Couldn't Help Noticing

Is Australia a Christian country?

Emma asked in an earlier CHN whether Australia can legitimately be called a ‘Christian country’. At an anecdotal level, here's proof that we are not very Christian compared to the good 'ol U.S. of A.

In America, those who are trying to draw crowds to minor league baseball games are now using ‘faith nights’ to attract Christian families. So you can go to the baseball with your family and see a 7-foot VeggieTale cucumber running a Bible trivia quiz, and hear testimonies from Christian baseball stars, and win bobble-heads of Samson, Noah and Moses.

And why are the marketers doing it? Because they've realised there are millions of christian households who will warm to this type of thing. And the scary thing is... it works. Crowd numbers increase significantly on faith nights. As one marketing executive said: “Faith Nights are the biggest thing we do here. It is big, big business for us.”

So, do you reckon faith nights would work here in Australia? Are they the next big thing in the NRL or AFL?

See this USA Today article for more information.

More on the Islam thing

Here are two classic examples of relativism gone wrong.

First, a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday 26 July, 2005:

Mr Doureihi, you are an Australian citizen and therefore you are expected to coexist with Western society and rules. If you feel that this is too hard to do, you are most welcome to find a place where you can exist. The pushing of your ideals on others and then complaining when people don't listen is not the way to coexist.

Everyone has their own beliefs but they don't degrade others because they're different. Remember, we are Australians first and foremost, who will live peacefully with others in our society. Try it, it may help your coexistence.

This letter was sent in by a woman. As I read it, I wondered whether she would have said the same thing to the Australian feminists fighting for change a few decades ago. The women who fought for the right to vote and work. They didn't fight by living peacefully with others in their society. They pushed their ideals on others, and complained when people didn't listen.

The fight is irrelevant (whether it's for women's rights, for Islam, for abortion, for gay marriage, for no-fault divorce, for free speech, etc.). It's the underlying basis of the argument that Australians are completely confused about. They want to say that we should live peacefully; that women are not less valuable than men; that Western society and rules are the ones Australia should stick with. But they don't want to actually use God as their reason. And as I said in my earlier post (on 1/8—scroll down), without God we just have a whole bunch of different opinions, all equally valid.

The second example is a story titled ‘Home grown’, shown on 60 Minutes on Sunday 24 July, 2005. You can read the transcript here.

One of the points made in the story is that once people migrate to a country—let's say Australia, for example—and their children grow up as Australians, then we are no longer talking about assimilation or integration. We are no longer talking about whether we want to accept the beliefs that people have brought to this country. For those children, it is about changing their own country so that it is a place they want to live in.

Which is exactly what the feminists did. So again I ask, how can we complain?

I'm not advocating for an Islamic Australia. I'm simply pointing out the gaping holes in the philosophical arguments Australians have been swallowing. Sheikh Khalid Yasnin puts it perfectly: “Australians have to wake up and smell the coffee.”

You don’t belong here

I hate moving. I hate traipsing through other people's homes, mentally superimposing my belongings over theirs and rearranging the furniture, when looking for a place. I hate filling out the application forms and having real estate agents assess my worth in terms of dollars instead of integrity. I hate packing my belongings into boxes, wondering if they'll survive the trip. I hate hiring movers and having the moving company send me two guys instead of three and completely forgetting to mention the piano.

And even when the move is over, I hate discovering all the “quirks” I didn't know the new place had. (Where did a carpet burn that shape come from? What do you mean we can't get television reception here?) There's that period of adjusting to the new space—getting used to the man who smokes on his balcony downstairs or the woman who drops what sounds like ping pong balls on the floor upstairs; discovering, as the months roll on, that that fence, which you were assured would eventually be fixed so that people couldn't go tramping through your backyard, is giving the Tower of Pisa stiff competition in terms of its angle in relation to the ground (and, in fact, doesn't get fixed until the week you move out).

So lately, as my husband and I started talking about moving to extricate ourselves from a difficult situation, my heart sank and I felt sick just thinking of what we were going to subject ourselves to, once again.

Then I went to church and heard a sermon on Hebrews 11:

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. (v. 8-10)

Abraham was a rich man. He probably could have bought himself a nice plot of land with a good-sized field out the back for the camels back in Haran, but instead he chose to wander around in a place where he didn't belong—a place which had been promised to him but was actually owned but another. He spent his life living in tents—packing them up, moving around, stopping and pitching them again. The author of Hebrews tells us that Abraham was living by faith—living, not by what he could see, but by what he could not see. He was looking forward to living in the God—the city in the heavenly country.

Here we're in danger of being seduced into living by sight—repainting our walls, accumulating antique furniture, making sure our curtains match the lounges. We're convinced that Sydney is our home and we need to work hard to get those harbour views. But we don't belong here. We belong in our Father's house.

“In my Father's house are many rooms,” says Jesus (John 14:2) and I imagine them to be rooms without crusty floors and leaking bathrooms—rooms uninfested by mould spores or cockroaches who love scurrying in the cracks. Every day I am persuaded by the world to stop living by faith and keep living by sight. But, like Abraham, I desire a better country (Heb 11:16) where I will never have to move again.