The Amaz­ing Joel Hockey Move­ment is a Chris­t­ian Com­edy Folk band/singer. I thought he was funny when I was in high school — I con­fess I haven’t lis­tened to him much since…

The Amaz­ing Joe Hockey Move­ment is the series of responses around the blo­gos­phere to Joe Hockey’s vaguely stu­pid defence of the notion of Chris­tian­ity in a speech to the Syd­ney Insti­tute that was pub­lished in extract form in the Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald the other day. It’s received a fair bit of press cov­er­age. With spec­u­la­tion that he was using this speech to round out his char­ac­ter in order to one day make a lead­er­ship push.

The back­bone of this speech is the idea that some­how the best place to learn about God is not the church — who take things all too lit­er­ally — but the vibe. It’s mabo. It’s the seren­ity. It’s stupid.

The notion that some­how Jesus would be unhappy with the idea of peo­ple tak­ing the Bible seri­ously — which he seemed to do through­out his life — is pre­pos­ter­ous. It comes from some sort of social supe­ri­or­ity com­plex that for some rea­son believes that we’re much more enlight­ened than those who came before us, and that we can stand in judg­ment on thou­sands of years of back­wards thinking.

I read an annoy­ingly supe­rior piece along this vein in Sam De Brito’s new “Build­ing a Bet­ter Bloke” group blog. Appar­ently the idea that Jesus “wasn’t a Chris­t­ian” should be pro­found. News­flash. Jesus was the arche­typal “peo­ple of God” — Chris­tian­ity is just the way that con­cept has been branded since we fol­low him. That’s a dumb propo­si­tion, and it just gets dumber.

Appar­ently Jesus was not about restor­ing our rela­tion­ship with God — you know, the “repent, the king­dom of God is near” stuff… no, he was about:

“These are the real issues Jesus was inter­ested in: POWER, PRESTIGE and POSSESSIONS. He hits them again and again.”

I bring this up mainly because a com­menter call­ing him­self “the thinker” made this inter­est­ing point in the comments…

“In the same way it is the philoso­phies we as a cul­ture evolve” – I have to pull you up on this one and refer you to sci­en­tific anthro­pol­ogy. This is a com­mon mis­take which we humans who accept evo­lu­tion make all the time. We erro­neously assume that cul­ture within human soci­ety evolves in a for­ward man­ner, the same way as genetic evo­lu­tion did.

Anthro­po­log­i­cally, the sci­en­tific evi­dence is that human cul­ture rises and falls more like a flat sine wave. When Amer­i­can cul­ture crashes it can fall to the same depth as Roman cul­ture when it crashed (or even fur­ther). There is NO cul­tural ’safety net’ for a mod­ern cul­ture which will pre­vent it falling past a spe­cific level cul­tural level attained in the past. Also, remem­ber that on a genetic scale we are no smarter as humans than the Greeks, the Romans, the Per­sians, the Mon­gols, the Huns etc as evo­lu­tion takes longer than 2,000 years to sig­nif­i­cantly improve human brain power.

I thought that was interesting.

Any­way, back to Hockey. While sug­gest­ing that Chris­tian­ity should be all about style — with­out wor­ry­ing about sub­stance — he made this odd state­ment about politics.

“The trend I see in pol­i­tics is one where per­son­al­ity is win­ning over the sub­stance that should be at the heart of polit­i­cal life.”

Some­what con­tra­dic­tory methinks.

For a more astute take­down of Hockey’s state­ment read this response from Phillip Jensen. Or the let­ters to the edi­tor that came in in response, or Gordo’s response to those let­ters. Here’s a snap­shot from Phillip Jensen…

But Mr Hockey’s expres­sion of val­ues, with or with­out belief in any par­tic­u­lar god, scarcely defends faith in the death and res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus — the man who is God. Chris­tian­ity, void of Jesus’ divin­ity or sin bear­ing cru­ci­fix­ion — is hardly Chris­tian­ity. Such a state­ment is not extrem­ist lit­er­al­ism. The cross, not the golden rule, is at the very cen­tre of Chris­tian­ity. All reli­gions do not teach the same truth when the death of Jesus is cen­tral to Chris­tian­ity and denied by the Koran.

He noticed that the Opera House is usu­ally play­ing music inspired by faith. But his kind of faith did not and will not inspire such music. He noticed that mem­bers of reli­gious organ­i­sa­tions are nearly twice as likely to be com­mu­nity vol­un­teers. But his faith has not and will not lead to more com­mu­nity vol­un­teers. He noticed the decline in reli­gious obser­vance in Aus­tralia. But he fails to notice that it is those who take their scrip­tures seri­ously that are retain­ing adher­ents and growing.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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