AUDIO
 |
Archbishop Peter Jensen's Christmas Message 2011 on the centrality of Jesus to human history
|
This is the second of a three part series looking at "happiness and hedonism". The first - Thank God you are Australian - looked at the why 'thanksgiving' is an antidote to consumerism and material envy.
****
Nearly all Australians are hedonists.
In fact, I am confident you will have hedonists sitting in your church’s pews this Sunday who call themselves Christians and are very moral people.
This line of thinking is so pervasive that we probably all adopt a hedonist perspective for certain aspects of our lives.
As co-author of the latest AMP-NATSEM report - The pursuit of happiness: life satisfaction in Australia, Rebecca Cassells, rightly observes: "happiness is the goal that most Australians strive for".
This should come as no surprise. The 'pursuit of happiness' is the guiding principle of our entire culture. It justifies the drive for wealth creation and the focus on economic growth.
Shock finding: Australian are becoming more conservative on marriage
One mistake when preaching against hedonism is to equate it with 'selfishness'. This will just let your listeners off the hook because very few people believe they are amoral, egoistic pleasure-seekers.
Contrary to the way I often hear it spoken about in sermons, hedonistic thinking does not always produce what Christians would see as 'immoral' behaviour.
Andrew Norton, Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, has been charting Australians changing attitudes to sex.
As most of you would already suspect attitudes to premarital sex and homosexuality have become more liberal over recent decades.
What may surprise you is that Australians' attitudes to extramarital sex have actually become more conservative in the same period.
Norton has a little bit of difficulty explaining these apparently contradictory results. He rightly links the liberalizing trend to a decline in Christian adherence.
So why are Australians also moving towards a more conservative or 'Christian' view of fidelity in marriage?
Norton has only identified one half of the puzzle. The answer is that most Australians have replaced Christianity with a faith in 'social hedonism' - or what students of philosophy would technically call 'classic utilitarianism'.
All three of Norton's findings are entirely consistent with our society's growing commitment to social hedonism.
Or as Norton puts it, Australians have come to believe "that prevailing laws and norms caused huge misery to gay people and their partners in sham marriages".
(Likewise a belief that 'try before you buy' would ensure long-term happiness has helped boost widespread social acceptance of defacto relationships and pre-marital sex. In contrast, I suspect infidelity is increasingly being associated with divorce and the misery felt by those betrayed rather than seen as a path to freedom from loveless marriages.)
The point I am making is this: social hedonists don't merely care about their own self-interest but in the 'happiness' of society as a whole.
Australian 'social hedonism': what it means in practice
Liberal societies like ours are built on the maxim attributed to Jeremy Bentham: "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation".
This “greatest-happiness principle” found its deepest and most influential articulation in John Stuart Mill's classic work Utilitarianism.
To cut a long story short, what Mills added to Bentham's formulation was a qualitative view of happiness rather than a quantative approach. For Mills, happiness is the intellectual and moral satisfaction that blossoms when one follows the disciplined path of virtue rather than amoral pleasure-seeking.
From Mills theory flows the contemporary concepts of 'well-being' and 'life satisfaction' that are most often used to evaluate public policy in Australian political discourse. These terms are long been used to frame major social research such as the AMP-NATSEM report and so have become the accepted benchmarks for assessing right behaviour.
And so at the AMP-NATSEM launch luncheon my fellow guests found it easy to accept the findings of 'happiness research' that critiqued the limits of consumerism, for example.
Most Australians already suspect money cannot guarantee anything more than short-term happiness because they see their longer term well-being tied to their relational capital: strong community connections, faithful marriages, respectful children and deep friendships.
Joining the theological dots
As you would expect from a thinker grounded in Victorian Christianity, the social hedonism of Mills smells a lot like Proverbs: it is biblical wisdom sans God.
In fact Mills was the intellectual inheritor of 19th century Christian ultility theory, which he tried to shake free from its grounding in the Proverbial 'Fear of the Lord'.
And this is where the contemporary conversation about 'happiness' demands a Christian perspective. It should be an open door for Christian apologetics. But in a conversation that has already equated the Christian ethic with 'misery', I fear Christians are unable to engage in this conversation with the depth required, struggling to explain what the Bible means by concepts such as 'sin'.
Discussion points
A better starting point might be to ask:
"¢ What exactly do Australians imagine when they picture a 'happy life'?
"¢ To what extent is this picture dependent on being free from death and sin?
"¢ Is 'sin' more than injustice and misery inflicted by fellow humans?
OK over to you. What do you think the Bible says to social hedonists?
NEXT TIME : Is Christian hedonism heretical?
My own part of Sydney is very family oriented. And so people's picture of a 'happy life' is very focussed on their children's well-being. The result is that a high % of social capital is invested in maintaining parks etc and a very high proportion of household expenditure (financially and in time) is spent on kids: on education, tutoring, kid's sport etc. The work-life pattern this generates leaves no time for church.
I would love to hear from some of your expert Bible teachers on how we can preach the gospel into this kind of context.
Tim Keller has done modelled this for Manhattanites. But New Yorkers are not like Sydneysiders, so you can't directly repeat his material.
As to how to communicate with folk, I think we need to bridge the gap between knowledgeable Bible teachers and sociologists and anthropologists. Perhaps we need to look for some kind of regular conferencing between the disciplines.
I didn't mean they literally don't have time, just that they don't perceive they have time for something that is not seen as priority (ie they don't think church will contribute much to their happiness). In the main, they are 'unconvinced' about the relevance of church rather than antagonistic.
So yes there is truth in your comment Ian - in my observation our churches have far stronger connections with 'non-churching' Australians when they are perceived to contribute to the well-being of people's kids, whether through a school, a pre-school, a playgroup etc
Apart from sociologists, churches should start a dialogue with trade unions. There is a common cause there, in particular around work-life issues and the very negative impact on the working classes of recent social changes.
Then, a decade later they started following the book of Proverbs because it DOES work. (That's why it's in the Bible.)
If you give them a bit more time, they'll realise that they need a relationship with Jesus Christ. This is a profound realisation that many Anglicans sitting in pews have not come to.
It really irks me when the Anglican church finds fault with whatever it can about non-Christians in its diocese and the way these non-Christians live their lives. For example, I've heard a prominent Anglican minister in the last couple of years bemoaning the pursuit of wealth by non-Christians in Sydney. While this observation has its merits, it ignores the fact that everybody living in Sydney is on a treadmill, often not of their own choosing, because Sydney is one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to live.
In relation to the above paragraph, I am going to write the following paragraph in uppercase because I believe it is very important.
I THINK THAT THE ANGLICAN DIOCESE OF SYDNEY HAS NO IDEA JUST HOW MUCH IT IS SHOOTING ITSELF IN THE FOOT BY FINDING FAULT WITH THE WAY NON-CHRISTIANS IN ITS DIOCESE ARE LIVING THEIR LIVES. THERE IS NOTHING CLEVER OR REVELATORY ABOUT IT. IT MAKES NON-CHRISTIANS WANT TO TURN THEIR BACK ON THE CHURCH AND RUN. IT MAKES CHRISTIANS WANT TO DO THE SAME. THAT IS WHY THE ANGLICAN CHURCH HAS BEEN IN DECLINE. IT HAS NEVER BEEN SATISFIED TO BE HAPPY OR
If your main point here is this: evangelical Anglicans have a tendency to sound like they are against 'being happy'... then stay tuned because that's a key point I want to address in my next blog in this series: "what is the place of joy in the Christian life?"
I'd agree with your comments about the foolishness of making superficial criticisms about Sydneysiders being greedy or pleasure-seeking. In fact that is absolutely what I was trying to say: the situation is far more complex than many preachers allow.
But that said, surely there is a place for trying to understand reality. There is no use pretending our culture is 'becoming' Christian when there is no evidence to support this claim.
You said:
"This will just let your listeners off the hook"
Yeah, this is the whole point. The Anglican church has a long history of never wanting to let its audience off the hook. It is continually finding hooks to hang people on. So, if a person is working hard, earning good money and becoming prosperous, the church will say something like, "We must make sure we're not becoming materialistic." If a person is becoming more disciplined about following Jesus and is putting sin under their feet, the church will say something like, "We must make sure that we don't rely on our own works and righteousness for our salvation."
My point is that the most dangerous thing in church to be is right because the Anglican church thinks that human beings are fundamentally wrong. What it doesn't understand is that Jesus Christ has called human beings to become new creations which necessarily involves being right. When it comes across people who are exhibiting the fruit of being new creations, whether Christians or non-Christians, the church would be wise to affirm and praise that fruit rather than looking for ways to prune. The fact is that the church is led by people. It is not their role to prune other people. That is God's role. It is their role to prune themselves. This is all about the fact that one should not judge others, especially when it relates to them doing the right thing.
If human beings are fundamentally good, how do you understand the atonement?
You are a nice person and I regret that my original post appeared to directly confront you yourself. This was not my intention. It is a result of my often flammable nature. You have proved yourself more than mature enough to interpret the underlying message of my post without taking it personally.
I am who I am and I try to call things as I see them. Sometimes I am overly harsh. Sometimes I am a hypocrite because it is me often finding fault with the church the way I criticise the church finding fault.
Fundamentally, I am interested in pursuing truth and I don't have too much concern for whose sensibilities are impacted along the way - including my own. That is to say, if I think that I am out of line, I will say so, in the interest of pursuing truth.
I don't believe that humans are fundamentally good. I believe that the goal of life is to become a new creation. You can only become a new creation after you accept that Jesus Christ has died on the cross for your sins. I share your adherence to orthodox Christianity.
My point in relation to non-Christians who are not new creations is that we should not be trying to find some reason for them doing the right thing, such as opposing adultery, which reason reflects negatively on them. We should rather be reflecting on how society is steadily changing for the better.
The Anglican church spends more time harping on the fallen state of humankind than pursuing the God-given goal of its sanctification - becoming a new creation through faith in Jesus Christ.
I've been mulling on what you've been saying. I want to pick up this comment:
If I understand you correctly you have been arguing that the evidence on adultery suggests that the morality of Australians is becoming more 'Christian'.
Is that correct?
Basically the facts are as follows in the change from the mid 1980s to now.
1. Approve of pre-marital sex >> up from just over 50% to over 65%.
(unfortunately researchers have stopped distinguishing between attitudes to cohabitation and casual pre-marital sex).
2. Approve of homosexuality >> up from 25% to 55%
3. Disapprove of infidelity >> up from 80% to 90%.
I think we can safely assume therefore that roughly half of Australians think pre-marital sex and homosexuality can be 'moral' behaviours and that infidelity is 'immoral'. In the mid 80s about half of Australians thought all three were 'immoral'.
Yes, that's correct.
I agree from your comment above that number 1 is a cause for concern. However, for the full past thirty years, teenagers have been indoctrinated into a sex-saturated culture, driven by the media, which has put them under enormous temptation. To a large extent, I see people who succumb to pre-marital sex as victims of their environment. I am not one of them.
I don't think that number 2 is a problem because although 55% of the population approves of homosexuality, I don't believe that 55% of the population would approve of themselves engaging in homosexual activity. The percentage of people who engage in homosexual activity is, I believe, still low and probably, at a guess, less than 10% of the population.
I see this 55% as being politically correct as a result of extensive indoctrination by the media over the past fifteen years. It is worth asking the question, "What group of people or individuals is interested in promoting tolerance towards homosexuality?" It is the same group of people who are actively seeking to destroy the fabric of society, which fabric compromises biblically sound relationships between all of the different types of people in society.
These sexual behaviours have found acceptance (or not) because they fit with people's pre-existing belief system (ie that right behaviour is determined by what increases happiness and what decreases harm.)
You are right that I'm talking about what people say is right/wrong rather what they do themselves. After all in previous centuries when Christian moral norms were stronger some people still had gay sex etc. Likewise although the vast majority of Australians say infidelity is wrong people are still having affairs.
But you can't say perceptions of right/wrong have no impact on the real world.
I am uncertain how survey teams define "Christian." Evangelicals are a minority of "Christians" but we do tend to speak as if our particular view of being Christian is absolutely correct. Perhaps that is what is meant by some of the criticisms of "Anglicans" in this thread. I am not sure that there are significant differences, overall, between the views of Australian Christians and non-Christians on most issues. Almost everything depends on the wording of questions and the social context of the survey.
Measuring values depends on so many variables that the best we can say about surveys is that they are interesting for discussion purposes. The word "hedonism" has an historical context and I am not sure it is really relevant in modern Australia. Few Australians practice the kind of behaviours of historic hedonism. I am not even sure that happiness, as Australians pursue it, is properly linked to traditional views of hedonism.
In terms of the research on acceptance of homosexuality, the question was scaled as follows:
How strong are your religious beliefs? very strong / strong / weak / very weak etc
What historic context did you have in mind Ian? And what do you mean by 'traditional views' of hedonism?
Technically utilitarianism is part of the 'hedonist' family of ideas.
Surely its indisputable that utilitarianism is the dominant worldview right across the political spectrum from Green to Liberals?
Hedonism, I believe, came into common use in the 19C as part of a revival of classical social ideas—the same era that imposed Latin grammar and spellings on English. I understand that historically it relates to the pursuit of sensual self-indulgence resting on the theory that satisfying desire is a primary, if not the primary, aim of human life. House of Commons reports show a thoroughly hedonistic 19C London.
I don't think that really describes the Australian pursuit of happiness, which was the primary goal of utilitarianism and is most clearly stated in the foundation documents of the American Republic and by Rousseau et al. We cannot ignore the importance of the American documents in shaping the Australian Federal Constitutional framework even though the language is not parallel.
I doubt that sensual self-indulgence is the same thing as utilitarian happiness, which is focussed on the common good. I think it is true that much of modern media and public discussion gives the impression that happiness lies in the absence of restraint, personal or societal.
I think Australian voting patterns. reflecting the principles of our political parties, show a strong commitment, overall, to the common good rather than advancing sectional interests, although we could argue that forever, I guess.
That's incorrect Ian.
The data I am referring to is from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2009
Yes, and that's why Mill's development to the theory is called 'social hedonism' and I explained the difference in the original article above.