Poor Pete is not backwards in coming forward with his head towering above the tallest poppy!
There’s a morsel for everybody in this long sigh.

Abounding in antidotes will be the responses, but I have a simple one.
Again it’s from the world of fairytales. And a master in the art was Hans Anderson.
For his contribution towards looking forward and not backwards is “The Galoshes of fortune”.

“Rome has its Corso, Naples it’s Toledo but Copenhagen has its Oster Street”.

And so, the Minister of Justice was to be deceived by two fairies in the anteroom following a social gathering of sorts, which descended into debating the comparative worlds of the past and present, donned the magic galoshes by mistake and proceeded into the dark night on a homeward Journey through the once familiar Oster street, now set in the Middle Ages, a time the good Minister had argued vehemently as superior.

Poor man was soon to learn the discomfort of his dream.

And the pillar of salt fits in here somhere I believe too.

Dan

Sells,

<<While Australia has suffered the decline of the Churches with other Western countries, it appears to be more drastic here because of the fragile base of theological education that is not well supported in the newer universities.>>

You are short-sighted in your understanding of Australian theological education. Since when did it have to be through "newer universities"? Evangelical Anglican Ridley College in Melbourne receives its accreditation through the University of Melbourne. A number of theological institutions are accredited with the Australian College of Theology and the Sydney College of Divinity, but you give these the flick.

<<The Roman Catholic church has also seen huge decline in congregations but is supporting theological education through campuses of Notre Dame and the Australian Catholic University. It will soon be very difficult to train clergy in Australia and this means that Christianity is destined to resort to a kind of folk religion which is the worst of all outcomes>>.

There are many overseas universities that train Aussies for ministry vocations. I am one of them. These include Trinity International University, http://www.tiu.edu/; University of Pretoria, http://www.up.ac.za/; and the University of Oxford, http://www.faraday.cam.ac.uk/about/people/prof-alister-mcgrath/

There was a gaping hole in your article that ignored the enormous growth of Pentecostalism in Australia. See http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jun/27/christianity-on-the-wane-in-australia-but-pentecostal-church-bucks-trend

A miserable outlook to start the day with.

You wrote: The story of how that all went wrong involved deficiencies in Puritan theology mixed with bad Enlightenment philosophy (the pursuit of happiness) and resulted in American civil religion that saw the merging of God and the Stars and Stripes.

All didn’t go wrong. There was another tradition in those early days. Roger Williams, a Baptist minister, lived in the colony. He established a tradition which espoused separation of church and state. That tradition is alive and well.

“Williams believed that preventing error in religion was impossible, for it required people to interpret God’s law, and people would inevitably err. He therefore concluded that government must remove itself from anything that touched upon human beings’ relationship with God. A society built on the principles Massachusetts espoused would lead at best to hypocrisy, because forced worship, he wrote, ‘stincks [sic] in God’s nostrils.’ At worst, such a society would lead to a foul corruption—not of the state, which was already corrupt, but of the church,” from John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

As a result of his opinions, Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony within a few years. He chose to found a more tolerant, religiously free colony at Providence in what is now the state of Rhode Island. Williams was thus a pioneer for the idea of church-state separation and a Founding Father more than 100 years before the generation of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. He was possibly also the first Abolitionist. He went as a missionary to the Indians but quit when he felt he had nothing to teach them.
John Madison and Thomas Jefferson incorporated the ideas of Roger Williams of separation of church and state which counters the idea of the American civil religion.

I am an American living in Australia who respects the separation of church and state.

One of Peter's better essays.

But what is to be done?

So called theological education is essentially useless because it shares the same reductionist and godless presumptions about what we are as human beings, the nature of the natural world, and the nature of God or The Radiant Transcendental Being. This essay describes the situation http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/Aletheon/three_great_myths.html

Related to the above essay the current thoroughly secularized zeitgeist is the INEVITABLE outcome of institutional religion which has always confined/reduced human beings to the mortal meat-body scale (only), even while (perhaps) prattling on about timeless transcendental truth and destiny.

In the Western world both exoteric "religion" and secular scientism have, for many centuries been actively "instructing or propagandistically coercing humankind to disbelieve - or, without or apart from actual experience and the exercise of true discriminative intelligence, to dissociate from all modes of association with magical, and metaphysical, and even Spiritual, and in general ecstasy producing ideas and activities.

This process of negative indoctrination to which humankind in the Western world has long been subjected by its "sacred" and secular authorities has, actually, been a magic paranoid political, social, economic, and cultural effort to enforce a worldly or gross "realist", or thoroughly materialist - and altogether, anti-ecstatic, anti-magical, anti-metaphysical, and anti-Spiritual - model of human life upon all individuals and collectives.

This benighted enterprise has required the universal suppression of the actual INNATE natural magical, metaphysical, and ultimately Spiritual, and altogether ecstatic potential of the human psycho-physical ego. But also, and profoundly more importantly this enterprise has deprived humankind of its necessary access to Intrinsically egoless Truth Itself.

Three related references references;
http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/jesusandme.html
http://www.daplastique.com/essay/the-maze-of-ecstasy
http://www.beezone.com/narcissus.html

The basis of all policy has to be the national interest only and totally secular! Otherwise, this or that lunitic fringe will want this or that law imposed on folk! This or that, ruled out or in!

[Christianity was wrecked the day Constantine the Great imposed his will, pagan rituals,pagan beliefs and hand-picked henchmen in authoritative roles, on it! At the first council of Nicosia.]

Without secular, national interest only policy, we'd have the looney toon green fringe ruling in renewables, higher costs and rationed usage? And ruling out everything else, including carbon-free, clean, safe and cheaper than coal or gas, nuclear power, i.e., MSR thorium or nuclear waste burning MSR!

The pulpit pounding, religious right deciding the reprodutive role of women, who would in that context, have fewer rights than owned slaves?

Or white supremists deciding that folk with different coloured skin were somehow inferior, needed to be kept out or in their place?

And conspiracy thorists the world over would be having a picnic almost daily? As would the self-appointed control freaks, who pervade all religious practice? Who, almost to a generic man, cherry-pick what science reinforces their homophobic/sexist view of the world? And like the flat earthers, discard the rest?

Need I go on?
Alan B.