4thofeleven | Shocking Revelation: Many Christians Believe in Christ (Reply)

“MORE than four in 10 Australians who don't consider themselves "born again" nevertheless believe Jesus rose from the dead, while one in 10 doesn't believe he even existed…These are two of the surprising results from an independent survey of 2500 Australians, according to noted author and church historian John Dickson, co-director of the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney.”
- The Age

There’s something pretty damn disingenuous about this survey. See, the article claims that ‘the results were produced from those who were non-religious, or from another religion, or who loosely indentified with Christianity.’ So you look at it like that, and you think “Wow, even people who don’t call themselves Christian still believe in Christ!”. Except… well, ‘don’t consider themselves born-again’ isn’t the same thing as ‘non-religious’ or ‘non-Christian. Considering oneself “Born Again” is pretty much unique to evangelical Protestantism. Catholics tend not to use the term in that way. Orthodox Christians don’t use the term that way. Anglicans don’t tend to use the term that way.

And Australian Christians are overwhelmingly from those denominations, not evangelicals. So the results end up being far less surprising than Mr. Dickson seems to believe. I can’t help but feel there’s a political motive here – an attempt to minimise the influence of non-Christians by being able to point to surveys that ‘prove’ that even most ‘non-Christians’ still believe in the divinity of Jesus. Not to mention what looks like an attempt to define evangelical Protestantism as ‘real Christianity’.

The Age has a religion editor – I’ve mocked him a few times. Perhaps he could stop writing terrible editorials and start actually editing these stories so they’ve got a bit of context and don’t just take the survey maker’s interpretation at face value?

Oh, and it’s not an odd finding “that 31 per cent of Australians believe Jesus lived BC”. The gospels record Jesus’s birth as occurring during the reign of Herod the Great. Herod died in 4 BCE. It’s not that obscure a fact to know that 1 CE probably does not correspond to Jesus’s birth year.