For the Open-Minded

Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia, by Tom Frame; UNSW Press, 2009, 337 pages, $34.95.

Australia and religion: to some minds these two terms represent polar contradictions; yet there have been many who would deny their incompatibility. For some Australians, to discuss religion is socially impious, while to others any discourse on that subject should avoid the casual, the slight, while assuming a measure of deep solemnity or grave reverence. Religion carries with it both an impetus to sceptical denial and a tenacious insistence on some higher truth, depending on the individual to whom its claims are presented. In Australia, religion has a definite ambivalence, both within single minds and in defined communities.

Tom Frame’s book represents its author’s exploration of the status of religious belief in Australia, in both historical and contemporary contexts. It is concerned with post-1788 Australia, wherein imported religious precepts, the worldviews of the representatives of the cultures from which those outlooks originated, have been transplanted to a foreign soil. He is interested in the insights and oppositions that define the nature of the religious thoughtscape that he and we, his contemporaries, inhabit.

At the core of Frame’s thought is a conviction that humanity is improved by adherence to religious understanding and practice. He believes that those advocating the demise of religion within civilisation offer no realistic alternative:

I contend that those without religious belief do not have a clearly articulated vision of what a godless world will be like. Most insist they don’t need one. Although they profess few common values or shared virtues, have no comprehensive answers to the world’s problems and are offering no positive program of action to deal with greed and selfishness, betrayal and violence, they assert that a world without God is always and everywhere to be preferred. They ask that others trust their interpretations, receive their pledges and have faith in humanity. I believe that to accept such an invitation carries significant risk.

Frame structures his subject as philosophical persuasion, perhaps inevitably interspersed with personal assertion. Beginning from his definition of key terms (belief, behaviour, belonging), he outlines the historical origins and context of unbelief in Australia as these are evinced by interpretations of such official sources as census data. Coming to the provisional conclusion that Australian religious reality has always presented a context of opposing lines of thought, he accounts for the Australian resistance to religious belief in traditional terms. He argues, that is, that Australian anti-theism is erected on double foundations: the coincidence of Australia’s European settlement with the rise of alternative belief systems from Hume to Nietzsche and the emergence of science as breeding ground for scepticism.

Frame sees Australian unbelief, its colonial anti-theistic tendencies, as an expression of a class struggle inherent in the foundation of the European settlement as a penal colony. This situation is compounded in the proliferation of non-traditional theological sources, including the temporary prevalence of “secular theology”. He sees the consequences of these influences and processes as incoherence and confusion that have done more harm than good to the credibility of theistic belief in this country.

The contemporary status of Australian unbelief is viewed here through the medium of a vox pop devised by Frame from such sources as letters to the editor and talkback radio. This methodology casts Australian unbelief as an amalgam of the opinion that “belief in God is irrational and unreasonable”; the objection that “theism is dangerous and that religions are dangerous”; the conviction that atheism is “a sign of human maturity”; the realisation that theism is “one explanation among many”; and the development in society of a “preference for agnosticism”. He admits then that he can find no characteristic of Australian unbelief distinguishing it from its European, British or North American counterparts, although he contends that “Australian unbelief is more practical than philosophical, and more personal than theological, in terms of its motivations and imperatives”. The outcome of that disposition is mourned in the following terms:

The Australian attitude to religion gives comfort to neither the believer nor the atheist. This accounts, in part, for the existence of fundamentalist religion and for the rise of militant anti-theism. Neither is interested in half measures. Both are appalled by anything other than full commitment …

Does this state of affairs signal the death of organised religion? Frame thinks not, arguing that religion today more than ever imparts “a sense of communal identity that stands defiantly against the impersonal forces of global capitalism”. Nonetheless his study pushes to conclusion with a review of the debate between atheists and their critics, believers and their philosophical opponents. This closing phase of the book is perhaps the most stimulating: it presents the atheism of Christopher Hitchens, the anti-Islamic writer Sam Harris, the British philosopher Anthony Grayling, the atheistic opponent of Middle Eastern monotheistic religions, the philosopher Daniel Dennett and the atheistic standard-bearer Richard Dawkins. Frame’s objections to the work of these individuals are generally founded on the intolerance he finds in their critiques of theistic beliefs and practices. Additionally, he complains of the logical inconsistency of these aspirants to reason’s throne in dismissing as delusional and even insane the mindset of those who accept as possibilities the claims of religion as beneficial to human affairs. He finds a lack of respect at the heart of both ends of the debate:

In my view, the main problem to be addressed is the manner in which religious beliefs are handled by those who profess them—and by those who don’t. There are etiquettes appropriate to all conversations and interactions.

To fortify this argument, Frame enlists Schopenhauer’s idea that “politeness was based on ‘a tacit agreement that people’s miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not made the subject of reproach’”. He further employs the American Eric Hoffer’s identification of rudeness as “the weak man’s imitation of strength”.

Fundamentally, then, this book concludes with a claim as ancient as that expressed by Aristotle in the observation that the mark of an educated mind is the ability to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Losing My Religion calls for the reinstatement of the education that Robert Frost saw as “the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence”. Tom Frame, in asserting his own personal theistic faith, claims with Keats the right to a mindset of “negative capability”, entitling and empowering him to achieve a state in which he is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”.

Losing My Religion is written for the non-specialist reader. Its matter is presented in a lucid discursive style and aided by its referential notations and bibliographical listings. For the open-minded reader, it offers the pleasurable opportunity for reflection to whatever depth the reader is inclined to choose.

Dr Michael Cotter, a freelance scholar, worked for over three decades as an educator in the Australian and American university systems.