Abp Jensen’s Conference for Christian School Executives address, Parliament House, Canberra 12/05/04

Archbishop Peter Jensen | 27 May 2004

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Introduction
I was recently told about a school survey which rated desirable jobs and professions. I don’t know what topped the list, but I do know what came at the end: school teaching and the ministry in that order! I have tried both in my time, and felt rather put-down. Fortunately, perhaps, politics does not seem to have been one of the options – that may not have fared so well either. At the same time I was informed about the results of another piece of research, this time on the amount of stress suffered by the different occupations. You will be glad to know that in this research the clergy came in as the second worst for stress, behind…air traffic controllers. I am sure that a number of the teachers and politicians present would like to dispute all these rankings.

The truth is, that many of the people-centred professions have become less attractive, especially when they are not well remunerated. They do not receive the same respect in the community as once they did. Not surprisingly, there is stress associated with the work place. I know that the working life of the clergy is very difficult, and I observe that the same is true in the teaching profession. Likewise, I am told by friends in politics that significantly fewer people are lining up for pre-selection these days. I don’t think that there is a single reason for such developments, but one of the cultural reasons is both obvious and important and we can identify and discuss it: I would describe this reason as the rise of individualism.

The rise of individualism.
Western culture has as one of its strongest values the need for human freedom. In many ways this is a precious value and one to be guarded. We need only think of freedom of speech and freedom of religion to name but two of the fundamental qualitative goods of living in a civil society. These freedoms have not developed automatically: they are the fruit of centuries of legal, moral and religious development. In the twentieth century they came under immense threat from movements of collectivism, notably Marxism and Nazism. Today they are once more threatened by terrorism and other forms of civic disorder, and, more insidiously, by the extraordinary growth in electronic communications and surveillance. Human liberty is a rare and precious plant.

But this hunger for freedom is capable of abuse. Our forbears understood that liberty brought responsibilities, and where the sense of responsibility was lacking, freedom itself would be imperilled. In her recent book on the history of the Liberal Party, Professor Judith Brett charts the way in which the individualism of the early twentieth century turned into a different animal under the same name in the early twenty-first century. She points out that the early sense of sturdy self-reliance was accompanied by what I would call a service-ethic, a sense of responsibility for others in the community. By the time we get to the last decade of the century, individualism had become self-centred, insistent on rights and the ego, relativistic in ethics and with a weakened sense of community. Interestingly she attributes some of this change to the decline of what you may call Protestant values, and what I would call the biblical virtues.

Those of us whose time has been the second part of the twentieth century, have passed through two significant revolutions which have contributed to the rise of individualism.

First there was the cultural revolution of the 1960s. This revolution attempted to complete the great Enlightenment project of ridding the society of the influence of the authority of the Bible and the Church. In the name of freedom and of reason, the remnants of the Christian moral tradition were effectively challenged and overthrown, especially in the area of sexual ethics. We may think of such things as abortion law reform, the collapse of censorship, the feminist revolution, the decline of marriage. More fundamentally, the Christian story ceased to be the founding, guiding story of social life; the old biblical stories, once familiar to every child, began their slide towards social oblivion. Just as the history of England ceased to be used to explain the significance of Australia, so the even older history of Israel ceased to provide the meaning of western civilisation. Christianity was simply no longer plausible to multitudes of people, especially the new post-war opinion-makers. It was not that wowserism ever disappeared. Rather, the wowsers were no longer Christians and had new targets for their wrath.

The second revolution was the economic and social revolution of the 1980s. Paul Kelly in his book The End of Certainty reminds us of the collapse of protectionism, of the Imperial defence shield, of the wage-fixing system, of white Australia and of what he calls ‘the nanny state’. It is clear that the Australia we now inhabit is a vastly different place from the Australia of the period 1950-1980, and close to the heart of this is the embrace of a non-regulated economic - and to some extent social-order. We need only think of the differences in education, sport, banking, labour practices, and voluntaryism to see some of the changes. Friends of mine in Sydney now complain that all they can get their guests to talk about is what school they will send their children to and the buying and selling of property. Observers of the Sydney scene (at least) point to an obsession with acquisition and an astonishing level of unhappiness amongst people who have never been so well off. At the same time, many others find that in return for increased property values their time has been removed from them and they are on an unacceptable treadmill. Strangely, our economic success and our individual freedoms seem to be somehow incompatible.

And yet the story is by no means all negative. Our society has never been perfect, and there have been real advances and improvements in society throughout the last decades. To take only one case, we are far more aware now than we used to be of the evils of racism, and while it still exists, we have a name for it and we know that it is to be condemned. The education and freedom of girls and women has advanced significantly. We are healthier than we used to be; although we can never be content with the current state of aboriginal heath. I could continue: but my main thesis is this, that for all the advances, the danger of collectivism and mindless conformity is not met by individualism – there needs to be a sense of community, and it is this which is so much under threat.

Am I right? Let me remind you of the most significant fact of all. The Australian family is not in good shape. On any rational account of the good life, the part played by a family of loving persons who nurture the individual has got to receive prime position. But whereas the state has rigorous laws preventing employers from dismissing employees without good cause, it has failed to protect the family unit from unilateral destruction. However we cannot blame the state; men and women of the freedom-generation have found it extraordinarily difficult to stay together or even to choose to be together, let alone to exhaust their energies and the finances on the onerous task of raising children. In this area the ramifications of the last thirty years have yet to be fully understood, but at last some observers are beginning to raise the right questions. People who have not experienced love will find it difficult to love. Interestingly we are dealing with a generation now which will not join voluntary community activities such as clubs and societies. It seems likely that in future, charitable work is going to be entirely professionalised. Fundamentally, we are dealing here with profound moral and spiritual questions.

Testing Moral Heath
How would you test the moral strength of a nation? One obvious place to start would be by examining how its most vulnerable citizens are treated. No doubt we could all make a list of who those most vulnerable are in our society. I want to suggest to you, however, that the ones we need to remember are the ones we are most likely to despise and even to forget.

If you have ever visited Warwick Castle in England, you may remember the terrible dungeons where prisoners were kept. Even more terrible, however, was the little hole in one of the dungeons, called (to English the word) the ‘forgettory’, into which a person was lowered and then forgotten. The test for the morality, for the humanity of any nation is what it does with its captives, its convicts, its prisoners. We may not lower them into holes, but they are so easily despised and forgotten. The glitter of a successful society may hide the corruption of its treatment of the no-bodies who have transgressed and are now forgotten.

You will have guessed why I am speaking about this. The media has in the last week or so been filled with images of brutality and evil; photos and even videos of Iraqi prisoners of the Americans. Like you, I do not want to see them; and yet it is our moral duty to see them for these prisoners too are human and deserve our love. They may be villains themselves; perhaps they have done all this and worse to others; certainly they are not Australian or even American citizens – but we cannot help feel surely that their captors have failed one of the most important moral tests that you can pose to a culture: how do you treat the defenceless whom you despise? And as allies, however far removed, we too feel some responsibility here.

Let me make these comments:

First, the offences seem worse because the English-speaking nations have prided themselves on their justice and their respect for the rule of law. We profess higher standards, indeed in particular we profess higher standards that the previous regime. This profession has been shown up to be hypocrisy.

Second, the brutality in the prisons is rightly condemned by all. There is no hiding it, or justifying it. What if it is less awful than the tortures of Hussain? What we have seen here is the gross abuse of human beings and it is utterly wrong.

Third, although the guilty parties may be relatively few in number, their behaviour has implicated the whole American nation. It is absolutely appropriate that the President has expressed his strong condemnation about what has happened, and has taken the further step of apologising to the Arab world for what has happened. There is a corporate guilt here, a complicity in an evil which we may abominate ourselves, but which has been done by Americans in the name of the USA. Individualism is not – cannot ever be – the last word about humanity. We belong in communities, for good or for ill.

Fourth, at least there has been an apology, and the people of the USA are outraged about what has been done in their name. Now that outrage must turn itself into justice. We trust that it will be clear that there is and always has been a moral difference between the US and the former regime. Will repentance bring justice and even open the way to reconciliation? That remains to be seen, but these are the categories which we must now use to describe what is going on.

Fifth, are we any better? It is easy, is it not, to be critical of what has occurred in Iraq. We all find moral categories close at hand to condemn what has been done. It seems that individualism and relativism do not suffice to calibrate evil. But are we willing to live under the same rules?

I have no reason to believe that there is systemic torture by authorities in Australian prisons. But I do know that we as a society pay little attention to the state of our gaols; we have hardly noticed the steady growth in the number of people behind bars; we are not aware that so many of the people that we incarcerate should be under medical supervision rather than in gaol; we do not much care what happens when people are released from prison. The rates of violent crime in Australia have grown by seven times in the last forty years; in the US the rate has only been one a half; one of the differences is in the large number of people in gaol in the US. Are we content to try to deal with our crime problems by gaoling more people? What are the conditions like in our gaols? Who cares?

Well, as a matter of fact there are people who care and who are active in the support of prisoners. But in a world of individualism that will not last. Which brings me back, at long last, to you and to your schools and the place they have in our nation. For you are graduating each year hundreds of ordinary Australians. The men and women who will run our trains and nurse in our hospitals and build the bridges and clean the offices and do the business of the nation. I want to ask this: will they be good citizens? Will their individualism be of the biblical variety of the mature person who serves, or will it be of the self-centred variety, for whom freedom from restriction is all? Let me put the test even more strongly – will they make good prison officers? Will they make good soldiers? Will they make good police? When they have an opportunity for petty tyranny, or for self advancement or for greed, will they succumb or will they stand? What sort of parents will they make? How stands the moral health of our Nation?

Of this we may be sure. The philosophy of individualism, with its lack of a unifying story to give it coherence and to give human life meaning, is not going to accomplish it. We need a sense of purpose, we need a capacity for distinguishing right from wrong, we need community to help us live the good life. Individualism is not going to deliver.

Relationships as the pivot
It has been heartening and fascinating to see our political leaders grasping the point that we need more community, more satisfying relationships. I think that in their own ways Mr Howard and Mr Latham exhibit this. I know that Mr Anderson and Mr Tanner have begun to speak out powerfully about the need for attention to our relationships.

That is what the values debate has been about. The fact of the matter is that large numbers of parents are choosing Christian and church schools for their children and at the heart of this is a perception about values. They may not accept the Christian way for themselves; they may even be ignorant of the Christian story, of creation and sin, of Jesus and his cross and resurrection. But they sense that there is a story there, and that it leads to a sense of meaning and a valuing of community and a respect for authority which they do not always sense elsewhere. They can see school and home working in partnership. And they are right to want these things because they are part of what being human is about.

I have spoken about the way in which the cultural revolution of the sixties endeavoured to rid society of the influence of God, the church and the bible, and how successful it has been. But it has never been the whole story. You cannot get rid of God that easily. As you know, the easy philosophy of individualism leads to relativism in ethics. But as soon as we see something like the torture of the Iraqis, we are quick to appeal to truth and universal standards of right and wrong. Among other signs of his active presence, we have the Christian schools movement which also goes back over those decades and which has been an outstanding success. The Christian schools – and in my part of the world the so-called church schools also – are saying ‘we are an essential part of the very fabric of this nation; we – and the message we carry, the message that there is a God and that there is a story, and that there is a Saviour and there are standards – are here to stay. More than that we have something very good to give to our nation, something which the nation needs now more than ever.’

What do we contribute? We give a Bible-based, Christ centred excellent education. It cannot take the place of the family, but it aids the family in its work. The Bible is very good on what it is to be human and so on building human communities. The Bible says these four major community-building things about humans:

First, we are precious as individuals; we are all made in the image of God. Yes the Bible has its own individualism, but it is not self-centred. What it says is that every individual matters to God and so matters to us. Attractive, unattractive, successful, failure, prisoner – yes, even one who has been gaoled for horrible crimes – all these matter and deserve our love and care.

Second, we are made for relationships. God created us for each other; for families, for societies, clubs, nations, schools, for heaven – which is a community – for himself. Recent research talks about out need to grow up in authoritative communities if we are to receive the sense of worth and meaning that we need as human beings. This is what the Bible says, too, and it tells us that the most important, satisfying and enduring relationship we can ever have is with God himself.

Third, we often fail in relationships. The Bible teaches that there are standards – standards such as truth-telling, generosity, forgiveness, modesty, love for others. In our hearts, we agree. But we are addicted to our own self-interest, and this addiction causes painful collisions, even with those we love best. The root reason for this is that we have failed our relationship with God and we need to repair that relationship and then seek to live for him and for others, with integrity. We will still fail, but the service of others will be the goal.

Fourthly, it tells us that Jesus Christ came into the world to bring forgiveness from God through his death, and to create community. If we think of the horrors of the Iraqi gaols, you will see how relevant all this is. There is going to need to be repentance and justice and forgiveness and restoration and community, if we are ever to have peace with justice. If you think of the sort of community-building that we need, we are going to have to call on the same resources.

Conclusion
Who would be a teacher, or a minister, or a politician, or a prison guard or a police officer: in fact, who are going to be the servants of our community, and what are they going to be like? Will they be men and women of character and standards? I am not saying that only the Christian schools will produce such citizens, nor that they are always successful in doing so. But I will say that they are set up to do so, that their contribution in Australian society is already profound, and that it will be all the more important as individualism continues to challenge community.

And I am saying this to you who represent the schools: you have earned your place in the nation. But it is earned by integrity. History shows us that it can also be lost. The quickest way to lose it is to cease to employ and equip teachers who understand the basis of your education in the story of Jesus and all its implications for life. What is essential in the first generation, is assumed in the second generation and lost in the third. I trust then that every generation will re-appropriate that from which your strength comes: being Christ-centred and Bible based.

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