David Marr is one of Sydney’s best known and highly acclaimed journalists. The High Price of Heaven is a collection of a dozen essays mainly based on his recent newspaper features, and loosely connected by their common criticism of the Christian churches.

Marr writes in an immediate, easy to read, visual style which keeps the best features of newspaper reporting. Here are chapters on such things as drug reform, censorship, homosexual law reform, John Howard, Brian Harradine, the churches’ discrimination against homosexuals, the attempts to ensure the Christian character of Sydney Anglican Diocesan church schools, and finally the bad effects of the churches attitude to homosexuality. However, this is much more than a ‘Best of’ collection. David Marr has a serious point to make.

Christians readers will be quite familiar with the book’s genre. It is one of those ‘the world is going to the dogs because of the undue influence of a dangerous minority’ kind of thing. Only this time, the enemy of all that is good is not secular humanism (as in the Christian version) but the Christian churches themselves! Marr’s concerns may serve as a perverse encouragement to those Christians lamenting the churches’ loss of influence in the way society is run. Here at least is one voice saying we are doing (too) well. If only he can be believed.

David Marr’s thesis is that the churches in Australia: (a) are ‘the most resilient, most respected and best connected lobby in town’, (b) despite the appearance of reasonableness, their agenda is driven by theological concerns over sin rather than what is in fact good for people, and (c) this is a very bad thing. The problems caused by the churches are the ‘high price of heaven’ of the book’s title.

Christians should not dismiss a book just because it is very critical of them. By listening to our critics, we may learn something about ourselves we otherwise could not know. I opened this collection with anticipation. Although the style made the book pleasant to read on one level, on another the result was frankly disappointing and predictable. Marr’s world is too much the mirror image of the one he is so critical of. It is a simple world of Black Hats and White Hats. ‘Freedom-good. Restriction-bad.’ Throughout there is a cosy assumption that what in fact is good for people is a simple and unproblematic matter for the rest of us to see, once we have got rid of the baneful influence of those churches.

Could there be real problems or paradoxes in the human condition, or even in these areas of sexuality and openness he advocates so passionately? David Marr doesn’t think so. For Marr, all would be sunny and straight forward ... if it wasn’t for those churches and their anti-pleasure ideology.

But when Marr suggests that the reason why churches fight social evils is to ‘get us all to heaven’, he is simply overstating his case, or (oddly for an ex-Christian who ought to know better) actually misunderstanding the Christian faith. On any view, getting people to heaven involves a lot more than simply preventing them by law or social pressure from viewing pornography, taking drugs or having homosexual sex!

This book raises the genuine and interesting question about why Christian lobbyists do in fact choose to fight on the issues they do. Marr’s contention is that traditional Christian understanding of sin (or to use his preferred term, ‘bigotry’) plays a larger role than is openly admitted. On this I think he is right (except for the bigotry part). This raises the question of how open Christian lobbyists should be to themselves or the government and community about what lies at the root of their concern on any particular issue. Should they explicitly say that something is contrary to the mind of God and therefore bad?

Marr does succeed in showing that the Roman Catholic church has a fair clout, especially in NSW politics, and that conservative Catholic Senator Harradine was for a while quite influential. However, not all is that straightforward. I thought it was a bit rich for Marr to blame John Howard’s perceived inadequacies on the issue of race and indigenous issues on his Methodist upbringing. And if David Marr wants to ‘leave faith to the faithful’ (p.91) then why get into a lather over an attempt by some of the more hard liners in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney to ensure its own schools are of a high Christian standard?

I found that the best essay was the last chapter where David Marr is angriest at the churches for making homosexuals feel shame and loss. In it he also reveals something of his own story, and where the energy for this book is coming from. It is not easy reading for a Christian. It is not even fair. But it is still worth hearing the cry of those who have lost confidence in Christ to be adequate to their needs.

Marr is no dispassionate observer. He writes, “All those years ago when my faith in an all-good and all-powerful God suddenly collapsed at university, I had yet to discover the best evidence for his nonexistence: that bully churches survive and flourish.”