Evangelicals and the end of Christian Australia: nation and religion in the public square, 1959-1979

Abstract

This thesis explores the relationship between evangelical religion and national public culture in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. The two decades between Billy Graham’s triumphant first Australian ‘crusade’ in 1959 and his underwhelming last visit in 1979 saw long-held notions of personal, social and national identity brought to the fore and radically challenged. Quickly and unexpectedly, long- and widely-held depictions of Australia as a ‘British’, ‘White’ and ‘Christian’ nation became contested and ultimately untenable in the public square. While understanding the erosion of ethnic and racial bases for a national narrative is a work in progress for Australian historians, they have been largely silent on the concurrent decline in the influence of Christianity on national public culture since the 1960s, often assuming its inevitable demise in the face of secularisation. However, in the past fifteen years observers have increasingly recognised religion’s continued influence on politics, culture and identity, necessitating a new look at how and why Australians stopped thinking of themselves as members of a ‘Christian nation’, and how the churches and their leaders responded. By interrogating the role of various Australian evangelical Christian leaders in public life across the ‘long 1960s’, this thesis examines how these ‘other-worldly’ Christians engaged with a changing world. It explores their articulation of a post-Christendom relationship between the church and the nation and their approach to shaping a post-imperial national identity, bringing a new religious perspective to studies of the ‘new nationalism’ and the end of ‘the British World’. This thesis argues that evangelicals responded to this profound cultural rupture in a range of ways, often creative, often exposing contradictions within the movement, and belying common caricatures of evangelicalism as monochrome, anti-intellectual, and disengaged from the central currents of national life.