Sydney journalist Richard Glover defends believers

Why does our society disrespect those with spiritual beliefs?

Tue 17 Nov 2015

Written by Richard Glover - Sydney Morning Herald columnist, ABC Radio presenter and author of recent memoir "Flesh Wounds". This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald Saturday Spectrum on 14/11/15. Republished with permission from the author.

Sticking up for believers

When exactly did Christians become such a derided and ridiculed minority in this country?

I'm sure it's happened during my lifetime. When I was 10 years old, the Christians were the boss of everything. We studied bible stories half the week and then on Sundays were rounded up for Sunday School.

This involved being stuck in the big church while an old guy gave a droning speech, which from memory took about 10 weeks. The sermon often mentioned the afterlife, and the speaking style seemed designed to deliver a vivid sense of what all eternity might feel like.

Inviting a cleric onto ABC radio, as I do from time to time, brings a torrent of enraged correspondence.

The only point of interest, even to a 10-year-old, was when he denounced sex – something that, in certain circumstances, could lead to dancing.

After the sermon, you'd be taken to a hot shed out the back where you'd make shepherds and sheep out of pipe-cleaners and cotton wool. This would also go on for, oh, months. The pipe cleaners would be twisted together to make the shepherds and their sheep, while the cotton wool was affixed using masses of Perkins Paste – its intoxicating smell gave rise to most of the religious visions of the time.

Finally, after about four eternities, you'd be released from Sunday School, at which point you'd realise there was nothing else to do, the Christians having banned all other possible Sunday activities.

Maybe this was a good thing, as any excitement – coming after such a soporific start – could have killed us.

Despite all this indoctrination, I never managed a speck of interest in religion, which may make me the perfect person to make this point: since the Christians are no longer the boss of everything in the way they were 40 years ago, could we leave them alone and not howl down their every word?

It's true many of us don't agree with the mainstream Christian view on gay marriage. It's true, too, that the campaign to limit ethics classes in schools was misguided and manipulative.

On both those issues, the Christians have managed to have a say, perhaps even a bigger say than their numbers warrant.

Yet on many of the things many Christians care about, they have lost the debate. They've lost the debate on Sunday trading, they've lost the debate on abortion and – here's another thing many care deeply about – they've lost the debate on asylum seekers. (They believe, don't you know, that refugees should be treated as human beings.)

Marketplace economics is now the God of our time, and its priests are Microsoft, Apple and Google. There's more religious iconography around during Halloween than is now permitted at Christmas.

Given that situation, it mystifies me why some people get so tense about those who still believe in the Bible. Surely – for we non-believers – our very lack of belief should allow us to relax when hearing the Christian message. What's it to us? We could even find ourselves compelled by the occasional idea, much as a non-Zoroastrian might still find that belief system fascinating.

That kind of tolerance is not the way it usually plays today. Inviting a cleric onto ABC radio, as I do from time to time, brings a torrent of enraged correspondence. "How dare you give this man airtime?", "I am disgusted you would allow this," and, "Who possibly thought this was a good idea?".

The phrase "religious nutter" is then much employed, as if it would be a grammatical mistake to use the world "religious" with a "nutter" in close attendance.

The "nutter" in question is usually the Catholic or Anglican Archbishop of Sydney – two chaps who are both scholarly, quick-witted, urbane and humane. To any open-minded person, what they say is at least as interesting as what anybody else has to say.

So why the derision? Why the fight to the death? Why the demeaning sneers of, "This guy believes in fairy stories"?

And why the rise of militant atheism at exactly the time the church has never been less powerful?

I'd understand the rage if the Spanish Inquisition was still going; I'd understand if the church – and church alone – was regularly dominating my day, as it used to dominate my Sundays when I was 10. I'd understand if the churches were the only groups that had covered up for paedophiles.

As a non-religious person, can I whisper I few things that I believe to be true?

Many millions of people much smarter than me – and maybe even smarter than you – have believed in God.

To deride someone else's spiritual beliefs is, at its simplest, a lack of manners. Have some respect.

The big questions of meaning and existence have not been settled so definitively that we can deride the answers achieved by others.

And the stories that human beings have told themselves again and again – stories from the Bible, from Homer's Odyssey, from the Aboriginal Dreamtime – are a trapdoor through which today's human beings can connect with the collective wisdom of the humans who went before.

Those pipe-cleaners, back in Sunday school, were just another way to prop open that trapdoor.