Religion as the Basis of Community Life
Religion comes from the Latin word 'religare' which means 'to bind'. Throughout history, religion has bound together communities and cultures. It has held people together through difficult, even desperate times. It has provided the basis of a way of life.

At the heart of every religion is a story. It is a story about what the world is really like, about the place that human beings have in the world. It is a story which pictures human possibilities and human failures. Every story has its particular angle on 'the enemy', why the enemy is evil, and how that evil can be overcome - whether the enemy is inside, in another culture, or in supernatural forces.

It might be said that a community is a group of people who share a story. They share the picture of the world drawn in that story. Their hopes for the future arise out of that story. The story unifies their efforts in identifying that which is evil and together work at ways of overcoming it. Thus religion has been fundamental to the existence of most communities.

Sometimes ideologies or philosophies have taken the place of religion in providing that unifying story. At other times, there have been several sources which have each contributed part of the story - as in the animism, Buddhism and Brahmanism which have subtly intertwined in the playing such a role in Thailand, for example. Not all religions have played such roles have been institutionalised in their communities, as in traditional Aboriginal communities. Yet, in one way or another, communities have been built on the basis of common conceptions of reality and unreality, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil.

Religions have not only bound together peoples and cultures, but they have bound the everyday to the eternal (Bouma 1992, p.1). They have placed the events of an individual life within a framework which has to do with the very nature of the universe and of reality. In that way, they have provided meaning.

Christianity has a clear story, although there are many versions of it and many ways of telling it. While the political realm was dominated by liberal philosophies, I would suggest that at the level of everyday life, several Christian stories dominated common understandings of reality and unreality, good and evil. The commentary that follows is about everyday life, the sorts of reality which social surveys seek to measure.

In a survey conducted by Edith Cowan University and NCLS Research in 1998, we asked people if religion was important and why it was important to them. 72% of a random sample of 2000 Australian adults said that religion was important, 55% nominating that religion was important in the provision of values, in particular, encouragement to care and concern for others.

If that is true today, I suspect the role of religion was more widely affirmed prior to World War II when the Census tells us that 80% of the population identified with just four major Christian traditions: the English Anglicans and their offshoots, the Methodists, Irish Catholics, and the Scottish Presbyterians (Hughes 1997).

A few religious virtuosi groups existed alongside these. In general, the members of these groups took their religion a little more seriously. Some believed that if you took faith seriously, then you should return to the patterns of faith and practices of the churches in the days of the New Testament. Groups such as the Baptists, the Brethren, the Christadelphians, the Churches of Christ, and the Seventh-day Adventists entertained such ideas (Hughes 2001). Others such as the Quakers and the Salvation Army believed that taking faith seriously meant being more holy, or more dedicated in service, for or Salvation Army. However, these groups in no way threatened the dominant values and identity of Australia as a Christian country. They brought minor variations in the dominant values: such as their opposition to the drinking of alcohol and gambling.

A few other religious communities had their origins in other cultures: such as the German Lutherans or the Jewish immigrants or the Russian Orthodox who had come to Australia via China. Communities were often divided on religious grounds, particularly between Catholic and Protestant sectors. Despite these divisions, Australians saw themselves over against the people from Asia and Africa. Their Christianity distinguished them from those of Islam faith, the Hindus and the Buddhists. The Aboriginal people, it was hoped would be quickly assimilated into the dominant white, Christian society. Prior to World War II, Christianity was an important part of the glue which held the central parts of Australian civic and communal life together.

The immigration that followed World War II began to challenge the unity of Australia. Many of the early immigrants were Christian, although they brought new expressions of the faith. Italian immigrants brought a new diversity to Catholicism in Australia. The Greek, Serbian, Ukranian and other immigrants from Eastern Europe brought Eastern Orthodoxy. It was expected that these people would assimilate to the Australian culture. Christianity could remain a significant part of the glue which held the nation together.

Perhaps it was not so apparent the role these specific traditions would be in maintaining a plurality of cultures in Australia. For example, the Greek Orthodox Church has helped to hold together the Greek community as a distinct entity, within the wider Australian society. It has helped them to maintain their language and their customs. It has provided a basis for the Australian Greek community to gather and to engage in common enterprises, and even to build their own schools.

Such patterns have been repeated many times. Take, for example, the Assyrian people. In 1996, there were 6200 Assyrians in Australia belonging to two Assyrian expressions of the same denomination tradition, the Ancient Church of the East and the Assyrian Church of the East. The Assyrians lost their land, their independence, some 2600 years of ago. 612 B.C. is the year when the Assyrian Empire was destroyed. The Assyrians were converted to Christianity in the third century B.C.E.. Valentine Aghajani, an Assyrian living in Australia, has noted that the Assyrians 'have had no government of their own for 2000 years, yet their heritage, language, customs and traditional beliefs have been retained throughout the turmoil of the centuries' (Aghajani 1989, p.144). The Assyrian church has played a major role in that. It has been the bearer of identity, the repository of the language, the guardian of values. The Assyrian culture has remained throughout the millennia because of the church, and is now held together in Australia through their churches.

That plurality has widen considerably since 1970 with large numbers of immigrants arriving in Australia who did not have a Christian heritage. Islamic immigrants began coming in large numbers in 1970 as a result of the civil conflicts in Lebanon. Others came from Turkey, Albania, and since then, many places around the globe.

Buddhists from Vietnam started arriving in large numbers about 1975 as a result of the Vietnam War. Baha'is from Iran, Hindus from Fiji and then from India; Sikhs from the Punjab; Coptic Orthodox from Egypt; and even a few Druze from Syria have come to Australia, each group bringing with them their own religious heritage, their own story, their own language and culture, values and rituals.

The four major groups that dominated Australia prior to World War II, now claim only 64 per cent of the Australian population. And that fact fails to acknowledge the diversity now apparent within each of these groups. No longer are all Presbyterians Scottish, for example, as large groups of Korean Presbyterians have established a virulent base in Australia. Some Dutch cousins of the Scottish Presbyterians have joined the Presbyterian Church, others the Uniting Church, and many of them developed their own Reformed denomination. The Catholic scene is the most diverse, with the Mass now celebrated in 29 languages every week in Melbourne alone (Dixon 1996, p.94).

The other major change in the religious scene in Australia in the last three decades has been the rise of the 'no religion' group. Pre-war, the committed 'no religion' people throughout Australia would hardly have filled one auditorium. Sure, there were many who did not take their religious identity very seriously. But it was mostly a few intellectuals strong enough to stand against the flow and people at the fringes of the Australian culture who really claimed to be 'no religion', atheists, or rationalists.

In 1971, the Census first invited people to put 'no religion' on their Census form if they had no religion. About 6 per cent of the population responded to that invitation. Since then, the percentage has grown to over 16 per cent and sample surveys suggest it may be higher again in the 2001 Census. These people add to the plurality of the religious scene in Australia.

Decline in Local Community
Over the last few decades, we have, in fact, lost a lot of our sense of community. One of the associated factors has been the loss of a common story, a common set of values, a shared view of the nature of life and reality.

It is not easy to know, however, which has been the cause and which the effect. For at the same time as people began to lose their story, so local expressions of community began to decline in significance.

Prior to the 1960s, a substantial part of life took place in local communities. The mainstays of local community life in the 1950s, for example, were the married women. Most of them were at home during the day. Or, at least, they spent much of their week in the confines of the local community. Without a car, they walked to the shops to buy their food. And they did this far more frequently than today, as refrigerators were smaller, and freezers non-existent. They met each other at the shops and at the school gates. They socialised primarily in the churches, in the auxiliaries and women's groups. They had to find their friends in the local area. They shared the local community with their husbands at weekends when they were involved in the church sporting clubs, the church social clubs, and the church services. 1960 appears to be a high point in church attendance when 45 per cent of Australians attended a church service at least once a month. Married women began entering the workforce in large numbers in the 1960s, and the significance of the local community declined. As local communities became less significant, so did local community churches. Many left the church altogether. The flow started in the mid 1960s, and has not yet ended. We still have many remnants of local community life meeting in suburban and rural churches - remnants from the 50s and before, now largely elderly people. Most of these remnants will disappear within the next 20 years.

Change in work practices were only one factor. Families bought a second car, and increasingly, shopping was done at large regional shopping centres. telephone calls to old friends and family took the place of chats over the neighbour's fence. The television made much entertainment an individual matter in the privacy of one's home, rather than playing cards or music with neighbours or down at the local club or church.

Many of us find today that we are involved in many different groups and activities, and that there is little overlap in the people we meet in our these various groups and networks. The various groups we meet in connection with work may be quite different from those we meet in sport or when shopping, in educational activities or in connection with our children. Indeed, there is little which might indicate that we all belong to one community. We experience community in a thousand little fragments. Each fragment of community has its own assumptions when its members gather, its own tasks, and, in some ways, its own language.

This is particularly true in urban areas. The Australian Community Survey, conducted in 1998, found that almost 40% of Australians living in urban areas knew no one in the local community who shared their work interests, more than 25% knew no one who shared their personal interests, and only 6% knew their neighbours well enough to know some of their neighbours personal concerns.

Social Capital
There has been some research which has suggested that trust has diminished in Australia. In 1983, people were asked in the Australian Values Survey whether they felt they could trust most people. 46 per cent of people said they could. In 1995, the same question was asked in another run of a similar survey, and the proportion responding positively dropped to 39 per cent.

Levels of confidence in institutions had also fallen over this time. The proportions expressing confidence in the legal system fell from 62 per cent to 34 per cent, in the press, from 28 per cent to 17 per cent, in the Federal government, from 56 per cent to 26 per cent. The largest fall of all was in the banks, in which confidence fell from 80 per cent to 21 per cent.

In the last few years, people have begun to use the term 'social capital', a term popularised by Robert Putnam, an American academic who has been arguing that trust has fallen as individualism has run rampant. 'Social capital' has often been used imprecisely. The analysts generally point to two intellectual histories, one which is traced to the thinking of the French social theorist, Bourdieu, who saw social capital as the network of social connections and obligations through which one gained access to economic and cultural capital.

James Coleman, in the United States, developed the concept within his theory of human actions, seeing social capital as those social obligations and expectations, information channels, norms and sactions, which allows actors to gain resources that they can use to achieve their interests.

Robert Putnam, the populariser of the term, has used social capital in a more general way to refer to the 'glue' in a community, the communication links in which there is trust and good-will, which enable people to solve common concerns and achieve common goals.

I find the distinctions made by Michael Woolcock, an Australian sociologist working with the World Bank, helpful. He talks about social capital involving three types of connections:
1. Bonds - as in family and close friendships in which people can depend on each other for practical, everyday support;
2. Bridges - as in acquaintances and wider connections. Woolcock argues that a range of bridges are important for accessing a wider range of resources, and making connections. He notes for example, that people in slums often have well-developed bonds, but cannot move beyond slum life because of their lack of bridges. Middle-class people often have many bridges, but their bonds may be weak.
3. Linkages to organisations and institutions, in which there is a measure of confidence, and through which their resources may be used and social functions accomplished.

In work that Prof Alan Black and I have been undertaking for the Federal Government Department of Family and Community Services, on measuring community strength, we have recommend attention to:
1. The extent to which people have bonds, bridges, and linkages, and willing engage with strangers;
2. The qualities of those relationships, in terms of trust, altruism, the sense that language and norms are shared;
3. Structural qualities which provide an environment in which such relationships can be developed and in which people can proactively work together for their common and separate interests, including leadership and means of dealing with conflict.

There is a growing body of conceptual and empirical literature which uses the concept of social capital or allied ideas, and there is a growing body of empirical evidence which shows that social capital, in terms of people having links with is important for the economy and for health, for the sense of security and even for democracy. Social capital contributes substantially to the quality of life. Where there are higher levels of social capital, there are fewer psychological and physical illnesses (Baum, 2000). Where people trust one another, business prospers (Fukuyama, 1995). People enjoy life, feeling safe and secure. The stocks of social capital in many Western nations, it would appear, are being depleted. All levels of society are now asking how the stocks of social capital can be restored. The Federal Government has made it a major plank of its policy to seek to 'strengthen community life'. The problem is how this might be achieved.

We cannot expect to return to life in the 1950s. People are not going to give up their involvement in the wide regions in which they live so they can concentrate of life in the local community. They are not going to find work in the local community, or give up their cars, telephones and televisions so they can wander around the familiar streets of their neighbourhoods. The few out on foot in the neighbourhoods still like to have their walkmans, or better, their MP3 players, plugged into their ears as they jog past each other on their fitness runs. There is no time to stop and discuss the weather. Few will give up the great variety of sports people enjoy in order to develop local community life through the local footy and cricket clubs.

Indeed, I suspect society has moved further away from local community life since 1990. The internet has provided a means of cheap, interactive, global communication. In many spheres of life, academic, business, sporting, media, amongst others, people are relating to peers on a global basis. Transnational conferences, business meetings, sporting events, and media cooperation have become commonplace. Not only are the elite of society living life on a global scene, so are Australians in many sectors of society.

Trust used to be built in the context of familiarity and personal reputation. When you were familiar with people, you knew whether you could trust them or not. You added the advice of others to your own experience, and the picture was soon apparent. Trust was based partly on the idea that the other person identified with a similar religious story, and upheld the basic values of honesty and compassion which were deduced from that story.

But most of the people with whom we deal on a daily basis, are totally unfamiliar to us. We deal with them today, but tomorrow it will be someone else at the check-out, mending our photocopier, taking a lecture, taking notes on the crime we have experienced, or even teaching our children. As we live in a world which stretches well beyond the community found within walking distance of where we sleep, familiarity can no longer provide an adequate basis of trust.

There is no time to get to know these people and to learn whether we can trust them or not. There is no opportunity to check out their credentials. As far as we know, we have no common acquaintances with most of the people with whom we deal. And it is not easy to ask for someone familiar to give us our food at the fast-food outlet, or take our money at the bar.

Anthony Giddens (1990), the British sociologist and social commentator, has made us aware that much of our life revolves around 'expert systems' or, better, giant complex systems in which vast arrays of experts all have their place. If we cannot trust the people, we have to trust the system. We assume that each person knows their job and will do it properly. If they do not, we have a means of redress. We could call the company and ask for the job to be done again. We expect that the system will provide means of ensuring that people fulfil their contracts with one another.

We may not know the teacher in the local school, but we assume that the system is working well that trains and employs the teacher, the ensures that he or she has the appropriate credentials for the job. We assume that there are means of redress if the job is not done appropriately. We trust unless we have a good reason not to do so.

A significant contributor to trust in modern life will be built through creating systems that are transparent and in which there are numerous checks and balances. Trust has a lot to do with transparency and accountability. We trust organisations and businesses when we know that their operations are publicly visible, even if we ourselves do not have time to examine them. Our levels of trust are increased by the fact that there are consumer organisations who examine the operations of companies and measure the reliability of their products. Our trust is increased when systems are accountable, when we know that they can be subjected to public scrutiny, when the media can gain access to stories of malpractice.

In large, modern urban communities, we are developing systems to check out the trustworthiness, not so much of individuals, but of institutions, organisations and systems. The regulation mechanisms of government, the consumer organisations, the media, and ultimately recourse to the legal system, help to ensure that the major systems of our society are trustworthy. The systems, in turn, have mechanisms, or should have mechanisms, to ensure that their employees are appropriately trained and reliable, that the systems of public safety work effectively. The fact that, when companies or systems fail, they can be held accountable is very important to the levels of trust in society as a whole.

Incidentally, churches are only just beginning to take seriously the development of professional codes of practice. Few churches have yet built in means of accountability. Nor are they particularly transparent to the community. Churches have relied on trust being developed through familiarity. But this is no longer sufficient.

The Roles of Churches Today
Do the churches have a role in 'binding communities' in this new world? They certainly do not have the same role they had in the earlier period of European immigration, as providing a basis for the assumptions about values, truth and reality.

1. One role of churches is to create small communities of like-minded people. This is occurring in the context in which the very nature of religion is rapidly moving from being the basis of culture to becoming a resource used on the basis of personal interest. Churches have a role as one of the many fragments of community, as special interest groups which uphold certain values among the members of the group, that tell stories for its members, stories which must inevitably live beside many other stories. Churches are places where members of the group practise their own rituals and engage in their own celebrations. Increasingly, those members are building their own schools, developing their own welfare institutions, generating their own businesses. In some ways, it would appear that their communities are becoming increasingly comprehensive. But there is always a danger that they will withdraw from the wider society. They will become ghettos in the wider community, cut off from the values and aspirations of Australian society as a whole.

It is unlikely that any one religion or group of religions will take the place in Australia of being the sole basis of values. Public life will be negotiated as people bring their various values and aspirations, needs and concerns together.

Each religion has its own set of values. However, there are values which transcend every religion, although expressed in one way or another, values which are inherent in the very nature of human society: values of respect for the other members of society. I remind you of that finding that almost three-quarters of the Australian population still consider religion to be important, predominantly in encouraging the basic values of care and concern for others.

One of the findings of the Australian Community Survey was that the factor which correlated most strongly with social trust was altruism, the willingness of individuals to put the interests of others before their own. In the arena of social capital, many people, such as Mark Latham (2000, pp.193-197) and Jenny Onyx (1997), prefer to speak of 'reciprocity' rather than 'altruism'. They are drawing attention to the fact that as people put their own short-term interests aside for the sake of others, so they will enjoy long-term benefits. This is one of the values towards which most religious groups aspire, although they may express this in different ways.

Perhaps it is time for the religions represented in Australia to work together on their common values. It is time to begin fresh and serious consideration of how those common values might be expressed within the expert systems of society, as well as in the lives of individuals. As religions tell their story and emphasise the values which emerge from them, they will find commonality with other groups, concerned for building community but perhaps motivated by other stories, by the stories of humanism, for example; or even motivated by the empirical findings about the importance of reciprocity for human community. By emphasising their common values, those points where the stories come together, they can again add strength to the glue which holds communities together and makes this world a better place to live.

References and notes:
Aghajani, Valentine, (1989), 'The Assyrian Church History and Identity in Australia' in Abe Wade Ata, Religion and Ethnic Identity: an Australian Study. Volume 2. Melbourne: Spectrum, VICTRACC Publications.

Baum, F., Catherine Palmer, Carolyn Modra, Charlie Murray and Robert Bush, (2000) 'Families, social capital and health' in Winter, I. (Ed.), Social capital and public policy in Australia . Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Bouma, Gary D., (1992), Religion: Meaning, transcendence and community in Australia, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.

Dixon, Robert, (1996), The Catholics in Australia, Canberra: AGPS.

Giddens, A., (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Fukuyama, F., (1995). Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. New York: Free Press.

Hughes, Philip, (1997), 'Australia's religious profile' in Bouma, Gary D. Many Religions, All Australian: Religious Settlement, Identity and Cultural Diversity, Melbourne: Christian Research Association.

Hughes, Philip, (2001), Australia's Religious Communities: A Multimedia Exploration, Melbourne: Christian Research Association.

Hughes, Philip, (2001a), 'No Religion' in Hughes, Philip (editor), Australia's Religious Communities: A Multimedia Exploration, Melbourne: Christian Research Association.

Latham, M., (2000), '"If only men were angels": Social capital and the Third Way' in Winter, I. (Ed.), Social capital and public policy in Australia . Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Onyx, J. a. P. B., (1997) Measuring Social Capital in Five Communities in New South Wales: An Analysis (Working Paper, no. 41)Sydney: Centre for Australian Community Organisations and Management (CACOM), University of Technology.

The Australian Community Survey conducted by researchers from Edith Cowan University and NCLS Research was made possible by a Collaborative Grant from the Australian Research Council, and the support of ANGLICARE (NSW) and the Board of Mission of the Uniting Church (NSW). The research has been jointly supervised by Prof. Alan Black and Dr Peter Kaldor. The research team included John Bellamy, Keith Castle and Philip Hughes.