Life & Faith

Brexit, Trump ... and the Voice? Australia’s political divides

British journalist David Goodhart on the Anywhere-Somewhere divide challenging national unity abroad and at home.
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Is Australia polarised?  
The country is no UK roiled by Brexit, or US torn apart by the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016. But we’ve had our own brushes with polarisation – most recently on the question of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. 
On this episode of Life & Faith, we look at the issue of national division from a sideways angle: could the Anywhere-Somewhere divide explain contemporary polarisation and the gulf in people’s instincts? 
The terms belong to David Goodhart, author of The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics and Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century.  
People in the Anywhere class, Goodhart says, tend to be well-educated, mobile, and cosmopolitan, making up about 20-25% of the national population. Their Somewhere counterparts, on the other hand, tend to be more rooted in their local communities, perhaps more conservative and communitarian, and make up 50% of the population. 
Neither worldview is better or worse, he argues, but Anywheres tend to run the country, and don’t reliably read the national room. For Goodhart, this explains the cry for recognition of recent populist movements – and raises the question of where someone might seek what Goodhart calls “unconditional recognition”. 
“The institutions that gave people unconditional recognition like the family, like the church or indeed the nation, all of these things are weaker and the weakening of that unconditional recognition bears most heavily on the people who are the lowest achievers, as it were, in modern liberal democracies.” 
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Explore 
David’s book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics 
David’s book Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century 
David’s “Too Diverse?” essay for Prospect  
Brigid Delaney’s piece in The Guardian after the 2019 federal election 
The LSE blog post on British Parliament’s “class problem” 
The SMH report on the backgrounds of Australia’s federal MPs 

Seen & Heard V: Getting disenchanted with disenchantment

Our cultural narrative says there is no supernatural or transcendent realm. The CPX team wants to break that spell. 
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Seen & Heard is back – and this time, the team have disenchantment in their sights, or the belief that there is no more supernatural or transcendent realm to life, that science is the only verifiable path to truth, and that all things religious are debunked, once and for all. 
But is this true? The books and films we’ve been reading and watching might disagree.  
Natasha highlights beloved Australian author Helen Garner’s encounter with an angel and our flirtation with the supernatural through occasions like Halloween, before taking us through the supernatural stylings of the latest Poirot film A Haunting in Venice, based (extremely loosely) on Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party.  
Simon has been reading the biography of tennis icon and former World No. 1 Andre Agassi who, it turns out, hated tennis and wrestled with fame, but discovered that helping people is the “only perfection there is”.  
A world that has cast off religion and the transcendent also leaves behind any account of the good life that goes along with those claims. Yet Agassi discovered that being the best tennis player in the world didn’t fulfil him. Only serving others did, which resonates with the Christian claim that the good life is a life lived for others.  
And Justine raves about Susannah Clarke’s novel Piranesi and its vivid portrayal of what the disenchanted view of the world lacks: wonder, deep communion with the world, joy, and hope. Plus, Justine makes a bold claim:  Susannah Clarke is the 21st-century successor to C.S. Lewis. 
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Explore 
Helen Garner describing her angelic encounter at the 2018 Sydney Writers’ Festival (from 30 mins) 
Sean Kelly’s column mentioning Hilary Mantel’s possibly demonic encounter 
Trailer for A Haunting in Venice 
Natasha’s article on Halloween, published in the Sydney Morning Herald 
Andre Agassi’s Open: An Autobiography 
The Guardian’s interview with Susannah Clarke 
Piranesi by Susannah Clarke 
Wikipedia entry on the real-life Piranesi, the 18th-century architect and artist 

Coming to Faith Through Dawkins

A new book tells the stories of people whose encounters with New Atheism set them on the path to Christianity.  
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“He said, I’ve been a scientist all my life and I was an atheist – quite a happy atheist, you know, I wasn’t particularly looking for other worldviews. Until I read The God Delusion in 2006. And that really shook my faith in atheism.” 
It’s around 15 years ago that the so-called New Atheism – represented most prominently by the “Four Horsemen” Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and of course Richard Dawkins – had its heyday. The conversation they instigated gave many people permission to fully and publicly embrace disbelief in God; perhaps even a strong belief that religion was harmful and should be done away with.  
For others, encountering the work of the New Atheists had quite the opposite effect. A new book, Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity, edited by Alister McGrath and Denis Alexander, tells the stories of people for whom, paradoxically, New Atheism became a doorway to Christian faith.  
In this episode of Life & Faith, co-editor Denis Alexander explains how the book “wrote itself” and why it’s not meant to be a triumphalist read. And contributors Johan Erasmus and Anikó Albert explain why the New Atheism had such a significant – and contrary – impact on their lives. 
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Buy Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity 

“Mere Christianity”: why does C.S. Lewis’s unlikely classic continue to hold such appeal?

This week marks 60 years since the death of CS Lewis and that seems like an appropriate moment to return to a very popular episode from a couple of years back.
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A lot of people know the date 22nd of November 1963 because that's the date that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. That dramatic event overshadowed another death that same day on the other side of the Atlantic – the death of the beloved writer and public Christian CS Lewis, best known still today for his Narnia stories. It's 60 years this week since Lewis's death and that seems like an appropriate moment to return to a very popular episode from a couple of years back. In 2021 we marked 80 years since the origins of Lewis's book, Mere Christianity, which in an unlikely turn of events became one of the most influential books of the past century. Mere Christianity and Lewis's other writings have only grown in popularity since his death in 1963, and this episode goes some way to explaining why.

Andrew Hastie: Lessons from the combat zone

Seeing war up close and surviving nonetheless leaves its mark.
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Andrew Hastie would not be the first person to join the defence force out of both a hunger for adventure and deep-seated sense of duty.
After a distinguished career in the army, including being an officer in the elite Special Air Service (SAS), Hastie speaks to Life & Faith about the experience. He explains why he joined up, his gruelling entry into the SAS and his three tours of Afghanistan.
Here we learn about the Afghan people Andrew worked with, the pressure and intense experience of engaging an enemy in an unfamiliar land and culture, and the toll of responsibility when the stakes are so high. This is a raw and honest assessment of the cost of war, the ethics of battle and the weight of the hard-won lessons of the combat zone.
What can faith offer to those experiencing the wounds of moral injury so prevalent in those who have been taken out of civilian life and placed into the extreme environment of war?

The psychology of hope

Hope feels scarce, but it’s not lost – and it’s within our power to be people of hope.   
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“I certainly have clients who are in their twenties who are saying to me, I will not have children because look at the world! So, the question is, where is the vision of hope?” 
Clinical psychologist Leisa Aitken gets that hope seems in short supply right now. Daily headlines are a barrage of bad news – of wars and rumours of wars, politics in breakdown, the life support systems of the earth in crisis. Rising rates of poor mental health among the young show that the next generation is struggling. The future doesn’t seem all that bright. 
We need collective action to address the world’s growing disorder. But who do we need to be in the face of our present hope crisis? 
Leisa has been researching hope for the past decade. In this interview, fresh from her 2023 CPX Richard Johnson Lecture, she runs us through the psychology of hope, offering us tools to help us cope with the times in which we live.  
Leisa also covers the limits of mindfulness, the correlation between hope and feeling connected to something bigger than the self, and what is within our power to do – right now – to be people of hope. 
“It’s easy to spend our lives just in distraction. But we can surround ourselves with people who are going to help us bring about our hopes and we can have eyes to see the glimpses of what we hope for – and to be those glimpses,” Leisa said. 
“The beauty of glimpses is we don’t have to change everything in the world to bring hope about. We need just a taste. Just a glimpse.” 
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Explore 
Leisa’s website 
The “sunny nihilism” article 
Fancy some marriage advice from Leisa? 
More on mindfulness from Leisa 

Down the Rabbit Hole

Why have conspiracy theories gained so much traction? And are Christians more prone to believe them?  
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“I’d like to say that it’s all intellectual, but I don’t think it is.” 
The belief that behind the visible mechanisms of society, powerful forces are up to no good is hardly a new idea (or reality). But geopolitics and culture wars in recent years have thrown up plenty of material for conspiracy theorists to work with.  
What’s so appealing about these theories? When do they become a problem? And how can we have constructive conversations about them, without one side just infuriating or dismissing the other?  
Nigel Chapman is the lead author of the ISCAST paper “Who to Trust? Christian Belief in Conspiracy Theories”, which digs into the phenomenon of conspiracism, including how Christian faith and community can either feed into or mitigate against such beliefs.  
And Michel Gagné is someone who’s been down the rabbit hole himself, and returned – starting with the myths and theories surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 60 years ago. He explains how he got in – and out! – and offers advice for families and friends who find themselves divided and exhausted by conspiracy theories. 
“If we dehumanise others, we are on the slippery slope of creating a false reality, a simplistic myth that does not reflect our world.” 
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EXPLORE:  
ISCAST discussion paper, Who to Trust? Christian Belief in Conspiracy Theories  
Michel Gagné’s book, Thinking Critically about the Kennedy Assassination: Debunking the Myths and Conspiracy Theories 
Michel Gagné’s podcast Paranoid Planet

REBROADCAST: The “Christian” Classroom

Why might someone who’s not religious want to send their kids to a faith-based school?
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“Teachers are one of the few groups of people in society who can tell other people what to do in their discretionary time and – by and large – they obey.” 
Education is among our core activities as a society – so it’s unsurprising that it can be a battleground for all sorts of ideas. 
David I. Smith is Professor of Education at Calvin University, and he has spent decades thinking about how education really forms people. He says that there’s no such thing as a “vanilla” or “neutral” education – and that even a maths or a French textbook will imply a whole way of seeing the world and other people. 
“We spent a lot of time learning how to say in French and German, ‘This is my name. This is my favourite food. I like this music. I don’t like biology. This is what I did last weekend. I would like two train tickets to Hamburg. I would like the steak and fries. I would like a hotel room for two nights.’
So the implicit message of the textbooks was that the reason why we learn other people’s languages is so that we can obtain the goods and services that we deserve and so that we can tell people about ourselves … It’s not really imagining us as people who listen to other people’s stories or as people who care about the members of the culture we’re visiting who don’t work in hotels, or as people who might want to talk about the meaning of life and not just the price of a hamburger.”
Given that about a third of Australian schools are religious, and that faith-based education is the subject of nervousness on both the left and right of politics these days, it’s worth asking: why do parents who aren’t religious want to send their kids to Christian schools? What’s the content of a “Christian” education? And what happens when religious schools get it wrong?

The wounds you can’t see

We’ve heard of burnout and PTSD but what about “moral injury”, that’s affecting soldiers and also Covid-19 health workers?  
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“Soul sick”.  
That’s how some of the literature describes the effects of “moral injury” on people. Perhaps we’re more used to violence leaving a physical mark or causing psychological trauma that disrupts a person’s ability to live their everyday life.  
But moral injury is a different kind of wound altogether. As defined by Andrew Sloane, theologian and Morling College ethicist, “it’s when somebody has either done or witnessed something which is in deep conflict with their internalised moral values, and it leaves them damaged psychologically, emotionally, ethically, spiritually.” 
“It is a disruption to someone’s understanding of themselves. It’s a matter of wounded identity and a wounded sense of what the world is meant to be and who they’re meant to be in it,” Andrew said, before explaining how the experience of caring for people during the Covid-19 pandemic left many health workers morally injured.  
In this episode of Life & Faith, we also hear from Sam Gregory, the last Australian Defence Force (ADF) chaplain in Afghanistan, sent there as Coalition forces were withdrawing after 20 years in the country.  
He describes the turmoil of feeling “the sense [that] we weren’t done yet, and that we were being constrained by political forces to bring about the end of that operation”. Then there were his “feelings of profound shame” that Australian military involvement in Afghanistan meant that soldiers essentially had to dehumanise not only the enemy but also their local allies. 
“My faith tells me that every human is made in the image of God and therefore worthy of dignity and respect and value. And then I’m part of an organiszation that has taken that dignity and respect away from a whole nation of people,” Sam said. 
This is a confronting and difficult exploration of the invisible wounds suffered by those to whom we entrust our safety and security. But as health workers leave the caring professions, and returned war veterans struggle to adjust to normal life, it’s an increasingly necessary conversation.  
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Explore 
Andrew Sloane’s article for ABC Religion & Ethics on moral injury and Covid-19 health workers 
Atonement: the Australian Story episode featuring Dean Yates 

Gabriel Bani’s life in the Torres Strait

Australians are used to filling in forms that ask whether they have Aboriginal or Torres Strait heritage. But not many of us have contact with people from the farthest northern reaches of our country.  
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This week on Life & Faith we talk with Torres strait community leader and pastor Gabriel Bani. We hear about his growing up on the islands where houses were crowded but community life was very strong.  
Gabriel tells us about his, and his people’s embrace of Christianity, despite the dubious methods used to bring that message to his people. 
What has been the cost to the people of the Torres Strait of their encounter with Europeans? And what can be learned from the islander people? Gabriel Bani urges us to listen to his people, and to be hopeful, as we all search for meaningful and positive engagement.