Part 3 of a series:

• Dear Australian and American Friends
• Dear Australian Friends, here’s what I think you need to know about my American Friends
• Dear American Friends, here’s what I think you need to know about my Australian Friends
• American and Australian Friends; How has this all played out?

I arrived in Sydney Australia in January 2004 to study at Moore Theological College. Our original plan was to study the 4 year degree course, get ordained, do 3 or 4 years of post-ordination training and then head out somewhere else on the planet where we could be useful. Yet here I am 21 years, 3 children, 3 parishes, and 1 passport later still hanging around. More than that, thoroughly embedded in our new home; Australia. Well, sort of embedded. The reality is that it’s possible to be very much part of the furniture and yet also feel like you don’t really belong. Migrating to any other country can give great insights into things that the home culture doesn’t see about themselves – that’s one of the blessings at my current position in Parramatta where so many of our church family were born overseas and so have fresh and helpful observations about Australia.

If you’re from the States then I’m pretty sure that you don’t have a fully-orbed view of Australia, let alone the Reformed Christians that are here. That’s understandable, the US tends to have a fairly parochial view of the world – it does rather think of the rest of the world in terms of relationships with the States rather than in their own right. That’s just the way things are but it doesn’t stop us chipping away it.

So here’s what I’d love my American friends to know about my Australian friends…

1. They love Jesus. We ought never to lose sight of this one. Much of our disagreement is about how we should go about loving Jesus, not whether we do. Sure, at times we might ask the “do they really?” question but let’s not do our Australian friends the disservice of assuming they don’t. They’re just working out how to love Jesus in a very different context to ours. (Yes, this is exactly what I wrote in the previous piece).
2. Australia is very, very different to the US and certainly from what you see on your screens. Australians see a lot of the US, I’m pretty confident it’s not so much the other way. Believe it or not I didn’t have to stop for kangaroos to cross at the traffic lights on my drive into work today. We don’t all work around with leather hats and enormous knives. I know that you know this. But it’s good to be reminded that it’s the case. Australia has some iconic places and stories but it’s so much more.
3. Australians are very different from each other. Australia is actually an enormous place. Coast to coast it’s very similar to the US in size, just with far less people who are almost all living on the coast in a couple of big pockets. Nevertheless there are some significant differences; we have a range of liberalism/conservatism – it just expresses itself a little differently (more on that later). Some of us live in the tropical north next to rainforests, others in far cooler climates. There’s a large working class, a significant portion of our population are immigrants, there’s lots of aspirational wealth and growth and even some vestiges of a class system (although it’s a bit different to the UK).
4. Australia is nowhere near as polarised as the US. Even though sometimes we think we are because we import US conversations. The reality is that our two main political parties sit much closer to each other than the Republicans and Democrats do and this is a reflection of a much more relaxed attitude to many things. If Australia had a meta-catchphrase it would be “she’ll be right“. Is it optimism or is it apathy? I don’t think it’s either – it’s a whole attitude that most everything will work itself out in time and if not then we can all get stuck in and make it work itself out. The “Aussie Battler” (see below) always pushes on. When I originally sat down to write this piece we were about 2 weeks away from a federal election and the reality was that there’s not an enormous amount of difference between the main parties’ policies, even if their more extreme fringes have a gulf between them.
5. Being less polarised mitigates against extremes. ABC journalist Patricia Karvelas recently argued, “we are the anti-America. Where, in the US, people are toxically polarised and unable to see politics through any other prism than their own partisan lens, in Australia our passions are lower but so are our biases.” We have fringe parties but they don’t ever get large number of seats. The nature of Australia’s parliamentary democracy (with single transferable voting in the lower house and a slightly more complex proportional system in the upper) tends to also favour this stability. The bottom line is this: that whole Democrat vs Republican hostility with the battle lines drawn in an all-or-nothing fight to death … well we don’t have that here. The differences aren’t existential and so we don’t act like they are.
6. Our experience of “woke” has not been as severe as yours. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had some issues. Identity politics has infested large segments of our common life; media, corporations and the rest of it have all been affected. The work of outstanding organisations like HRLA has been necessary – they have more than enough stories of people’s freedoms being infringed upon. But because we’re not that polarised a society the whole woke experience has been far less dramatic since it’s not been so embedded in our political life.
7. Australia has a different relationship with freedom than the USA. In my previous piece I urged Australians to get their head around just how big an issue freedom is in how the US understands itself – it’s their raison d’être. Australia comes from a different political ancestry and so has a different relationship with freedom. It’s not that we don’t believe in freedom, it’s just not the absolute core of how we’ve understood ourselves. One of the biggest questions facing the church in the coming decade is how we can carve out the necessary freedoms that we’re convinced are required when they’re not embedded into our system. In Australia (as with other similar western democracies) freedoms are added onto the the core constitutional foundations. They aren’t the foundations. So, for example, look at the Australian Constitution and see if you can find the word “freedom” anywhere. It begins by setting out the powers of the legislature, executive and then judiciary. Those aren’t bad things, of course, but there’s no “we, the people…” in the same way that the US has. Instead we get this: “WHEREAS the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established”. “We” submitted ourselves under the Crown. If Australia ever became a true republic it would involve a huge amount of rearrangement of things.
8. We’re very familiar with you, far more than you are with us. We get your media ALL THE TIME. It saturates. Yes, we have rules here about how much locally-produced TV etc has to be screened but we’re still downstream of the torrent that comes from the States. We watch the sitcoms and the dramas. Name more than 2 Australian shows that you watch regularly. Actually, just name 2 even if you don’t watch them. I rest my case. And we know more (or think we know more) about your politics and the rest of it. Yours affects us, ours doesn’t really affect you. The last time a major decision here impacted on the US was when Johnny Depp’s dog was put in quarantine. All of this is also true in the Christian sphere and certainly in the Reformed internet. We’re watching, reading and listening along as you have your debates and fights. They interest us because they deal with the same fundamental issues that we’re concerned with, even when they’re being worked out in different contexts. Which means that when we comment it’s possible that we’re speaking out of our own context without realising that we are – or that you don’t realise that we’re addressing different presenting issues even when the underlying topic is the same.
9. There has been a LOT of thinking here about Biblical Theology. I wrote a lot about this in my previous post and so won’t repeat that mini-essay here. Instead let me give a few more things to think about. There are a number of writers about Biblical Theology (by which I mean the field of theological study which looks at how themes such as sacrifice, land, water (add any number of things here) progress and develop through the canon as an expression of the gospel (again, see my previous post). Perhaps the most well-known is Graeme Goldsworthy. His book “Gospel and Kingdom” was formative for so many of us. Biblical Theology has a constant eye on fulfilment of not just outright promises but also themes and ideas. For example, the thirst of God’s people for a sinless divine leader is there in the OT narrative long before we get a clear prediction of a Messiah. Biblical Theology brings with it a different eschatological understanding. It sees eschatological fulfilment across a broader spectrum of events than the perhaps stricter “end times” view of some that is still looking for those last days to arrive. It sees Jesus as the very centre and reason for everything, looks instinctively to how all things are fulfilled in him (2Cor. 1:20) and, as a result, is less tied to deontological ethics (ie an ethical system that grounds itself only in the nature of a thing). If all things are on a Biblical Theological trajectory towards fulfilment in Jesus then ethics are logically teleological. We ask not just “what is the nature of this thing?” but “what is the intended eschatological end of this thing?” and then derive an ethic accordingly. This last point is fundamental, I would suggest, to understanding the disagreements that this whole series is intended to address.

That’s it for now. In a final piece, dv, I’ll get to addressing the disagreement that seems so long ago now but is still important for us all to get our head around.