In the public sphere, more Christians should “own their faith”, says the long-time foreign editor of The Australian newspaper.
Greg Sheridan, who has been the foreign editor at the newspaper for 30 years, and has written eight books, with two of them specifically about Christianity, said this in a keynote address to the Australasian Catholic Press Association conference in Melbourne on September 7.
Mr Sheridan opened by saying he had been a Catholic all his life.
“I’ve never had any trouble with belief. I’ve had the most enormous trouble with living up to the most elementary standards of Christian life. So, naturally, I became a journalist,” he said, to much laughter from a room full of Catholic journalists and communicators.
Hostility
In his four decades plus in the fourth estate, he has seen profound change in western culture, especially the Australian version, which has moved from being nominally pro-Christian to a type of neutrality to being “seriously hostile to the Christian religion now, and especially the Christian churches”. The reality of this hostility is “just overwhelming, unavoidable, incontestable”.
Mr Sheridan was quick to qualify this, saying that “we shouldn’t overstate this — we are not persecuted the way Christians are in Pakistan or China or much of Africa, but the culture is very hostile now to Christianity”.
He lives and works in that culture, and has a public profile, with regular appearances on radio and TV. Therefore, he believed that he had a responsibility to counter this cultural hostility. But there was some hesitation at first.
“All through my journalistic career, I had always been happy to identify as a Catholic, but it was more tribal and good fun. I used to say I have only ever had faith in three institutions in my life — the Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs, News Corporation and the Catholic Church, and none of them have ever let me down.”
He explained that one reason he was a bit shy about speaking about Christianity was “an absolutely well-justified modesty”.
“[But] if you leave the discussion of ultimate truth, the spiritual life, only to the morally-qualified, it tends to be a very small discussion.
“So anyway, I finally jumped in, put my toe in the water with a memoir I wrote . . . , and then the second-last book was ‘God is Good for You (2018)’.”
To his surprise, this book, and the one that followed, titled “Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World (2021)”, sold very well.
“I do think that the media, and the culture, neglects Christians and portrays them entirely negatively, and we don’t get a fair representation. The success of my two Christian books is evidence of this. There are fabulous Christian books published every year, but the secular culture never gives them a run,” he added.
Mr Sheridan said that the reaction to his book about God was very positive and very friendly, even from secular media.
“Coming out, so to speak, as a Christian has been nothing but fun. I think more Christians should do this, more Christians should own their faith publicly. Fellow Christians need their public solidarity, that we don’t get now from the public and media generally. And non-Christians need to be alerted to the truth. They need to have the truth of Christ’s presence announced to them, in the culture.”
He went on to say: “I think our education system doesn’t expose young people very much to ideas and apologetics and so forth; there is actually a tremendous hunger out there. So I found an enormous response to this material. Amongst non-believers, but also amongst Christians, who hadn’t come across systematic presentations of the positive case for belief in God.
“I was very conscious to try to write from the first principles and to write positively. So even the chapter about the rational basis for belief in God, I didn’t make that an answer to the new atheists. I made it a positive case for believing in God, and then dealt with the new atheists incidentally at the end.”
He said that he had read the new atheists’ opinions before embarking on the book about God. Mr Sheridan found their arguments unimpressive; “just complete junk really — it was just the same old 19th century arguments against God put next to a whole lot of irrelevant science”.
Second book
Mr Sheridan’s second book on Christianity was “an attempt to come to grips with Jesus . . . through reading the New Testament as a journalist. So reading it for its story, for its narrative, looking for sources, being aware of the scholarly consensus, but not being tyrannised by the scholarly consensus. Reading a book at a time, as a journalist would read them”.
In this book, he noted that “everything modern people have been told about the unreliability and lack of historicity in the New Testament is actually wrong. I think this is important for Catholics and all Christians to know”. He pointed to various examples to back this up.
“The chapter, though, where I had the most fun in this book was the one dealing with the culture. . . . I think the culture has become post-Christian, Christian and pre-Christian simultaneously, and that is the culture that we are operating in as journalists.”
The “first big generation of post-Christian people in the West is the baby-boomer generation, of which I’m one”, he said.
“They are hostile to Christianity, but they still know something about Christianity. Then, at the same time, Christians are very resilient. Christians haven’t been eradicated from the society. We are now a minority, but we are a resilient minority, and we are a minority in the face of a hostile culture. . . .”
“Then the third element, which is really striking and is completely historically new, is the pre-Christian element. The Millennials, now, are the grandchildren of the baby-boomers. The Millennials are not rebelling against their parents and their grandparents, because their parents and their grandparents, on the whole, didn’t have any faith. So they are not imbued with historical memory of Christianity; their ignorance of Christianity (and this is not a moral judgement on them, this is just the culture they grew up in) is almost completely total. Now this has good and bad elements. They are, in a sense, a pagan culture. You can see the neo-paganism we live in everywhere.”
Mr Sheridan added that “neo-paganism is not good for Christianity. But on the other hand, its adherents are not immune to Christianity the way the baby-boomers were”.
“. . . They know absolutely nothing about it. And that means they are able to be approached, and we can sell to them.”
He concluded his talk by saying that “Christians, including Christian journalists, are a bold minority in a hostile culture”.
“We are empowered as [a] moral minority, and minorities have rights in our society, and we should demand our rights, because we are not demanding rights for ourselves, we are demanding minority rights for the truth and, although this is a difficult environment, it is also a fun environment.”
Greg Sheridan is VERY good value.
His comment of Neo-paganism is
now abundantly clear as present
in today’s society.
Drugs, porn, Euthanasia, abortion,
and latterly “gay marriage” supply
evidence for the FRUITS of this inertia.
“By their fruits ye shall know them”.
It is countered by asceticism and mysticism.
This inertia is a DENIAL of God, and is
the anti-God religion of the U.S.,
which is an apostate religion (see
1973 humanist Manifesto), and drags
good Catholics (and all unwary Christians)
into it because it has the “appearance”
of non-violence. Actually it is responsible
for around 45,000,000 deaths by abortion
globally per annum. That is VERY violent,
and Marx himself said it and Communism
were the SAME. Why? Both were atheist.
No greater sin exists in the Catholic catechism
than apostasy- worse than heresy.
It is the “total repudiation of the Christian faith”-
page 507 (Catholic Catechism).
Vigilance is needed- prayer and fasting constantly,
to avoid being trapped by this global movement.
The entire European Union is on its back foot,
while a few (savvy) politicians are becoming a
wake-up to the dangers. The New PM Giorgia
Meloni of Italy is one of them and she has put
it into words that make sense.She is NOT going
to be a number. This would make it easy for the
big predators- financiers and the like, who do not
care one iota about your status. For them the
Humanist is a God send, making consumers
prey. This is why Catholics should be very wary
of those who stifle contradiction to S.H.