Back in the 1950s and 1960s nine out of ten Australians had a Bible at home and almost four in ten of them were reading it regularly. Over the decades, surveys have shown fewer and fewer people in our increasingly multicultural country reading the Bible and going to church. But that’s not the full story of Bible engagement in Australia according to cultural historian Dr. Meredith Lake.
She’s arguably the most knowledgeable person about the subject having written the multi-award winning The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History which was published in 2018. Dr. Lake also presents the ABC Radio National program called Soul Search about faith and spirituality.
She told Vision Radio that in raw numbers Bible ownership, Bible reading and churchgoing have been in decline for more than six decades. But Dr. Lake cautioned: “I don’t think that’s actually a useful or sufficient way to think, because we’re also seeing a shift, a change, a transformation, not just a decline. For example, faith based schooling is more popular in Australia than it has ever been. Something like 40% of secular students attend a faith affiliated high school. They attend chapel services. They might have a chaplain who runs Bible studies. A huge number of young people encounter the Bible in that context, and that’s growing.”
The historian continued:
“Migrant communities are often very Biblically engaged. Pentecostalism, I think, has changed the landscape of personal Bible reading in many ways. What I’m interested in is how is this changing the rise of Bible apps, digital Bibles, the Bible on Tik-tok? I think the nature of Bible engagement is changing very rapidly, and I want to see where that goes.”
“What I’m curious about is where does Bible engagement happen? The answers to that in 1960 might have involved a follow up meeting to the Billy Graham crusade, for example, or a church service with the family in the suburbs of the cities. But now the answer might include, and often I think does, school. That’s the changing location of Bible engagement.”
“I’ve been struck by hearing the Bible mentioned in the media quite often on all sides of politics. The current debate about the voice referendum is one example. The Bible Society in the UK described the funeral of Queen Elizabeth as the single largest scriptural event in history. In Australia, nearly four million people watched that broadcast. It’s not the same kind of Bible engagement as a private devotional in your own home, yet lots of people saw a psalm read or a biblical hymn sung, heard the Archbishop of Canterbury preach. So I think we’re living in quite an interesting moment of flux in terms of how do people actually come across the Bible in their ordinary lives, whether they’re believers or not.”
“I think people’s encounter with the Bible varies enormously .. the 1980s was a real boom period for Pentecostal churches like Hillsong in Australia. One of its distinctives is the centrality it places on the personal experience of God, and that is often accompanied by a very personal engagement with the Bible as a way of interacting with God and hearing from God. At the same time, no one denomination, not Pentecostals, not Catholics, not Anglicans or anybody, has all its believers reading the Bible in one way, even within a church or within a denomination. Christians understand the Bible in different ways, some as like literally true, some as a historically embedded revelation from God, some as an accompaniment to church authority. And what those differences of views have in common is the Word of God. But what that means to people varies enormously.”
“I think one of the big changes is that there’s been a changing relationship between the Bible and wider Australian culture. The Bible has often been mediated to a people in Australia in very English ways. It comes to many of us in the English language, rather than another translation. It comes to us with the history of the Bible in Europe as part of its cultural baggage. The kind of civilisation that we attach to it is often a Western Christian one. And that relationship has been drifting, I think, actually in exciting ways. It has its own history among Indigenous Australians, but without the imperial or colonial trappings.”
“I think we actually live at a time when there are crises all around us and there are huge challenges before all of us — climate change, politics, moral questions of all kinds. There’s a space now to actually re-engage the Bible and ask: How can we read and understand this in relation to the issues that we face? We might not know the answers to that until we do the work? I don’t think it’s about trying to retain or keep hold of old answers to those questions necessarily. I think there’s actually room for a fresh engagement, creative thinking, and a kind of self-awareness that maybe the British Bible, the Imperial Bible, the kind of Bible that comes to us with the power and structures of that world, might not be what we need right now. We might need to do the work of reading it for ourselves in this place, in this time listening to our neighbours, be they Indigenous people, people from the Asia-Pacific region and all those things.”
Dr. Lake notes the American Bible Society which prepares annual reports on Bible engagement in the US recently headlined a sharp drop in scripture engagement among Bible users. “The role of the Bible in the life of a Christian seems to be shifting quite rapidly at the moment. There’s lots of ways to hear the Word of God and reading in a book is only one of them. It’s an important one, but I just think we need to resist an idea that that’s the only measure of a Christian life. I mean, many Christians around the world aren’t literate and don’t have the Bible in their native language. So I think we need to be wary of that.”
“I think we are living at a time of incredible fragmentation. So many of the things that give our communities heart and shape and substance have been under a lot of pressure. The very fabric of our society, I think, has been under a lot of strain and a lot of people have become more isolated than they used to be from all their communities. The church has been bound up in that huge process as well. So I think we need to think about reading as a communal activity, not just as an individual one. A living faith isn’t something you only work out on your own or even in your nuclear family. It’s something we do together in our society, in our neighbourhoods, in our communities. I’d like to see a conversation around what role might engaging with the Bible have in that way. How can local communities take that seriously and creatively in this kind of post-COVID world?”
“This is not an ancient dead text. This is not a relic of some strange past. This is a text that can call us to a whole new perspective on the world that we live in. And I think engaging critically, creatively in community, that is a really worthwhile task for Australia now.”
Click below to listen to the full interview with Dr. Meredith Lake.
