Blainey to write a history of Christianity

Geoffrey Blainey turned 80 years old earlier this month. Along with Manning Clark, Blainey would be at the top of any list of Australian historians.

That doesn’t mean everyone agrees with him. In fact many certainly do not and even Clark clashed with Blainey on a few occasions, but he has always been regarded as an historian of thoroughness and integrity.

Blainey is not, however, a Christian (as far as I know!). At least, if he is he has certainly kept it well hidden. I don’t just arrive at this opinion by looking at him nor from reading his works (which I mostly have not), but remains a mystery to even Richard Allsop, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

Allsop is currently undertaking a PhD in history on "The works of Geoffrey Blainey" so he is in a pretty good position to analyse where the man stands on Christianity. Allsop says he does not know one way or the other whether Blainey is a Christian but can only say,

He certainly came from a Christian background (his father was a Methodist minister) but we have not discussed his religious beliefs.¹

So that gets me thinking. Is Blainey writing an account of “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” a good thing or not? I think there is a case for and against.

Go Blainey!

There is an old saying goes something like, “there is no such thing as bad publicity”. I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Certainly when it comes to the Church I can think of plenty of publicised stories I wish ended up on the cutting room floor, but perhaps in the case of Blainey it could be a good thing to have the whole subject of Christianity brought out into the public arena for discussion again.

Blainey is a very astute historian and is considered trustworthy in his research methods and writings. He is so brutally honest, political correctness has just about locked him away forever.

In enlightened western cultures such as ours, your freedom of speech is only celebrated in an ostensible way. What the world actually wants to hear are the words of those who trumpet a previously agreed upon theory. That is, a view it already agrees with.

Blainey has run foul of this on several occasions. In the 1970’s he was accused of going too far in his assessment that the British colonialisation of Australia amounted to an invasion from the Aboriginal point of view.

In his famous work Triumph of the Nomads, Blainey described the pre 1788 indigenous people as smart and developed instead of backward and unintelligent, which I think it is fair to say, was the European view.

He said their living standards at that time were comparable to many places in Europe. 

"by the standards of the year 1800 . . . the Aboriginals' material life could be compared favourably with many parts of Europe".²

Most white Australians (myself included) simply assumed they ran around the outback trying to catch lizards or kangaroos and that was about it. We never really thought to do any work to find out how they actually lived in the centuries before white man came.

Perhaps the Bible was correct all along and every race of people was created in God’s image which meant having a measure of wisdom and spiritual understanding and this included the Aborigines. Blainey’s view could line up quite neatly with a Biblical understanding of the dispersal of people groups following the flood and Babel incidents of Genesis.

Whilst Blainey never brought the Bible into the discussion, the right wing of Politics was not in the mood to hear some of this. Aborigines had only been given the full rights of Australian Citizens a referendum a few short years before publishing and now this. Commentators said he had gone too far.

However the political left was aghast to hear of Blainey also describing the never ending inter-tribal wars and even things such as infanticide. This was no garden of Eden prior to white man’s arrival. Blainey was an intellectual outcast from both sides.

However, this too (ie Aboriginal violence) aligns with Biblical thinking. All men are sinners and sin corrupts completely. There were wars in Europe: why shouldn’t there be in Australia? And as for infanticide, it is not really a whole lot different to what the British were doing to their children by shipping them off to Australia without any relatives is it? And what about the Dickensian children's homes of the 1700's?

Blainey eventually fell right out of public favour in the 1980’s when he made some politically incorrect comments about the levels of Asian immigration. His name became mud because when you make statements out of sync with what is ideologically acceptable in society, you’re not just disagreed with, you are vilified.

Allsop puts it like this:

The attacks on Blainey probably mark the beginning of the so-called history wars in Australia, wars in which ideological correctness became more important than any other factor in assessing a historian's worth.³

No Blainey!

The question is; when Blainey turns his considerable intellectual weaponry on Christianity, will it be another case of him suffering for speaking in favour of a politically incorrect world view, or will we be the ones with the bruises?

You see, Blainey too is a sinner. Sin has corrupted his thoughts and his motives. And that goes for the rest of us. You cannot possibly accurately describe Christianity and leave God’s opinion out of it. That does not make sense and it certainly cannot be objective.

What Blainey will probably do is write an account of how Christians have acted throughout history. Now I am getting really worried. There will be just as many highlights as low lights.

And what part of Christianity will Blainey focus on? Is the Roman Catholic Church the centrepiece? Is the Reformation told from its point of view or the Protestants’? Will we be branded fascists just because Hitler claimed to believe in God? Will missionaries be pilloried once again for the stolen generation or will they be congratulated for caring for the indigenous population?

Sin has a nasty habit of colouring even the most objective scholar and Blainey, as fine an historian as he is, is not exempt.

I suppose we can only pray that whatever comes of this work glorifies God in some way. Perhaps that will happen as we debate the issues this raises, interact with scholars and lay persons alike and take whatever opportunities arise from it for evangelism.

At this stage, Blainey has not released a working title for the book, nor has a publishing date been announced. Let’s pray for Geoffrey Blainey.