Stan Grant finds a God problem at the wrong end of liberalism

It always pays to examine how someone frames an issue to how they want you to think about it. It’s a good way of working out their real intent and the assumptions they’re bringing.

Take Stan Grant’s essay on the weekend about religion in Australian public life, which begins: “Does Australia have a God problem?” Grant, who has been forthright about the positive role of Christianity in his own upbringing, clearly thinks we do — though you won’t find a statement anywhere near as clear as that. But he uses words like “divisive”, “implacable” and “existential”, which kinda suggest he’s pretty sure there’s a problem.

He also quotes a variety of commentators, philosophers and historians in his presentation of liberal society struggling to deal with the clash of rights — or, as he ends rather dramatically, the right to have rights.

But it’s the dearth of history that’s a key problem for Grant.

If Australia has a God problem now, it’s a pretty innocuous one compared to that of previous generations.

Sectarianism is at the heart of the white history of Australia, dating from invasion right through to our own living memory, dividing Protestant from Catholic, a British Australia from a nationalist one, threatening to tear the country apart in the debates over conscription in the First World War and lingering beyond World War II in persistent discrimination against Catholics by the Establishment.

Compared to the fundamental division between Protestant and Catholic Australians for much of Australian history, and the extraordinary discrimination suffered by Catholics for much of that time, the current debate about who gets to expel kids is trivial at best.

And that’s the difficulty with Grant’s framing. He may want us to think the issue is an existential, implacable one, but it’s taken years of huffing and puffing by News Corp and some Coalition figures to conjure up the illusion of religion under threat in Australia — and even then, large numbers of communities of faith, church leaders and even strongly religious politicians such as Dominic Perrottet think it’s a non-issue. A clear case of, if the molehill won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the molehill.

But press further into Grant’s framing and some other things fall out as it falls apart.

It’s not clear that Grant has any particular coherent account of the development of Western liberalism — though the Enlightenment (or a monolithic stereotype of it) apparently features in it — especially when the key idea of individualism is only mentioned once, and then in the statement: “Modernity itself is built upon the elevation of the individual, the rupture of tradition, and the goal of human flourishing.”

As it turns out, I agree fully with that. But like Grant’s claim that Australia faces some existential issue over religion, there’s a glaring absence: sectarianism. Individualism is not some emergent property of secularism or the rise of liberalism. Quite the opposite: it was created by religion itself. It is Protestantism, and it is the fundamental assertion of a personal relationship between the believer and God, via the Word, that seeds individualism.

Starting with Martin Luther, Protestantism moves Europe from a world based on a community of the faithful for whom a priest mediates with God, to one of individuals with their own direct line to the Lord via the vernacular Bible.

Grant overlooks all of that — and funnily enough, that’s exactly the criticism of the book he seems to heavily rely on, Catholic historian Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age.

And once the logic that individuals can determine their relationship with God is out of the bottle, it can never be put back in, becoming a key driver of religious fragmentation first, then toleration, then secularism, then economics.

Christianity cleaves into Protestantism and Catholicism, then Protestantism cleaves into Lutheranism and Calvinism, then into ever smaller churches, communities and sects. Then the logic of individualism spreads from religion to politics, to social structures, to the economy.

The economics of belief

Eventually it finds its fullest expression in the mid-20th century with the emergence of neoliberalism, which does away with any concept of community and elevates the individual to the status of supreme object of moral and political philosophy: consumer, producer, worker, given full freedom to maximise their economic value in a market economy unencumbered by community restrictions or states, even to move seamlessly around the globe to wherever they can maximise their value.

Necessarily, of course, at least half of any such group will face below-average economic outcomes; having one’s identity fixed to maximising one’s economic outcomes becomes, in any but the least developed economies, an alienating experience, driving a search for more meaningful forms of identification — usually tribalism of various kinds, based on racial identification, faith, sexuality, political affiliation, whatever you’ve got.

The spiritual “emptiness” that Grant attributes to liberalism in fact emerges from neoliberalism and its ruthless assertion of the primacy of the individual over any community — not some flabby, self-undermining secular political liberalism that right-wing critics (and some religious thinkers) like to level at the contemporary West.

It’s worth pointing out, however, that organised Christianity has often been on the side of those opposing liberal and neoliberal economics — and not just in the great tradition (ignored by Grant) of Christian socialism, or the rise of liberation theology in the Americas. It’s forgotten now, but George Pell was among the critics of WorkChoices when the Howard government unveiled it in 2005.

One response from the right to the “emptiness” that results from neoliberalism — from the stripping away of all social values other than one’s economic worth — is to try to exploit the search for other forms of identity through culture wars.

Divisions over relatively minor matters are ginned up, or they’re invented out of whole cloth, into conflicts portrayed by the right as fundamental ones in which one must take a side, with us or against us, civilisation versus barbarians. In these culture wars, according to the right, Western society is always in some major crisis, is always facing incipient collapse, is always on its last chance.

That’s exactly the kind of framing Grant ends up using about his “God problem” — existential and implacable. Grant’s essay, in the end, is the perfect symptom of the problem he is groping towards identifying.