Greg Sheridan AO is a veteran journalist and foreign editor of The Australian. In 2018 he put his faith on his (book) sleeve by writing God is Good for You. It became a best-seller.
In 2021 he followed that up with Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World. His third book in this vein is How Christians Can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church, published by Allen & Unwin.
Sheridan launched it on 28 August in Sydney in a relaxed public conversation with former ABC journalist Stan Grant.
Before the launch The Catholic Weekly sat down with Sheridan. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.
The Catholic Weekly: Tell us a bit about this book.
Greg Sheridan: It represents a logical endpoint of a trilogy of Christian books. The first was about the God question, the second about Jesus, and the third about the early Christians.
I was trying to answer one question, which is how Christians today in the West can most effectively evangelise, translate their message, and reach out to people in an environment which is quite hostile to faith.
I’ve been fascinated by the early Christians who lived after the apostles. Jesus is no longer there to stand beside them and they’re living in a very hostile culture in which people thought they were crazy or pernicious or abominable or just too weird for words.
I realised that those people in the early church confronted the same questions we’re confronting today, but in much more difficult circumstances.
They were very clever people, and of course any success they had was due to the grace of God. But at the same time, they also worked through their own human abilities.
They started out with a few hundred people, no money, no power, no influence – and they transformed the world.
How did they cope with being a minority? How did they cope with being persecuted from time to time? How did they interest the society around them? What led to their success?
What are your hopes for it?
I decided to get more public about being Christian about 10 years ago, because I thought there was so much hostility to Christianity, and I think Christians should be a little bit more public about owning their faith. We’re not confessing to being child murderers. We’re just confessing to having Christian beliefs.
You say being openly Christian could affect people’s employment prospects. Do you think for younger people that is still the case?
It varies. It’s been quite shocking, for example, to see the case of [former incoming Essendon CEO Andrew Thorburn] getting sacked because he was on the board of an Anglican community where a vicar, ten years previously, had preached a sermon about gay issues.
It wasn’t Thorburn’s sermon; he wasn’t a clergyman; he was just on the board. And it was just a standard expression of traditional Christian teaching. Now, on all gay issues, Christians have to be sensitive and careful, but they don’t have to abandon their church’s teaching.
Of course, everybody should be prudent about how they discuss these topics in the workplace, but religion really shouldn’t be a matter that affects your employment unless it forces you to do something really bizarre.
You should have free speech. I think the more that Christians are straightforward and undramatic about their Christianity, the easier it is.
Have you received any backlash in your workplace for being Catholic?
Not at all. Journalism is a pretty easy-going profession. We’re very judgmental about everyone else, but we’re very easy-going about each other – and I’ve been a professional journalist, for just a bit under 50 years.
Just being a Christian and going to church is by no means the weirdest thing you’re going to find in a newsroom. Loads of journalists don’t agree with me and some of them tell me so – probably more so in the old days, because I was a bit younger – but that’s not backlash.
All the time that I’ve been in journalism, I’ve identified as a Catholic and written the odd column and the odd piece and so on. [Early on I also wrote] a couple of cover stories about the state of Christianity in Australia for The Bulletin magazine. Everyone knew what my outlook was.
One reason I didn’t preach much was because I didn’t lead a particularly heroically virtuous life, and if you are preaching the highest ethical standards and charity and so on, and you’re behaving like a pig, well, you’re going to get backlash. People are going to say: what is your Christianity worth, if this is the way you behave?
When I decided to be more public about Christianity, I realised that you’ve got to be very sensitive to that hypocrisy in your own life. But that can also be an excuse for never saying anything, and that’s not satisfactory either.
Will there ever be a return to Christendom?
We’re in this new environment which is partly neo-pagan. We’re not persecuted; we’re not thrown into the Colosseum and torn apart by wild bears – but it’s a very unsympathetic environment.
Most people under 40 have never really heard of Christianity. They watch Christmas movies but there’s no religious dimension. They go to anything other than a Christian school. They don’t run across the writings of Paul or the great apostles of history. They’re the new pagans, and they have some of the pagan difficulties. They tend to be very hedonistic and they don’t want anyone to spoil a party.
But they haven’t been inoculated against Christianity. They didn’t try it as kids and find it boring. It’s not something they associate with their grandparents or anything like that. They’re new. They’re fresh. You can give them the Christian message and they’ll respond, because they, too, are searchers. They’re looking for meaning and they inevitably come up against their own crisis of unbelief.
And it’s amongst young people that this new upsurge in interest that we’re seeing in the last year or two is taking place. For Christian people trying to promote their message, it took a big mental adjustment to move from the age of Christendom to this apostolic age.
In the age of Christendom, you expect everybody to be educated about it at home and at school and bless you and you administer the sacraments and all that, whereas in the apostolic age, nobody gets that. You’ve got to go out. It’s a missionary age.
How do you reconcile your beliefs with those from other religions? I understand that your wife, Jasbir Kaur, is a Sikh.
Well, I don’t require my wife to share my beliefs. The Catholic Catechism is a great resource, and it says that everything that is good in non-Christian religions comes from God. I’m not preaching indifferentism here.
Other religions have a share of the truth. They don’t have the whole truth as the Christian religion has, but people respond to God in different ways. A good thing now is that religious people are not hostile to each other because of their different traditions.
You’ve got to respect people’s traditions. You offer them Christianity; you don’t compel them to Christianity. I’m absolutely blessed in my marriage. The greatest act of kindness ever from God was to send me my wife. A normal person finds the love of God through the love of other people, and that’s mostly your own family.
If I’ve influenced anybody in my writings, that’s a wonderful thing. I’m very grateful to God for the opportunity to do that, but I don’t require either my family or my friends to share my beliefs.
How would you advise talking about difficult topics such as abortion and euthanasia?
Be straightforward and open. For most of my Christian life, I was too timid. One benefit that comes from getting a bit older is that at some point you think, well, okay, this is who I am, shoot me. That’s it.
There have been a few times where I’ve disagreed with the church on a matter of public policy. That’s okay. We’re allowed to do that. Most of the time I agree. I certainly profoundly agree with religious freedom, that the churches should be free to teach their teachings.
I’m not as knowledgeable and smart as I should be, and writing about Christianity means people often ask you questions, some of some of them quite difficult.
I’ve got loads of Jewish friends, for example, so I have to grapple with the tradition of Christian antisemitism. Lots of Christians denounced antisemitism; it wasn’t our official position or anything. Of all the things that trouble the Christian conscience, I think that’s perhaps the worst and you’ve just got to face up to that.
You’ve just got to look it honestly, in the face, and say that was a terrible tradition. The Second Vatican Council condemned it as strongly as it possibly could. John Paul II apologised for it as explicitly as he possibly could. But there’s no point if you’re trying to argue the Catholic case, pretending it didn’t happen. It was there.
I didn’t have any difficulty in sort of talking about Catholic doctrine, or Christian faith and people. Maybe 10 years ago, they’d be hostile; now they’re more curious. You know, “That’s strange, what do you guys do? Do you really believe that that sort of thing?”
How can Catholics restore trust in the church after the clergy abuse crisis?
That scandal is the most terrible thing I’ve ever known about the church. When growing up as a kid, I never would have imagined it.
Of course we know, historically, it has happened, and not only recently but hundreds and even thousands of years ago. In my book, there are instances of bishops saying, “If you use the confessional to abuse children, I want you publicly flogged before you’re defrocked.” It’s a constant of human evil.
Being Christian doesn’t absolve us from the fallen condition of humanity but I do think the church has responded as strongly as you could possibly imagine. In every parish now there are all kinds of protocols and safeguards about protecting children.
And there is still faith in the church. I went to dinner with Cardinal Pell just before he went on trial in Melbourne in an Indian restaurant in Camberwell. And three times during the dinner, we were interrupted by people coming up to say, “Good on you, Cardinal, we know that this is a stitch up. We wish you all the best and please know that we’re praying for you.” You find this goodwill everywhere.
A certain amount of people are bitter secularists who hate the church, not necessarily people who’ve been injured by the church, but who use that episode of injury to campaign against it. I just think you’ve got to take that on the chin.
Jesus didn’t say, proclaim the truth only if you inhabit a church which has never done anything wrong, and only if you live in a society where people are going to think well of you. In fact, quite the reverse. He said, “People will despise you, for my name’s sake”. The way you restore trust is by living a good life.
If people find that they can trust you; that you’re reliable; that your beliefs mean something to you; that you give your word and you live up to it; that you are kind to your family; and that you say your prayers and so on – well, people see the pattern of reality.
And the people who suffer the worst fate in society are typically ministered to by religious Christians. Mother Teresa ministered to the poor in Calcutta. Fr Damien of Molokai went to live with the lepers and got leprosy himself. And the people that no one else will help, like the Salvation Army dealing with the most difficult alcoholics.
I live a very happy middle-class life and I’m not on the front lines, so I can’t accrue that moral credit from those people. But the church as an institution does so many good works that it has to be assessed by that as well.
How Christians Can Succeed Today: Reclaiming the Genius of the Early Church is available from The Mustard Seed Bookshop.
