Viktor Zander Identity and Marginality among New Australians W DE G Religion and Society Edited by Gustavo Benavides and Kocku von Stuckrad Volume 39 Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York Viktor Zander Identity and Marginality among New Australians Religion and Ethnicity in Victoria's Slavic Baptist Community Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York © Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability. ISBN 3-11-017981-4 Library of Congress - Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at < http://dnb.ddb.de >. © Copyright 2004 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Cover design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin To Irene Zander, my wife and best friend Foreword by Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Oleg Donskikh Yes! Now it is my home country, because I was born here not with body, but with my soul. The Lord accepted me and I don't know with which words to thank Him... A migrant In his book Dr. Victor Zander analyses a quite small but at the same time a very interesting group of Slavic Baptists in Victoria (Australia). This group is formed by the migrants of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Yugoslavian origin, which have arrived in Australia at different times, predominantly after World War II. The community consists of three waves of migrants plus two genera- tions born in Australia, and so Victor is investigating five particular groups. It is quite important that the author provides a historical sketch of the migration. Moreover, in order to be objective, he presents the Slavic Baptists in their relation to the Russian Orthodox community, from which Baptists are quite strictly distinguished due to their religious affiliation. If we take into account that the attitude of the Orthodox towards Baptists cannot be called benevolent, this makes us realise the uniqueness of the position, in which Slavic Baptists have found themselves in Australia. Being a part of the Slavic community by virtue of language and ethnicity this group has been marginalised by virtue of their religious beliefs. This very fact explains the social and psychological complexity of the group-consciousness. At the same time there is also an advantage: the globalised views of the Baptists facilitate the identification process for them within the Australian society. The author outlines the crucial points uniting the community of Slavic Baptists in Victoria and through this provides the reader with an impressive picture of the life of the community. The work examines the identification process of the Slavic Baptists referring to Professor Hans Mol's well-known theory of religion which has been modified considerably by the author for the objectives of this particular research. Collecting data the author recorded about viii Prof. Dr. Dr. Dr. Oleg Donskikh 100 hours of semi-structured interviews which contain extremely valuable material by itself, especially if we take into account that some of the informants passed away. It was a great yet very tactful and sensitive job to arrange and to conduct these interviews. While communicating with the researcher at that time I witnessed how challenging and psychologically difficult the task was. Yet the author fulfilled the research with the delicacy, compassion, and deep penetration into the problems of the members of the community. The work demonstrates that the process of identification with the host society is not linear which seems quite plausible from the first glance. It was discovered, for instance, that first wave migrants' children express more marginal feelings than their parents. This can be explained by the fact that they have a choice between the focuses of identification from the world of their parents and the new, in this case Australian, culture. Parents apparently do not experience any psychological and social difficulties with this choice just because they have only one focus of identification related to the culture of the country of their origin. My personal opinion is that the most striking result of Dr. Zander's work is the discovered and well-proved fact that different groups of the Slavic Baptists have essentially different concepts of God and God's activity. This result is based on the unexpectedly similar statements expressed by the members of the corre- sponding waves. For the members of the First Wave of immigration (Post-War up to 1952-53) the Church is God's agency for salvation, and God is pre- dominantly regarded as Saviour. But for their children God is in the first turn "the One who is in control of everything" almost up to the point of fatalism. They obviously believe in His role as a Saviour, but emphasise His role as the One who is in charge of their lives. As for the Second Wave of immigration (between 1952 and 1972), their perception of God looks quite close to the one of the children of the First Wave's migrants—God is omnipresent, He is always nearby. However, there is a significant difference: for them He is not an omnipresent Lord who is in control, as in the case of the immigrants' children of the 'First Wave', but He is omnipresent, which is perceived through a personal touch of care and provision. The group of their children perceives God through the experience of Him in worship and life, in the feeling of His healing touch. For the migrants of the Third Wave (after 1991) God is predominantly the "God of Hope", they also emphasise the moral aspect of belief. This picture of different groups within the rather small and well-united community having their considerably dissimilar images of God is astounding yet psychologically convincing. It is the attractive feature of the work that Victor Zander does not try to simplify things. His picture of the community is complicated, and due to this not one-dimensional. The reader can feel the real voices of people alive. It is especially well seen, for instance, in relation to the group of Baptists who arrived in Australia from provincial China, where the majority of population Foreword ix were Uygurs. Their experience is quite different from what we normally encounter when we deal with the Russians who have migrated to Australia from Harbin or Shanghai. Surrounded by the Uygurs, they had to use two lan- guages—one for home (Russian), and one for all other places, while Russians in Harbin were formed a big community, and Chinese was not strongly demanded there. I believe that this book will attract the broad range of readers who are interested in such issues as the role of religion in modern life, sociology and psychology of religious groups, the history of religion, interaction of religious beliefs, and, apparently, in problems of identity and marginality.