Premium
The Religious Crisis of the 1960s: The Experience of the Australian Churches
Author(s) -
Hilliard David
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
journal of religious history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 13
eISSN - 1467-9809
pISSN - 0022-4227
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9809.1997.tb00486.x
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , encyclical , relevance (law) , christian ministry , protestantism , period (music) , political science , religious studies , attendance , morality , relation (database) , history , sociology , theology , law , philosophy , archaeology , database , computer science , aesthetics
The decade of the 1960s in North America and Europe is generally seen by historians and sociologists as a time of sudden and unexpected religious upheaval. But was this the case in Australia? This article examines the changes in belief and behaviour within Australia’s major churches during the ‘remembered sixties’ from c. 1964 to c. 1972, in relation to the cultural and social context, and the extent to which these amounted to a religious turnaround or crisis. Areas examined include the impact of radical theology, symbolized by the book Honest to God , and the ‘new morality’; the changes in Australian Catholicism initiated by the Second Vatican Council; the debate among Catholics over birth control and the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae ; the decline in weekly church attendance, Sunday school enrolments and the membership of church youth organizations; the ‘crisis’ in the ordained ministry; changing attitudes in the churches towards social issues; and the responses of the churches to the Vietnam War. The religious unsettlement that occurred in Australia during this period was very similar to North America and Europe, though there were distinctive local emphases. The central issues in debate were common to all major denominations: the relevance and authority of traditional institutions and formulations of belief.