Marr seems to rely upon the assumption that his readers share his values and that they think and feel the way he does. His view is that educated people everywhere have, like himself, tossed out religion, and that it remains in our society as a kind of relic of ancient beliefs and practices. That relic still clings to us, he says, dictating our moral attitudes and social principles on certain key political issues, when we really should exercise our secular freedom and kick the entire caboodle, spirituality, and ethics alike, out of our lives. ‘Most of us go through life with the moral values of faiths we’ve long ago abandoned’, laments the progressive Marr, wishing that our society could become more vigorously secular and atheistic in its values and principles.

Marr shows himself to be a product of his time, of the demythologising 1960s and the debunking l 970s, when the progressive liberation thinkers adopted this jaundiced approach to religion, and regarded it as a dangerously irrational thing. Since those angry days, however, many Australians have changed their attitude to matters of the spirit. Many of us have begun to feel that we have tossed the baby Jesus out with the bathwater, and that as a result of our debunking mentality we have drastically reduced the quality of life, and now sense a spiritual emptiness in our lives that we attempt to fill with religious substitutes, such as addictions, cravings, consumerisms, and all the other vices of affluence.

It is this awareness, that we have gone too far in debunking and demythologising, that we have left ourselves without spiritual guidance or nourishment, that David Marr completely ignores. He writes as if we are back in the raging 1960s, when we were shrugging off the apparent dead weight of the churches and struggling to discover a purely secular kind of freedom. There is something tragically out of touch about Marr, an indulgence in a destructive cultural style that has become anachronistic and a sign of things past. His failure to read the time signals the failure of the left-leaning elite of which he is part to mature and to get beyond childish rebelliousness.

Marr begins his book with a confession. He confesses that he was once a teenage Christian, but too many things did not add up, and eventually he threw it all away and adopted a style which is a mixture of common sense, cynicism, and liberational rage against authority. I would contend that he has not matured emotionally or spiritually beyond his eighteen-year-old stance on religion. There is no evidence throughout these predictable pages that he has sensed the separate reality of the spirit, that he has ever been drawn into an existential moment where the demands of the body and the flesh have come into collision with the claims of the spirit. Instead, Marr believes almost completely in the impulses of the body, in the rightness of unrestrained instinct, and in the right of individuals to give free reign to their instincts without prohibition or limitation.

Like other secular, disenchanted thinkers, Marr fails to understand the vital and civilising role of religion in our society, and the huge debt we owe to Christianity for restraining precisely the kind of instinctual free-for-all that Marr is advocating. From where do ethics arise in Marr’s imagined panacea of sensual delight? Whence the wellsprings of morality in a world wholly governed by the discharge and economic servicing of bodily desires? To ask these questions is to be criticised as unfashionable by some thinkers, but I contend that these thinkers are themselves unrepresentative of our time, lacking the courage to tackle the really difficult questions.

Marr engages in an infantile rage, where the separate authority of spirit is externalised and projected outside his body upon the institutions of faith, which he refers to throughout as the ‘enemies of pleasure and freedom’. Marr lives in an uncomplicated, sensual paradise which apparently knows nothing about the other will that works through us, drawing us into its service, and asking us to sacrifice merely libidinal pleasures for the sake of a higher purpose and an incarnational will. The paradox that Marr completely overlooks is that by entering into relationship with this separate will of the spirit we achieve a deep pleasure and a profound freedom that is unavailable to us in our merely secular or profane state.

The continuous, repetitive servicing of our libidinal desires brings neither the freedom nor the ultimate pleasure that Marr imagines. Again, he writes like a child who ardently believes that all prohibition of desires is false, and that the Law of the Father (represented for Marr by George Pell) is an abomination against the natural laws of the instincts. What Marr violently represses, however, is that the spirit which sometimes (not always) contradicts the life of desire is itself an instinct of colossal power and significance. Many of us in Australia have grown beyond the uncomplicated, secular hedonism of David Marr, and we don’t share his rage against the religious institutions that have helped to civilise the country and to restrain the barbarism of desire.

True, those institutions have made great mistakes in various matters, and they need to be criticised and held to account for their mistakes. The churches, although claiming a divine mandate, are part of the historical process, and participate in the errors of judgment of which human history is composed. In rigidly puritanical mode, the churches participate in the opposite kind of excess to that advocated by Marr, namely, a false belief that spirit must triumph over the body, and that the more pain the spirit inflicts on us the more we can be sure we are saved.

The puritanical and body-denying mode of the spirit is as much at fault, philosophically, psychologically, and politically, as the hedonistic mode of the body worshippers. The truth surely lies not with Marr or Pell, both trapped in stereotypes, but in a new sense of the integration of body and spirit. Marr sniggers at the text from Revelation nailed at the foot of the Cross in his childhood church, ‘Behold I come quickly’. This reminds the schoolboy Marr of only one thing. When it reminds him of another thing, then perhaps he will be worth listening to.