Trying times, but there's always hope

Dear ,

It’s been a challenging few years and I know that some of you wonder from time to time what the point is of continuing to fight when even our friends conspire to steal our rights and freedoms, bankrupt our economies, and defenestrate merit and facts.

Yet Christmas endures as a time to refresh and reconnect and as an inspiration that out of the implausible, improbable change can grow.

This year I’m wondering not so much about the Christmas story, but how it was that Christianity came to be the most popular religion in the world.

It certainly helped that it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, but that was in 380 AD, almost four hundred years after the event we celebrate this Sunday, and after long periods of persecutions and matrydoms. What did it offer that allowed it to out-compete the pagan religions that formed the religious orthodoxies of the Mediterranean world?

Part of the answer is self-belief and faith. The apostles and disciples really believed in what they had to offer, and they wouldn’t stop talking about it, even when threatened with persecution and death.

Another part of the answer is efficiency. Christianity is essentially an heretical form of Judaism, and the Jews invented monotheism. This is a much tidier approach to religion than that of the pagans.

The monotheistic premise is that there is one God, and that he created the world. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent – all-powerful, everywhere, all-knowing and supremely good.

To the Jews and the Muslims, he is completely abstract. When Moses encounters God in the desert through a burning bush and asks him his name he says “I am that I am” which the Jews write to be even more abstract as the unpronounceable YHWH, which is rendered as Yahweh (or Jehovah).

Contrast that to the pagan Gods. In the Greek and Roman pantheons they are more or less superhumans who are none of the “omnis” listed above. They didn’t create the world, and they are not just. Like humans they can be capricious and unjust.

They may appear in their own human forms, but they may also take over the forms of mortals, as Athena takes the form of Mentor, at the beginning of the Odyssey.

To live in a pagan world is to be terrified of unintentionally upsetting one of these deities, and if they are upset, then they have to be bought off through sacrifice, sometimes of the most gruesome kind. And pleasing one may antagonise another, leading to something like the Trojan War.

But what if there were only one God and that God were reasonable and just, and capable of enforcing his decisions? As I said, monotheism is much more efficient. One God, one lot of sacrifice, and certainty, unlike the chaos of the pagan system.

Yet that wasn’t enough. Even if Judaism had been evangelical and tried to convert gentiles I suspect it would still not have spread very far because of its abstraction, as well as its strict rules and observances.

So Christianity has another element. It jumps from the abstract to the concrete through the birth of Jesus. Not only does he personify God, but his teaching wipes away the complexities of the Mosaic laws, substituting simple principles, often embodied in stories, like the one of the Good Samaritan, or the Prodigal Son, and aphorisms, like the Golden Rule.

This provides his disciples with a message that is easy to spread because it comes not just with logic, but with emotional connection.

Christianity also brought a cohesion and philosophical depth that pagan religions lacked. It expressed the Bible as God's plan, and Jesus as the fulfilment of it. Christianity was designed to be internally logical and consistent (even if you think it may not always succeed). This made for a theology which could bridge across into philosophy. Jesus is the “logos” or word (John 1:1), “logos” having a precise philosophical meaning to the Greeks encompassing not just word, but truth and dialogue.

So for these, and other reasons, Christianity took the Mediterranean pagan world by storm, even penetrating into Asia as far as India.

The other aspect of it was that it worked. On average, countries where Christianity predominated were more orderly, industrious, fruitful, just and innovative than those that weren’t. It provided a framework where people were more able to get on and do things without social disruption than in pagan societies.

I say “on average” because it wasn’t straight-line progress, and there were wars, civil and other, but a shared belief in divine justice and individual worth made them less likely, if not non-existent.

How does this relate to our moment?

Well, we have a coherent philosophy, based on human rights, merit and empiricism which is demonstrated to work. Ours is an efficient philosophy because you only have to focus on getting the fundamental rights sorted, and individuals will look after the rest, without central interference.

We face a new paganism where gods like Equity and Diversity are worshipped, and that wants to tear our world down. This neo-paganism is inhabited by a myriad of “superhumans”, enabled as often as not by social media, who lie in wait to persecute the unwary. Their demands are capricious, and there is no logical way to approach, or to anticipate, them.

If these gods say a man can be a woman, or vice-versa, then you better believe it; that reducing carbon-dioxide emissions can have a meaningful effect on bushfires and floods, then so be it; that increasing debt and taxes is the way to grow productivity and real wages, then amen to that; and so on.

The logos has been entirely abandoned in favour of the doctrinaire and the illogical, truth is said to be entirely subjective, and by changing cultural norms you can change biological reality. Like the pagan world there is little cohesion, and everything is up for negotiation all the time, irrespective of whether it conforms to reality or not.

It may seem hopeless but the lesson from Christmas is clear: persist, clarify, illustrate, stick to the truth and be logically coherent.

As the Executive Director of the AIP that is what I intend to do. Expect many more functions and publications next year, despite the political climate. If our material and message isn’t clear, then tell me so I can clarify it. We’ll be looking for other opportunities, like the McIlwraith lecture, to illustrate those principles through stories and people that are inspiring and relatable. And the logos – the search for truth, whether comfortable or not, through dialogue and engagement – will be our overarching structure.

Optimistically I’d like to think this federal Labor government might have been the best gift we could have had because it gives us the opportunity to rejuvenate our side of the argument, and refocus it, against a government which has started out poorly and threatens to get even worse.

Wishing you and yours all the best for Christmas and the New Year,

Graham Young and the Executive
Australian Institute for Progress