in Montreal in 1893, Clark called for ‘a new and keener interest in public affairs’, going beyond the temperance campaigns with which Endeavourers had already been deeply involved. He specifically advocated the formation of ‘good-citizenship committees’ and the inclusion of ‘topics relating to civic righteousness’ in Endeavour conventions.¹⁶ Consequently, one day at each subsequent convention was devoted to ‘patriotic demonstrations and to addresses on the Christian citizen and his duties’.¹⁷ Though Clark was anxious not to become involved in ‘partisan politics’ which might distract from the spiritual focus of the movement, he was unequivocal about the civic purposes for which Endeavourers were being trained:

The problems of the religious life are so intimately connected with good citizenship, the great causes of temperance, of pure living, of charitable work on the remote frontiers; they are so interlaced with questions of national integrity, that it is quite impossible to imagine that young men and women being trained along CE lines should fail to feel their responsibilities as citizens or forget their duties to their native land.¹⁸

Good citizenship was an inevitable outflow of good Christianity. Piety and patriotism were natural bedfellows.

On one level, ‘Christian citizenship’, according to CE, was merely a synonym for Christian social action in a conservative key. But on another, the use of the word ‘citizenship’ carried weight that ‘social engagement’ or ‘public responsibility’ or ‘evangelical witness’ did not. For where other Christians in other times might use the New Testament motif of dual heavenly and earthly citizenship as one illustration of the Christian’s social vocation, Endeavourers used it as the reigning metaphor. Indeed, Christian Endeavour had such an emphasis on promoting good citizenship that it was criticised by one proto-fundamentalist for forgetting its holiness teaching roots.¹⁹

While Christian Endeavour was the first and most successful Church-based youth ministry organisation, and claimed to have coined the term ‘Christian citizenship’, it was not alone in training young Christians to be useful members of both their Church and their nation.²⁰ What Ian Tyrell calls a ‘wider ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Billy Graham, 1959 and 1979
• Introduction: The rupture of the 1960s
• 1 Citizenship: Fred Nile, political activism and the World’s Christian Endeavour Convention, 1962
• 2 Relevance: Hans Mol, secularisation and the Religion in Australia Survey, 1966
• 3 America: Billy Graham, Americanisation and the 1968–1969 crusades
• 4 Empire: Marcus Loane, Britishness and the Cook Bicentenary, 1970
• 5 Renewal: The Jesus People, the counter-culture and Kairos, 1973
• 6 World: Jack Dain, Athol Gill and the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation, 1974
• Conclusion: Evangelicals and the end of Christendom
• Bibliography
• Index