Church in Oz: A club nobody bothers to go to?

So I’ve mended my heathenish ways and started going back to church again. After last year’s less than happy encounter with low church Anglicanism, I found another church more to my liking, more traditional — so much so that I have joined the choir.

So far I am enjoying going to church more than I had expected I would. It is certainly helping to assuage my sense of loneliness and isolation. The people are genuinely nice and it’s comforting and familiar, going through the rituals I know so well in the company of others.

The company of others … and there is the catch. Because, in this part of Sydney at least, people don’t go to church. I’ve just come back from singing at evensong. As we walked, robes swishing, out of the church, one of the sopranos blurted out, “I made a bet that there would be more people in the choir than in the congregation this evening and I was right!” One of the men shushed her in case the worshippers inside overheard, but she had a point.

There were twelve of us in the choir, eleven in the congregation. It was the same on Ash Wednesday, traditionally an important service. (By way of contrast, my mother told me that at the service she sang at back in Joburg, people were queuing out the door.)

Is it this bad for the Catholics, the Uniting Church, the Presbyterians? Why don’t Australians, especially Anglican Australians, go to church? As in other first world countries, pentecostal churches such as Hillsong are showing rapid growth. At the same time, the number of Australians who claim no religious affiliation is growing. Not to mention the growth of other religions in line with increased immigration from Lebanon and Asia.

Australia is nominally Christian still. Private schools, many of them linked to various Christian denominations, are funded to the tune of many millions of dollars every year. Parliamentarians pray to God before every session. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a regular churchgoer (Anglican). On the other hand, having tracked letters to the editor for almost a year, I’ve picked up what could be characterised as almost an aggressive secularism, a resentment of any perceived special treatment of religion.

Going to church here in Sydney is like being a member of a club that nobody else wants to belong to. If people here in one of Sydney’s wealthiest areas don’t go to church, where do the Anglicans get their money to fund the clergy from? How much longer will they be able to sustain their echoing churches, the remnants of a more God-fearing, conformist past?

Evidence of that past can be discerned in public holidays — so the fact that the NSW state government introduced laws last year banning trade on Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Christmas Day and Boxing Day is oddly anachronistic.

A group of retailers including Bunnings, the chain of hardware stores, challenged the ban, and lost, prompting one reader of the Sydney Morning Herald to comment, “Why are Christians, who celebrate the renovation of their souls through the rise of a carpenter on Easter Sunday, so selfish as to deny the MacMansionites access to the Sacred Temple of Bunnings, that they may also worship their god(s) and raise a little carpentry in an act of renovation?”

Shopping, the new religion. And, in the wake of the GFC, one that has mocked the faith of those who believed in the dogma of more, more, more. Where will Australians find solace now?