HH Pope Shenouda III had strong views on the qualifications for the service of bishops and priests. They stood us in good stead for the past forty years. Let us pray they are continued into the future...

If you are like me – not so good in the Arabic language – you are probably finding it hard to get any information about how things are progressing in Egypt in the lead up to the papal elections. A huge thanks to HG Bishop Angaelos in the UK for posting a comprehensive and authoritative summary of what is happening, and what is going to happen over the coming months. You can find it here.

On the other hand, it is always interesting to see how non-Copts view us. Here and here are two such sites, but they come with a warning: Coptic readers might not like everything they read on these sites, and I certainly cannot vouch for their accuracy. The view from a distance can provide an interesting perspective, but it also often ends up being somewhat incorrect.

We continue to pray for our Lord to guide all those involved in the process, that His will may be done and not that of any human being. I will take this opportunity to express just one personal observation I feel very strongly about.

The role of a clergyman is critical in our Coptic culture. Bishops and priests have the opportunity to do both great good, but also to do great harm. In the years that I have lived in the Coptic Church, there has always been a closely followed principle that has stood the Church in good stead: those who covet ordination are excluded from consideration.

There are excellent reasons for this. A person who sees ordination as some kind of “promotion” or honour is thinking of himself, and in true Christian service, there is simply no room for that. Once the ‘ego’ gets involved, the Holy Spirit steps back, and all you have left is merely human service, with all its faults and failings and weaknesses. No one benefits from that, neither servant nor the served. You only have to look around to other Christian Churches where clergymen “volunteer” for “promotion” to see the kinds of disasters that eventually follow. I am not saying that everyone who wishes to be ordained is unsuitable, but the percentage that are unsuitable is much, much higher than it is among those who don’t desire this.

Our late and much missed Pope Shenouda III was a great believer in this principle. In his classic spiritual work, The Release of the Spirit, he wrote a moving exposition on how anyone who had the least understanding of the responsibilities of ordained service would run a thousand miles to escape them. This is reflected in the time-honoured tradition at the beginning of the rite of consecration of a Coptic bishop where the soon-to-be-ordained monk is brought into the church firmly clenched by the arms between two other bishops. Today, this is mostly symbolic, but there were many occasions in the past where without such measures, the humble and frightened monk would have fled the scene and disappeared into the desert.

His Holiness often said, “Those who are willing to be ordained are not worthy, and those who are worthy are not willing”. Our current system where the congregation chooses its own shepherd, and chooses him not through a political system of lobbying, but through mature and objective consideration of their suitability for the service, has resulted in an excellent standard of Coptic clergymen in general over the past fifty years or so. What it means is that you end up with people who see the role as humble, self-sacrificial service and not as a position of power. They serve by giving up all they have, surrendering ego and personal comfort and pouring themselves out for their flock (as Pope Shenouda did) and rarely abuse the respect and honour in which they are held by others.

I have very little access to information about what is going on in Egypt, but I sincerely hope and pray that our Church is not giving up this profound and effective principle.  I sincerely hope and pray that reports in English language newspapers that say things like “fourteen bishops and priests have put their names forward for the election” have simply got it wrong, and are just reading secular political attitudes into a scenario they can’t really understand. I sincerely hope and pray that none of our blessed clergy is coveting this position, and that if they are, that God will protect His Church from the difficulties that might well follow should such a person become pope. I wrote some years ago about just such a situation in our church that occurred a mere sixty years ago. Let us remember those wise words:

“Those who ignore the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them”.

Is God little more than a coin machine to you?

Australian philosopher Damon Young recently published an opinion piece on the ABC website headed “Prayer is delusional but its power can be real”. In it, he attacks people of all religions who use prayer to take vengeance on their enemies and points to the failure of medical studies to prove that intercessory prayer changes health outcomes, other than calming the person doing the praying and producing effects like reduced blood pressure in that person.

While some of those who commented on the piece charge him with being anti-religion, I find myself agreeing with most of what he says, but probably for very different reasons.

Of course there are numerous Bible verses about asking for things from God, but these need to be read and interpreted in the context of the overall Gospel message. In Old Testament times, people had not yet experienced the fullness of the love of God as expressed in the Incarnation of the Logos in Jesus, so they had some reason to be anxious about their lives. Not so for us Christians! The Incarnation, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection should mean that we can never doubt the extent to which the love of God will stretch to take care of us (if one ever could really doubt that any way).

So the Christian message about the relationship between God the Provider and our personal needs is this: “Do not worry” (Matthew 6:31). Christ came to teach us divine, aghape love, to make that love the overriding principle of our lives, to make us “beings of love”. And divine love cares not for its own first, but for others. Love draws us out of our selves and transforms us into little images of the God of Love Himself. I cannot emphasise enough how central this transformation is to the Gospel message.

Where can selfish requests for personal needs fit into that picture? Quite simply, they have no place. Rather than worrying about our own petty needs (in comparison with God’s big picture of things), we should be striving to forget about ourselves, to replace that selfish focus with a focus on loving God and loving our neighbour. That is not to say that the Christian must therefore endure a horrible life where her own needs are never met! It is rather to say that if God is real, then we can trust Him to provide for our needs, even without us asking Him to.

“For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” Matthew 6:32.

Our prayers can never  tell God something He doesn’t already know, nor can we move Him to love us more than He already does. Our prayers will not remind a forgetful God to help us, nor prod a careless God to pay more attention to us. At best, supplicatory prayer is a way to share our needs with God, for our benefit (a problem shared is a problem halved) not to change what God is to do about them. After all, we constantly ask that “Thy will be done”, not our own. And St Gregory’s liturgy reminds us that God is He who gives us “more than we ask or understand”.

But to use God as a cosmic “slot machine” is to abuse His friendship: slot in your prayer, and get your fulfilment in the tray at the bottom! Is that really what God is for us? This suggests that the selfish need is more important to us than God Himself. We care more about the present than we do about the Giver of the present. What if He doesn’t do what we ask of Him? Do we not then have the right to feel badly treated? Do we not then have a case against God?  But then, where is our love for God? And what is worse, this is utter madness! Who are we to know better than God? And it betrays a lack of faith in God, suggests that somehow He has failed in His duty towards us, as if He were a common human being like any one of us. This is certainly not the God of the Bible I know, nor the God I experience in real daily life.

God asks us to surrender everything if we wish to be His followers. This is a very high price to pay, and that is why He describes it as a narrow gate. I often wonder how many Church-going Christians have really surrendered to God in this way, and how many come to Church mostly because they find it convenient to have that “Friend in high places”. To be Christian is to accept with joy the possibility of having nothing. For the true Christian, Christ is all we will ever need, ever truly desire. Everything else: wealth and health and all those worldly things are just unnecessary extras. Sometimes God gives them to us much as a father occasionally gives his children lollies. But both the father and the children know that you do not live on lollies. It is the Bread that comes down from heaven that is essential for your spiritual nourishment and flourishing.

So although I am a Christian who believes in and practices prayer, I have to agree with Young and say that I too am deeply disturbed by those who use prayer as a means for achieving selfish ends. This is the very antithesis of true Christianity. The goal of true Christianity is to lose the selfishness inherent in us all and become beings of genuine love, not to beef up our selfishness by imagining that our Friend in high places will mould the universe to our own will.

Fr Ant

A day we have all been dreading has finally come upon us. After a long battle with illness, HH Pope Shenouda III has left this world. Shall we ever see another like him?

Many years ago, a relatively young Nazir Gayed left behind a promising career both within and outside of the Church and found a cave in the Egyptian desert in which, as a monk, he could pursue his chief passion: his love for God. But he was dragged away unwilling from his little heaven on earth, and thrown into the responsibilities of first the Bishopric of Education, and then the papacy. This he accepted, if unwillingly, putting his own desires second after the needs of others. Given a free choice, there is little doubt he would have chosen to live out his life in that cave, and the Church would have been blessed with one of those little known hermits who support us all with the purity of their prayers. But no, he acquiesced to the call and devoted his days instead to solving the problems of others. I wonder how many people really understand the magnitude of that sacrifice? And yet he never complained, never grumbled, never showed in the slightest way that he was unhappy with the path that God had chosen for him. And now, at last, after 88 years on this earth, after seven decades of faithful, self-sacrificial service, God has given him his heart’s desire. This time, he has left the world to pursue his chief passion, his love for God, and no one can drag him back.

At times like these, people are wont to list all the achievements of the person who has passed away. That will no doubt make for a very substantial inventory in this case.  But for me, these are not the things that matter. This list will probably include the number of churches that were established during his reign and the number of schools and theological colleges, the number of honorary degrees he received, and so on. But for me, this is not the Church, and so this is not the measure of the man or his service. The real Church is not made of buildings and institutions. Those things are just tools we use to build the real Church, which is made up of the hearts and lives of every member of the Church. Where there is love, where there is truth, where there is wisdom, and nobility, integrity and honour, kindness and compassion – that is the real Church. These are not things you can put numbers to, yet they are the things that really matter. And they are the things that Pope Shenouda had a very special way of nurturing and inspiring in others.

Elsewhere I wrote about a personal experience I had with His Holiness when I was a young and newly ordained priest. He had a way of making an unimportant stranger feel important, a way of giving you his attention in a way that said, “At this moment in time, you are more important to me than anything else”. I only had the blessing of meeting him in person on a limited number of occasions, but each one of those occasions is more precious to me than gold and has left its mark on my life.

What I loved about him was the way he remained a very real human being in spite of all the trappings and requirements of the high office he held. I loved that he loved his dogs at his cell in St Bishoy Monastery, and treated them with such kindness and gentleness. I loved the way he connected with children and young people, across all barriers of culture. I loved his kind smile that was never forced or put on, and always came accompanied by kind words and kind actions. I loved his integrity, the way he always insisted on the truth, even to his own hurt. I loved his compassion for the underdog, the way he would stand up for those that others put down. I loved his profound knowledge of Bible and the Fathers, and more importantly, the measured and balanced way in which he interpreted them. I loved his determination to do things right, not to cut corners, even if he could get away with it. I loved that he was from the Upper Egyptian town of Asyut (my origin too) and that he reminded me so strongly of my own father and my uncles, so calm, so patient, so pleasant in an old-world gentlemanly sort of way. I loved his sense of humour, the way he would tell a joke in his more casual moments and really care whether or not it made you laugh. I loved his own unself-conscious laugh and those little creases at the corners of his eyes. I loved that his sensitive soul had trouble coping with anyone who cried in front of him. And there is so much more…

How shall the Coptic Church cope without him? Of course, the Church belongs to Christ and He alone is its true keeper and preserver. But His Holiness was just such a clear living example of what it means to be Christ-like. May God protect the Church and especially the Copts of Egypt in these difficult and uncertain times.

The world is a poorer place for his passing from it.

Shall we ever see another like him? I hope we shall. I hope we shall see millions like him. If we truly want to honour him, the best way is not with words or tears. It is by taking up the baton he has passed to each and every one of us. It is by being faithful to his example, and following in his footsteps, he who faithfully trod in the footsteps of the Lord he loved with every fibre of his being.

The Temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis in the ruins of Pompeii in Italy

The last post on facing the world stirred some interest, so I thought I might share an excerpt from the draft of the book I mentioned at the end of that post…

When St Mark left Egypt to continue his missionary travels, he appointed Anianus to care for the young church in his absence, and when St Mark was martyred in Alexandria in 68AD, Anianus assumed the leadership of the church. He is thus considered the second of the 117 Popes of Alexandria, although the title “pope” did not come into usage until the time of Pope Heraclas in the third century. Interestingly, it is likely that this title, ‘Papa’, which is simply a term of endearment akin to the modern ‘Daddy’, was used in Alexandria some years before it was applied to the bishop of Rome. For many years after that, there was always one bishop and twelve presbyters or priests in Alexandria. When a bishop died, the twelve priests would elect his successor from among their number, and whenever a priest died or was elevated to the bishopric, another suitable man was ordained to take his place.

What did the coming of Christianity mean for the inhabitants of Alexandria? It is almost certain that the significance of the conversion of Alexandrians to Christianity had the same significance for them that it had for people throughout the Roman world, indeed, the pagan world: Christianity turned the world upside down. This phenomenon is most lucidly described by Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart, and it helps to explain why the pagan society was so violently determined to exterminate this new religion.

If you visit the archaeological remains of ancient Pompeii near the Italian coast you will find there a Roman temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis. What is an Egyptian goddess doing in the heart of the Roman Empire? In fact, the Romans were really quite tolerant of religions other than their own. Their standard procedure on conquering a new land with different gods was to absorb their religion into their own. The conquered Egyptians were encouraged to continue worshipping their ancient gods, and the Romans either equated those gods with their own Roman gods or else added them to their own list of gods. But Christianity was different. Christians insisted that their God was the only god, and that there can be no other real gods except Him. The Romans saw this denial of their gods as blasphemy and even called the Christians atheists – those who do not believe in the gods.

If that were the only problem that pagan Romans had with Christianity, they may not have been quite so aggressive. But there was a deeper difference that threatened the very society of the pagan world, and this difference was absolutely intolerable. To understand this difference, we need first to briefly sketch the pagan view of the universe. For them, the universe consisted in a hierarchy, a set of levels, with the gods being at the very top, and krill and algae at the very bottom. As you go down the levels, you find lesser gods, then the descending social classes, followed by the higher animals, and so on down to the simplest of life forms. Within the levels of humanity, we have again the most important, rich and powerful (e.g. the Roman Emperor) at the very top, and the poorest and the slaves at the very bottom. This hierarchy was considered to be the way things should be, the natural order of things. So long as it remained in place, society could be prosperous, for the gods would be happy and everyone would be in their proper place. Everyone belonged in their level because that is what they were worth. A king is a king because he is a superior human being to all the others. A slave is a slave because he is inferior to everyone else, irrational, unintelligent, ruled by base animal emotions and desires, only a very little removed from the higher animals that come just below him in the order of nature. But only upset this balance of nature somehow, say by someone leaving their proper level and rising to a higher one, and the whole order of nature would be upset. The gods would not tolerate this unnatural state of things and something would have to be done to restore the balance of nature. From this thinking arose the idea of human sacrifice or tragic death, the death of the one who upset things would appease the gods and restore the natural balance once more.

And then, along comes Christianity with its unspeakable idea of the humble God. Pagans furiously hated Christianity because it suggested that a God could descend to earth and take the position of a lowly human being. Not just take a human form for a little while, an illusion temporarily perpetrated in order to allow the god to get his business done among the puny humans, but God actually became a human being, a full and normal human being, with real flesh and bones, one who needed to sleep and eat or else he would die. And He did not become an Emperor or a King, He did not even become just an average human being; He became a lowly carpenter, and then worse still, a homeless wanderer who relied on others for food and drink and shelter. This was the ultimate unbalancing of the natural order of things! This was intolerable!

What is worse is that the Christians would not stop there. They introduced corrosive ideas into society. Ideas like the equality of men and women, when every pagan knew that women were by nature inferior to men, for women are ruled by their irrational emotions but men are logical and rational. Even worse was the idea that slaves and Emperors are equal! Not only would such beliefs destroy society if they spread, but they might even give slaves and women strange ideas and make them difficult to control. No, this new cult of so-called Christians could not be tolerated. The good of society, the prosperity of the empire, depended on exterminating them with their heretical and dangerous views. And so pagan Rome tried on at least ten documented occasions to wipe Christians and Christianity from the face of the earth, or at least from some large part of it. We shall explore this era of persecution further in the next section, for it has had a lasting effect on Coptic Christianity.

Thus did the earliest Christians often have to hide their Christianity from their neighbours. They would meet in secret to pray and celebrate the Eucharist, for fear of being discovered and prosecuted. They developed secret signs by which they could nonetheless recognise each other. It is likely that the sign of a fish (see box) was an earlier symbol of Christianity than the sign of the cross. When a Christian met someone on the street and wanted to find out if they too were Christian, they might nonchalantly trace out the shape of a fish in the dirt with their foot. If the other person was a pagan, they would probably think they were thinking of dinner, but if they were Christian, they would understand this secret sign and reveal their own identity as a Christian.

Why would anyone hold on to a faith that put one in such danger? Why would the early Christians insist on following the Carpenter from Nazareth when it was likely to cost them so much? Imagine living in a secret community of Christians where every now and then news would spread of yet another member who had been found out, arrested, tortured and killed. And yet, in spite of this atmosphere, Christianity in Egypt and throughout the pagan world continued to grow and spread at an astonishing rate. How can we explain this? Of course, we do not have direct access to what went on in the minds and homes of those early Christians, but some of their writings have survived, and they give us some idea of their mindset. It seems that they were convinced that Christianity gave them Truth, a truth so powerful, so convincing, so fulfilling, that it was worth dying for. That is the truth that eventually came to be embodied in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that we explored in chapter XX. The Truth that God is love, that love is the most important guiding principle of our lives, so important that we must do more than just practice it, we must become it. This Truth made far more sense to them than the hierarchical universe of the pagans. It offered those who were of low social station hope and gave them value, and so the pagans often criticised the Christians for allowing these dregs of society to join their community. But even for those of higher social status, this Truth made sense of the world, and it fitted reality far better than their pagan beliefs. It was from among this educated upper class that Christianity in Alexandria produced its first Christian scholars, as we shall see in the next section.

But there are also some very important lessons for us to learn in twenty-first century western society. It is worth remembering and reminding our society that the values we cherish most like the equality of every human being came to western society directly from the teachings of Christ. And as western society gradually falls away from Christianity, it is worth asking whether it will be find enough good reason to continue to hold on to such values, or whether it will descend again into the selfish thinking that is our fallen human nature. Perhaps, as Christians in this modern world, we have a responsibility to work hard to spread the eternal Truth of Christianity to a world that is slowly falling into forgetfulness?

Fr Zakaria Botros in his controversial satellite TV role. His engagement with Muslims has stirred great unrest. How do Copts engage with the western societies into which they have been transplanted?

As the Coptic Church has spread into the Diaspora of Western nations it has experienced an ever growing interaction with non-Copts. The sheer breadth of this interaction is rarely appreciated by Copts I think. To list just a few situations:

• Employees and clients in Coptic organisations like Child Care Centres, Vacation Care Centres, Coptic Schools, Aged Care Facilities and the Theological Colleges.
• Interested visitors to Coptic monasteries.
• Marriages of Copts to non-Copts, or rather to converts to Coptic Orthodoxy.
• Dialogues with other Churches and religions through organisations like the World Council of Churches and its branches and Interfaith events.
• Participation in Government sponsored initiatives as well as those organised by civil society to deal with various pressing social issues.
• Coptic sporting teams participating in local competitions.
• Copts who run for political office.
• Missionary and outreach services.
• Services for the homeless and those in prison.
• Apologetics dialogues with non-believers.
• Kimi radio program and the Coptic satellite TV channels.
• Visitors to Coptic websites of all kinds.
• FOCUS – university campus societies.
• Copts who volunteer to teach religion in public schools.
• Interest from the media following the many massacres of Copts in Egypt and regarding the future of Christians in the Egypt of the Arab Spring.

All of these of course are in addition to the many thousands of commonplace interactions that take place daily in schools, tertiary institutions, workplaces and over the back fence with the neighbours.

In majority Muslim Egypt, there has often been strife, but relatively little actual theological debate or dialogue between the two Abrahamic faiths. One of the rare records of such debates precedes the miracle of the mountain of Mukattum, and that debate ended with the Christians being threatened with harsh punishments if they could not fulfil the Bible’s promise and literally move a mountain (which thank God, they did). In recent times, Fr Zakaria Botros has been strident in his criticism of Muslim beliefs. Although he has reportedly won thousands of converts to Christ, he now lives his life in hiding for fear of assassination. It is not hard to understand why the Church in Egypt has tended to avoid direct debate or dialogue with Muslims on the pros and cons of our relevant beliefs!

For a Church that has spent most of its existence just struggling just to survive in an often hostile climate in Egypt, the opening up of the Coptic Church to the western world has brought with it both challenges and opportunities. There are no such hindrances in the tolerant and liberal west, and our ancient faith has been questioned like never before. Whereas the young Copt could fast all her life in Egypt without ever being questioned why (Muslims fast too) revealing one’s fast to one’s western friends often results in a polite interrogation as to why one would do that to oneself. Not to mention the many strident attacks on religious faith itself which have become fashionable in the last couple of decades. The Copts find themselves thrust unready into the marketplace of ideas that is modern liberal democratic society.

Yet I believe that we should not view this new challenge to our faith as a bad thing, but as a great opportunity. After all, to practice one’s faith with understanding and confidence is surely better than practicing it blindly, and ending up with deep subconscious doubts that it might all turn out to be wrong. I believe the right approach to one’s faith is fearless robust honesty. If our faith is true, then it will stand up to any and all scrutiny, and we will only hold it even more strongly for learning that. And if it is false, then surely it is better to know than to live a lie? So far, in this perilous journey of discovery I have found that our faith is far better founded and supported than most Christians realise.

It is also far more beautiful than most Christians realise. I wonder how many Copts are little more than ‘cultural Copts’, holding to the faith, attending Church, even praying and reading their Bibles just because they were told to, just because they were brought up that way. For them, practices that should be the very sweetness of life become boring and dull routines and duties to be performed to please an angry God or else suffer the consequences. It is these Copts who, when challenged seriously, run the risk of falling to pieces and perhaps even losing their faith. I have seen it happen all too often.

This is sad, and unnecessary. We need to revive the reality, the power and the beauty of Orthodox Christianity in the hearts of our own members before we can seriously share it with others or defend it against criticism. I am being perhaps a little too pessimistic in the picture I have painted, for there are indeed many shining examples in our parishes today who live the fullness of the life with Christ and have done wonderful things to share our precious faith with others. But such remain a minority, I fear, and I dream of the day when every member of the Church is a living, breathing, daily witness of the power of Christ to transform humans into heavenly creatures walking this earth.

I am in the process of writing a book to introduce the Coptic faith and church to non-Copts and hope to complete the manuscript by the end of February. I welcome any suggestions you might have from your own experiences as to what needs to be in such a book, what would make it useful for the non-Copts you have met. Feel free to make your suggestions publicly via a comment on this post, or privately by email via the “Contact Me” link at the top of this page. All suggestions will be much appreciated!

A little contemplation on the liturgy, with a linguistic turn…

The Anaphora in the Coptic rite is that part of the Eucharistic liturgy that begins with the priest praying the words,

“The Lord be with you all”,

to which the congregation respond,

“And with your spirit”.

The word anaphora is Greek and is derived from two roots: ano or ‘upward’ and phero meaning ‘to bear, carry or bring’. Thus we find it used in Matthew 17:1…

“Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves”

So, the Anaphora is that part of the liturgy where we are enjoined to allow ourselves to be carried up to God. Note that in Matthew 17:1, it is Jesus who leads the three disciples up the mountain, in that sense ‘bringing’ them. And yet, they must walk on their own legs to actually follow Him, so in that sense, they ‘bring’ or ‘carry’ themselves. Neither is sufficient to get them up the mountain by itself. Christ will not pick them up physically and carry them if they choose not walk on their own feet, and if they walk alone without Christ they will not know where to go. So also, our lifting up of our hearts to God cannot be accomplished by our own efforts, or by the grace of God alone, but the two must act in concert, in harmony.

As part of this dialogue, the priest enjoins the people to

Lift up your hearts: ano emon tas kardias

Again, the words are Greek rather than Coptic. Looking into the Greek origins reveals layers of textured meaning that are sadly lost when translated:

ano - “upward or on the top: – above, brim, high, up” (according to Strong’s; see John 3:3 anothen ).

So the Greek word has the implication not just of height, but height to the very brim: reaching up as far as possible. So we are to lift our hearts not half heartedly, but generously, fully, all the way to the brim. This in turn is derived from:

anti - “A primary particle; opposite, that is, instead or because of (rarely in addition to): – for, in the room of. Often used in composition to denote contrast, requital, substitution, correspondence, etc.”

The implication here is that our new state must be substituted for the old state. The lifting is no mere change in position, it is a change in the very nature of the thing lifted. There must be a noticeable difference, a contrast, between our hearts before and after they are lifted up.

And of course, ‘kardias’ is the Greek for heart, from which English words like cardiac and cardiology are derived. Diseases of the heart are generally life or death matters. A malfunctioning heart means that one’s life is in peril. Even the ancients understood the link between a beating heart and life. So what we are being asked to lift up to God is not just our superficial emotions, not just words from our lips, but the very deepest things that make us who we are. Nothing is to be held back from God in this encounter. The hearts we lift up contain within them our whole lives, our very existence.

This brief exchange often flits by quickly in the liturgy, and I often wonder how many people really absorb it, really take it to heart. It is the essential introduction to the prayers that follow, so essential that as far as I can tell, it is found in virtually every Christian tradition that has a Eucharistic liturgy. It origins would seem to lie very deep in the long history of the Christian faith, very close to its origins, and for that reason alone it is to be treasured and enjoyed. But more importantly, it embodies and expresses the ‘how’ of ‘how to approach God’.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately around a video by evangelist Jefferson Bethke that has gone viral called “Why I Hate Religion But Love Jesus”. You can see the video and read an excellent critique of it by an Eastern Orthodox priest here. There is not much left to be said on the topic, but of course, I must have my two cents’ worth!

As is the case with so many debates, problems arise because the words are not defined clearly. What does ‘religion‘ actually mean? What is it that this bloke hates, exactly? Anyone who loves Jesus is bound to also love ‘true religion’, a phrase used by St James in his epistle (1:26,27). He points out the difference between religion properly practiced and religion abused. I think what the bloke in the video is rebelling against is religion abused, but he just calls it ‘religion’, hence the controversy, since people think he is using ‘religion’ in the more general sense of the word, thus hating both true and abused religion together. Of course, that controversy is probably exactly what he was aiming at. What better way for an evangelist to get his message heard by millions?

The abuse of religiion is nothing new. It happened in the Jewish faith at the time of Christ, it happened in the early Christian Church in the time of the Apostles, and, surprise, surprise, it happens today. I fully join with Bethke in rejecting the abuse of religion.

But that doesn’t mean we should toss out religion altogether. As St James points out, there is a pure and true practice of religion that is acceptable before God and which enlightens, ennobles and elevates the believer. Our task as Christians is to constantly self-review, both on a personal and individual level as well as on the community level, and ask ourselves daily whether we are following that path. If we stray, repentance and return is called for.

Religion has acquired a bad name nowadays. I can see why this video has struck such a cord with so many people. In these days of universal education where children are taught to think for themselves from a young age the old ways of “just believe what you are told” no longer work, whether in religion, or politics, or in any sphere of life. Add to that the abuses by church leaders that the media loves to sensationalise, and the general move towards flexibility rather than rigidity in our daily lives, and it’s easy to see why ‘religion’, in the sense our grandparents thought of it, has fallen well out of favour.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. After all, Christ never came to build an institution, and He never asked people to believe in Him just out of fear of or respect for authority. He wanted people to know Him as a person, and to love Him as such. Perhaps we are finally beginning to shed a constrictive skin of institutionalism that has tended to starch and stifle our true encounter with God? Imagine a day when videos like Bethke’s don’t even raise an eyebrow, because nobody practices their religion in that way, the abusive way. Personally, I don’t like to speak of Christianity as a religion, except in a technical context. Christianity is not just an institution, or a book, or a set of ideas and rules. It is a relationship with one’s Creator and one’s fellow creations. It is a way of life. It is a state of being. It is who you are, deep down inside.  All the outer stuff follows naturally from the inner stuff, and without the inner stuff, the outer stuff is worthless.

I too hate the abuse of religion. But I think I’d be lost without true religion.

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SUPPLEMENTARY (23rd January 2012)

A younger person’s take on the subject: Glory and Rubbish

Can you handle the Truth?

There are two ways to follow Christ.

Actually, there are more, but overall, they can be grouped under two general categories: true ways and false ways. Here are just a few false ways:

Magical Thinking

If I fast for three days, I will force God to give me that job … if I run into five red traffic lights in a row, God is telling me not to buy that used car … the examples are endless.

And when, pray tell, did God agree to be our personal wizard? Can you see the similarity between this kind of thinking and casting magic spells? Is that really what Christ was all about? Oh, you will answer, but didn’t He promise that if we ask we shall receive? Yes, but is this the kind of asking He was talking about? What if two pious supporters of opposing football teams both ask God to give their team a win? How can God answer them both? (A draw is answering neither).

No, this promise cannot be understood as casting God as some kind of supernatural vending machine in our lives: put your prayer in the slot at the top, press the button, and out comes the fizzy answer at the bottom. We feel wronged when a vending machine swallows our money but doesn’t give us our product – is that how we should think of God? That would be degrading God to the level of our menial servant and it is not how a loving relationship works. A loving relationship is about uniting in spirit and thought and desire. It is about trust. It is about freely choosing to conform our limited will to His infinitely wise and loving will. And most of all, it is about loving the Beloved for His own sake, and not for what He can give me, or what I can benefit selfishly from Him. When we ask for things from God within this framework, it works beautifully.

Wishful Thinking

There is a powerful pressure on us to create God in our own image. Rather than letting the Real God be who He is, we create a kind of false God in our minds, and expect Him to always act the way we think He should. This is the kind of thinking that leads judgmental Christians to see the punishing hand of an angry God in tsunamis that kill thousands, or read God’s approval of me into the fact that I am more materially successful than my neighbour. It makes Christians adamant that God is a Republican or a Democrat. Or even that God is Catholic or Protestant, or Coptic Orthodox.

A moment’s reflection should be enough to convince us that God is Himself, and above all merely human prejudices. You cannot change reality just by thinking it different, and God is real. He does not conform to our image of Him; it is we who must alter our image to fit His reality.

I don’t need to create a God in my own image to feel good about myself; to validate myself. That is living a lie. In fact, God loves me, not because I am a jolly good chap, but in spite of who I am. He blesses my life not because I have earned such blessing in any way, but because He is love: gracious, generous, and constantly compassionate. Forget earning God’s approval – that is wishful thinking. Accept that God loves you because He is God, and love Him back because you come to be in his image, the image of love.

Over Simplification

An example of this is our tendency to reduce our relationship with God to a nice clear set of rules. This  ‘by the letter’ approach is very appealing to many people because it is so simple: so long as you carry out a list of simple instructions like pray every day, read your Bible every day, and go to church on Sundays, you are fine with God (and a jolly good chap to boot). Tick the boxes and you can sleep soundly.

Another example of oversimplification is the way we stereotype people along racial lines, because that is so much simpler than taking the trouble to see each individual for who they are. “All Muslims are arrogant fanatics who want to take over the world” – such beliefs make it so much simpler to deal with a Muslim (just hate them, they deserve it), but it is a lie. It denies the reality that there are many decent, kind and good Muslims in this world who only want to live in peace and get on with their lives, just like us.

Reality is complex. Any approach that ignores this fact is doomed to end with lies. We crave simplicity so we can understand our world, so we can feel some sense of control over it, but it is a false security.

And as for living by the letter, anyone can carry out all those ‘duties’ outwardly, perhaps even do them while convinced they are being sincere, yet their heart may still be far from God. The Old Testament is full of such cases, and in the New Testament Christ warns us more than once to beware lest on the last day He say to us, “Assuredly I say to you, I do not know you”. I fear that many of those who will hear those words said to them will be people who trusted in a comforting lie.

Following Christ is not easy and it is not reducible to a list of duties to be fulfilled. It is more about who you are as a person, the person that you become over your years of life with Him, constantly changing, constantly putting to death old ways of thinking and behaving and replacing them with new ways that are closer to the example of Christ. The practices we have called ‘duties’ can certainly be most helpful, but do not confuse the means for the end – that too is a lie. Practiced out of sincere love, things like prayer are no longer ‘duties’ but free and loving gifts to God.

There are many more examples of false ways to follow Christ, and all of them have this in common: they are based on an untruth of one kind or another. Magical thinking relies on the lie that God is a vending machine and that my desires are more important than the will of the Creator of the universe; wishful thinking relies on creating my own false image of who God is; and oversimplification relies on falsely reducing complex matters to an unreal and often unfair model.

This is not Christianity in its true form, the form for which the eternal Logos took the trouble to incarnate to reveal to us. When the Samaritan Woman in John chapter 4 asks Jesus about the right place to worship God, Jesus characteristically gives her more than she asks for:

But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. John 4:23-24

It is self-defeating to try to follow Christ who placed so much emphasis on Truth and yet evade Truth in ways like those described above. To do so is to betray one of the core foundations of what it means to be Christian. Yet by nature, we humans like security. And we feel more secure when things are simple and easy to understand. But reality refuses to be tamed. Like Aslan in CS Lewis’ Narnia books, Truth is not a tame lion, and those who hang around with Truth must be prepared for some wild, unpredictable and sometimes downright dangerous behaviour from it.

Personally, I find comfort in that thought. God has created me with an inbuilt sense of adventure, and I find that ‘wild adventure view’ of Christianity far more appealing than the sanitised, simplified, codified and pasteurised view. I also find it far more consistent with the reality I experience every day. One of the problems with a faith that accepts falsehoods is that sooner or later it must unravel as it comes into contact with reality, much like a bad scientific theory that falls apart as more data comes in. I genuinely wonder how a person who takes the false path can continue to do so without feeling that something is terribly wrong. Sometimes, to preserve our false faith, we add more and more unlikely beliefs to protect it against the evidence of real world. Eventually you end up living in a fantasy world of your own creation.

Here, strangely enough, I agree with the atheist who sees religion as little more than a fantasy created by humans to meet very human needs. A religious faith that does not include as an integral component a dogged devotion to Truth often ends up earning that criticism quite deservedly. But of course, what the atheist is criticising is not true Christianity but a ghostly parody of it. If we want to be true followers of Christ, He asks us to take off our seatbelts and trust His driving (but please don’t do this in your actual car – after all, there it is you driving, not Him). He makes no promises of safety nor of things turning out the way we would like them to. Often, they don’t. But the nice thing is that when we trust ourselves to Truth, things turn out the way HE wants them to, which is far, far better.

For me, to follow Christ is to follow Truth, since it is seeking Truth that has led me to follow Christ. I am inspired and motivated by Christ precisely because His words not only make an awful lot of rational sense, but they ‘feel’ true. More on this in my next…

As Xmas approaches, I present a really interesting guest blog from Samuel Kaldas. So few people today realise the incredible debt we owe to Christianity. Going on the words below, society today would be unimaginable had not that very special Baby been born two thousand years ago. Enjoy…

As often happens when one walks the streets of the Sydney CBD, I was once approached by a homeless woman who asked me for some money. In the conversation that followed, she commented on how irritated she was at the way city-goers would routinely snub her off and ignore her completely; “I mean,” she said, “I’m as human as everyone else.” I agreed with her of course. Who would deny as obvious a fact as that? Even those people who snubbed her and provoked the comment no doubt understood that although this woman was homeless, and lay considerably lower on whatever scale of social respectability we use to categorise ourselves nowadays, she was still as human as the richest person in Sydney. Her status as a member of the human race meant that she had a sort of inalienable value; she deserved exactly the same sort of basic respect and dignity as the richest and most successful members of our society, purely because she was a human being.

This might sound like a fact so obvious that it doesn’t really need to be said. All of us know perfectly well that a person’s social station does not reflect their value; we all understand that wealth and poverty, health and sickness don’t necessarily reflect any particular virtue or flaw in a person’s character, and that even if they did, we would be no less obliged to help any of our fellow human beings in need. How could we think otherwise? Isn’t that what it means to be human? In “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies”, the Orthodox theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart argues that if it weren’t for Christianity and its revolutionary re-imagining of what it means to be a human being, none of us might think that way at all. In the book’s introduction he says

“At a particular moment in history, I believe, something happened to Western humanity that changed it at the deepest levels of consciousness and at the highest levels of culture.”[1]

Living as we do, at the end of 2000 years of Christian history, in a culture that has been irrevocably shaped by the Christian view of the world, it is hard for us to appreciate just how revolutionary Christianity was when it first stepped onto the stage of history. We Copts know especially well that the Roman emperors were brutal and bloody in their repression of Christianity (half the icons that line our churches are the victims of Roman persecutions), but we do not, perhaps, appreciate why as well as we should. If Hart is to be believed, Christianity’s fundamental claims that God became man and died the death of a criminal, and that the sick, the poor and the sinful are as precious to God as any other of His children, were among the most subversive, rebellious and offensive ideas that the ancient world had ever encountered.

Modern readers might be surprised to find that one of the greatest problems the ancient pagans had with the early church was the ‘sort’ of persons they invited to their churches. Celsus, a pagan of the 2nd century AD, wrote:

“No wise man believes the Gospel, being driven away by the multitudes who adhere to it.”^[2]

He harshly criticises the Christians for teaching wisdom to women, children and slaves, claiming that they only teach such people because they are unable to convince people of more ‘intelligent’ pedigree.^[3] In saying this, he was merely echoing the soundest principles of classical wisdom; centuries earlier Plato[4] and Aristotle[5] had insisted that men, by nature, were superior to women, children and slaves. Such was the natural order, the way the gods had fashioned the world, and to treat slaves and women like men by teaching them and exhorting them to wisdom, was pointless stupidity.

He expresses a similar distaste for the way that Christians called ‘sinners’ to faith in Christ. Unlike most almost every respectable religion that came before it, the Christianity not only accepted but sought out prostitutes, drunkards and other ‘sinners’ in order to convert them to life in Christ. The outrage that this practice provoked in the minds of the ancients is readily apparent in the Gospels themselves; Christ’s contemporaries were repeatedly disgusted at the company He would keep (tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers etc.), and Christ would simply explain in response that He had come to save those who had need of saving.^[6] While to us, Christ’s reason for behaving this way (“those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick …”^[7]) makes perfect sense, to many of the ancients it was impious madness. Celsus complains that: “… no one by chastisement, much less by merciful treatment, could effect a complete change in those who are sinners both by nature and custom, for to change nature is an exceedingly difficult thing.”^[8] For Celsus, sinners were sinners as much as women were women and slaves were slaves. It was ludicrous to think that one could change ‘what they were’ by any amount of correction or punishment. They simply were lesser, fouler members of the human race and no-one could or should attempt to change that. To attempt, as the Christians did by Christ’s example, to win sinners over by loving and serving them (or, to use a more modern term, by treating them as human beings) was the height of idiocy and bad taste.

To understand Celsus’ objections properly, it’s important to understand that pagan societies were heavily hierarchical^[9] – they were very clearly ordered. Every person had their place on the grand ladder of social/religious importance; the emperor’s family, the wealthy landowners and the priests sat at the top of the ladder, while slaves, poor men, sinners and women tended towards the bottom (with occasional exceptions). It borders on being an undeniable fact that the people at the higher ends of the ladder were viewed as more ‘important’ and more ‘worthwhile’ than those at the bottom.

This is partly because, by and large, the pagans saw little difference between the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’. That is to say, your place on the social ladder reflected not only your political importance or your level of ‘authority’, but also reflected your virtue, your ‘worth’ in the eyes of the gods. As one author put it, “for the Romans, it was not true that all people are created equal.”^[10] The gods had not created ‘humanity’ as we understand it today, a set of individuals who differ in ability, circumstances and social station but all share equal worth; the Roman gods had created rulers and subjects, masters and slaves, men and women, some of whom were made to rule and some of whom were made to serve.

Roman society was ordered in a way that reflected the superiorities and inferiorities that the gods had built into nature itself, and that notion of hierarchy pervaded every level of the Roman state, including the family. And it was the gods, captained by the great Creator God Himself, who preserved the hierarchy that held human society together; as Hart says, “the gods love order above all else.”[11]

Keeping all this in mind, think for a moment about Christianity’s fundamental historical claim: that God Himself became a lowly Jewish carpenter, spent most of His time preaching to and serving tax collectors, lepers and prostitutes, and was ultimately executed as a criminal. The extent to which this idea was a rejection of the pagan worldview is impossible to understate. In Hart’s rather forceful words:

“[To the pagans] the gospel was an outrage … this was far worse than mere irreverence; it was pure and misanthropic perversity; it was anarchy.”[12]

Christians claimed that the Creator God Himself, who should have been working to sustain and encourage the created order, had humbled Himself to its lowest level by taking the ‘form of a bondservant’^[13] and dying the death of a criminal. And in so doing, He shattered, or even inverted the pagan hierarchy and brought into being a new order; an order in which “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” and where “all are one in Christ Jesus.”^[14]

In other words, it is in Christianity that we first see the ideas of ‘humanity’ and the ‘infinite worth’ of every single human being regardless of virtue or social station, coming into being. Arguably, if it had not been for Christianity’s stunningly subversive teachings about the value of sinners and lower class peoples, such people might never have come to be considered fully ‘human’ at all. In Hart’s words, “it would not be implausible to argue that our very ability to speak of ‘persons’ as we do is a consequence of the revolution in moral sensibility that Christianity brought about.”^[15]

Christianity is called a lot of things nowadays (dreary, outdated, dogmatic, evil …), but one character rarely applied to it is rebellious; which is rather ironic given that the early Christians (and their persecutors for that matter) inevitably understood themselves as rebels. Unfortunately, as modern Christians we rarely appreciate this sense of rebellion, even though it survives powerfully in our prayers and rites. It is nowhere more obvious than in the rite of baptism where the convert (or their parents if they are a child) turns to the West and declares:

I renounce you, Satan, with all your impure works, all your evil soldiers, all your wickedness, all your powers, all your despicable worship, all your deceiving and misleading trickery, all your armies, all your principalities and all the rest of your hypocrisy.

I renounce you! I renounce you! I renounce you!

The significance of these words to an ancient convert was absolutely life changing. In saying them, he was rejecting the pagan gods (who the Christians now began to call demons), and the human empire which they sustained – which is probably why early Christians refused to worship the image of the Roman emperor even on pain of torture and death.^[16] By becoming Christians, they were confessing their allegiance to a new emperor (Christ) and a new order. And this new order rejected all the ‘hierarchy’ of the old, corrupt order; baptism washed away all pagan labels. Instead of a society based on rank and authority, the church was a community where all members bore the rank of the King Himself, for all Christians were said, by baptism, to have ‘put on Christ.’^[17] In Christ’s church, even authority figures ought to humble themselves instead of ‘lording it over each other like the Gentiles’.^[18] The Church also offered those whom the pagans despised as ‘sinners’ liberty from the rigid restraints pagan society had placed on them. In response to Celsus’ claim that it was near impossible to change the nature of a sinner, the Egyptian church father Origen replied that:

“for the word of God to change a nature in which evil has been naturalised is not only not impossible, but is even a work of no very great difficulty, if a man only believe that he must entrust himself to the God of all things.”^[19]

And that was a definite difference between the pagan and early Christian views of humanity. Where the pagans (with some exceptions) saw only men, women, slaves and sinners who were what they were and could never be otherwise, the Christians saw a potential Christ in everyone. For Christians, the worldly wisdom^[20] that ascribed different levels of worth different ‘sorts’ of people was an abomination. A Christian could not judge anyone’s worth based on their position in the social hierarchy, precisely because Christ had told them that even ‘the least of these’ warranted the respect due to the creator God Himself.

That is why Hart argues so passionately that if it weren’t for Christianity and it’s revolutionary ideas about the human race, the homeless woman I met on the street might never have thought to make the assertion that she was ‘as human as everyone else.’ For a pagan like Celsus, the idea that a homeless woman and the emperor himself shared some sort of equally respectable ‘nature’ may well have been not only ridiculous but an insult to the dignity of the emperor. Perhaps, if it had not been for the ‘Christian revolution’, many of our most cherished ‘modern’ ideals would not even have been possible.

Obviously, there’s a lot more that could be said about all this. There are questions like why, if Christianity was so revolutionarily egalitarian, Christians continued to keep slaves for so long (to which the short answer is ‘old habits die hard’), and many more. As a disclaimer, you’ll notice I’ve made a special effort to say ‘Hart argues’ or ‘according to Hart’ in much of the above rather than simply stating his arguments as facts, and this is because historical arguments this wide-ranging are hard to assess properly without a good level of historical knowledge, which I certainly don’t possess. Hart is a stunningly knowledgeable author however, and certainly, his arguments carry far more weight than the generally poorly informed historical arguments of the New Atheists. For those want to learn more, this is a beautiful, short and sweet summary of the argument:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FytwCHCniCk&feature=BFa&list=LL69h4BfHEoj4QkUWhBgHo1Q&lf=plpp_video

And of course, I highly recommend “Atheist Delusions” itself. It can be slow going at times, but Part 3 in particular presents one of the freshest and most inspiring visions of the Christian faith I have ever come across.

^[2] Origen, ‘Against Celsus’, Book III, Chapter 73,  (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04163.htm)

^[3] Ibid., Book III, Chapters 54-58 (same URL as above)

[4] Plato, The Republic, Book IV, Part v (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#2H_4_0007) (The relevant passage can be found by pressing Ctrl+F and searching for ’servants’ – the few paragraphs above that give useful background to understanding Plato’s argument here)

[5] Aristotle, The Politics, Book VII, Part iii (http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8po/book1.html)

^[6] (Luke 5:30-32), (Luke 7:36-50)

^[7] (Mark 2:17)

^[8] Quoted in Origen’s Against Celsus, Book III, Chapter 65 (http://web.archive.org/web/20060427150628/http://duke.usask.ca/~niallm/252/Celstop.htm)

^[9] Barbara McManus, Social Class and Public Display (http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/socialclass.html)

^[10] N.S. Gill, Roman Society, About.com – (http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/socialculture/tp/Roman-Society.htm)

[11] DB Hart, Atheist Delusions, pg. 173

[12] Ibid, pg. 115

^[13] Phil 2:7 (Paul’s statement that Christ ‘did not consider it robbery to be equal with God’ makes a lot of sense when viewed in light of the pagan hierarchy; arguably, it was precisely this ‘robbery’, this pretension of a low ranking criminal carpenter to be the God that sat at the top of the created order that so infuriated Celsus and his contemporaries.)

^[14] (Gal 3:28)

^[15] DB Hart, Atheist Delusions, pg. 167

^[16] (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/pliny.html)

^[17] (Gal 3:27)

^[18] (Matt 20:25-26)

^[19] Origen, ‘Against Celsus’, Book III, Chapter 69,  (http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04163.htm)

^[20] (1 Cor 1:18-31) and (1 Cor 3:18)

In the last post I discussed the problems that might arise due to the world’s ever growing population and looked at some of the discussion about what might be done about it. In this post I am going to explore the growth in population of different religious groups.

In recent times, there has been some heated discussion about Muslims having large families and taking over western countries through sheer numbers. But do the figures bear this out? A little exploration of the Australian Bureau of Statistics website shows some interesting facts. Below are a few trends projected for the growth of religious groups, firstly in the Australian population, and then in the world population. Please keep in mind that while statistics are fun, they can also lie quite easily, so one should take the predictions for the future below with some caution.

If there are any statisticians out there who have a better way of analysing the figures and making more sound predictions, I would love to hear from you! If you email me (“Contact Me” at the top of the page) I would be happy to share my spreadsheets with all the Bureau statistics and you can play around with them to your heart’s content. But please, do share your results.

My Results:

For 1996-2006, Hinduism (120%) and Buddhism (110%) have grown faster than Islam (69%) or Christianity (0.8%).

The percentage of children in Australia who are 0-14 years old has changed from 1996 to 2006 as follows:

Buddhist: 1% to 1.8%

Hindu: 0.4% to 0.7%

Islam: 1.7% to 2.6%

Christian: 65.3% to 58.2%

Growth is very hard to predict, and I am not a professional statistician. First I tried multiplying each population by the same growth factor that occurred from 1996-2006, but this produced some obviously ridiculous results by the year 2016. So I then tried just assuming that each population grows or declines by the same number of people every ten years. Obviously, this method too has its limitations, but using it, the big winners are going to be “No religion” and “Religious Affiliation not Stated” which together will grow by 2106 to be 49.5%of the population, compared to only 29.9% in 2006. In the same period, others will change thus:

Buddhist: 2.1% to 6.4%

Hindu: 0.7% to 2.3%

Islam: 1.7% to 4.2%

Christian: 63.9% to 33.6%

At current rates of decline, Churches of Christ would disappear by 2036; Uniting Church by 2066, Presbyterians by 2086 and sadly, the Salvation Army by2076. Of course, this is all unlikely as other factors will certainly come into play.

So the biggest trends on these assumptions are the shrinkage of the Anglican Church and the growth of non-religion. In 2066, the non-religious will outnumber Christians for the first time in Australian history.

Non-Christian religions, while experiencing significant growth, are so small in number that they do not really make any big impact on the country’s profile. By 2106, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam combined would make up only 12.9% of the population compared to 4.5% in 2006.

Of course, this calculation does not take into account what the immigration trends will do, or fertility rates. I could not find fertility rates by religion at the ABS and I suspect they may not want to publish them too easily. The bureau responded to my email enquiry by telling me that such comparisons are not produced as standard, but one can have them generated at a cost of about $500.

It is interesting to compare these figures with worldwide population trends predicted by the United Nations. They note the falling growth rate of the population and predict, by some models, that the population of the world will stabilise at around 10 billion just after the year 2200. What is more interesting is their predictions about the change in the distribution of the population. Here, it is Africa that seems to be the big winner, growing from 12% of the world in 1995 to 24% in 2150. By contrast, China declines from 22% in 1995 to just 14% in 2150, and Europe from 13% to just 5%.

“By 2150 in the medium scenario about a third of the world population lives in China and India; about a quarter in the rest of Asia; another quarter in Africa; fewer than one in ten persons lives in Europe and Northern America; and about the same proportion lives in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

One of the lessons from the UN study is that population growth is exquisitely sensitive to fertility rates. The Executive Summary explains that varying the worldwide fertility rate by small amounts can lead to wildly different outcomes:

“By 2150, the population of the world will be 24.8 billion according to the high scenario, 9.7 billion according to the medium scenario and 3.2 billion according to the low scenario. The low and high scenarios illustrate how deviations of about half a child from replacement level, if sustained over the long run, can produce large deviations from the path of the medium scenario which leads to an unchanging population size. Owing to the nature of exponential growth, the deviations expand over time (see table 1 and figure 1). Thus, the differences between the high and low scenarios with respect to the medium scenario are moderate in 2050 (at less than 2 billion each), but in 2150 they amount to 15 billion and 6 billion respectively.”

So it seems that the average number of children that a community has will seriously affect the proportion of that community among the worldwide population. If the community is very small, then the effect will not be great – doubling a population is not a big deal if that population starts with only 12 million people, say, as is one estimate for the Coptic community worldwide. Amidst the billions, there is little difference between 12 million and 24 million.

But what about a much larger population, like the Hindu or Islamic communities? The UN report cleverly avoids mentioning religion, and looks at trends only in relation to geographical areas. As we saw above, the starting points in Australia (1.7% Muslim) are relatively small, so the effect will not be so pronounced, even with high fertility rates. A country like France (8-9.6% Muslim) will begin changing its face long before Australia does. But the worldwide picture is quite different. It doesn’t take much to see that if one starts out with a large proportion of the world’s population in 2011 and adds to that a high fertility rate in comparison to other groups, over the centuries the world will certainly look very different.

The population of Muslims in 2009 was estimated to be around 1.57 billion, around 23% of the world’s population. The world’s Hindu population, mostly in India, is estimated at around one billion, or about 14% of the world’s population.  But while the populations in Western countries are stable or even declining slightly, both these cultures currently have relatively high fertility rates. It would be interesting to find some modelling that projects how they will fare as percentages of the world’s population in the years to come.

One study suggests that Muslims will grow significantly as a proportion of the world’s population over the next 20 years. The trend is worth looking at from 1990 to 2030. The percentages below are percent of world population.

1990 – 19.9%

2000 – 21.6% increase by 1.7%

2010 – 23.4% increase by 1.8%

2020 – 24.9% increase by 1.5%

2030 – 26.4% increase by 1.6%

But the study also suggest that the vast majority of this increase will be in countries that are already majority Muslim, and that the Muslim populations of Western countries will not grow drastically as proportions of their national population.

“If current trends continue, however, 79 countries will have a million or more Muslim inhabitants in 2030, up from 72 countries today. A majority of the world’s Muslims (about 60%) will continue to live in the Asia-Pacific region, while about 20% will live in the Middle East and North Africa, as is the case today. But Pakistan is expected to surpass Indonesia as the country with the single largest Muslim population. The portion of the world’s Muslims living in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to rise; in 20 years, for example, more Muslims are likely to live in Nigeria than in Egypt. Muslims will remain relatively small minorities in Europe and the Americas, but they are expected to constitute a growing share of the total population in these regions.”

Another study compared the growth rates of the major religions in the world:

Islam  - 1.84%

Bahá’í Faith  - 1.7%

Sikhism  - 1.62%

Jainism  - 1.57%

Hinduism  – 1.52%

Christianity  - 1.32%.

If these rates continue into the future, there is little doubt that the face of the world will change. The question is whether the current fertility rates will drop as the Muslim and Hindu worlds continue to grow more prosperous, and inevitably more secular, as has happened in the largely Christian world in the west. Then again, Africa with its large Christian population may be the balancing factor.