ABSTRACT
Rather than fight to return to Christian Australia, Dutch Presbyterian clergyman and sociologist Hans Mol (1922–2017) conducted his landmark Religion in Australia Survey in 1966 to understand just what was changing and why. Chapter 2 examines Mol’s intellectual formation in settings of mobility and marginality, showing how these shaped his penchant for questioning the need for evangelicals to pursue ‘relevance’ on secular terms. He argued from the Survey that the nation was more religious than often made out, and yet, that evangelicals should embrace their theological distinctiveness and not capitulate to the dominant utilitarian understanding of religion’s relevance. Drawing extensively on Mol’s published and archival material, as well as an interview with him, this chapter provides the first sustained examination of his pioneering role in the sociology of religion in Australia and evangelicals’ intellectual response to the secularisation thesis which rose to such dominance in the 1960s.
