What "Fair Dinkum" Teaches Us About Authentic Faith

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MarkTheHerald.com

✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦

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There is a phrase at the center of MARK! The Herald Angel that I want to spend some time with today, because I think it carries more theological weight than it might initially appear to.

That phrase is "fair dinkum."

For the uninitiated: fair dinkum is Australian slang meaning genuine, true, authentic, the real deal. It functions as both adjective and emphatic exclamation. A fair dinkum story is a genuinely true story. A fair dinkum person is someone who is exactly what they appear to be — no performance, no pretense, no gap between the public face and the private reality.

In MARK! The Herald Angel, it is Mark's highest standard of excellence. He applies it to journalism, to pencil sharpness, to the quality of a person's character, to the reliability of information. When Mark says something is fair dinkum, he means it is true all the way through.

And it turns out that "true all the way through" is one of the better descriptions of authentic faith I've encountered.

The Performance Problem

One of the things that drives people away from organized religion — and I say this as someone who has spent decades in ministry and who loves the church — is the perception that it is fundamentally a performance. That what happens on Sunday morning is a curated presentation of spiritual health that doesn't necessarily correspond to the other six days of the week.

This perception is not always unfair. The temptation to perform faith rather than practice it is real and persistent and I would be dishonest if I pretended I've never felt it myself. The social rewards for appearing spiritually healthy in a faith community are significant enough that the incentive to perform rather than actually be healthy can be genuinely powerful.

Fair dinkum, by definition, is the opposite of performance. It's what remains when the performance stops. The Australian phrase has a slightly comic, earthy quality to it that I find useful precisely because it resists elevation. You can't perform "fair dinkum" very well. The phonetics alone work against it. It's a phrase that insists on being real.

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What Fair Dinkum Faith Looks Like

I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of the Christmas story specifically. The characters who encounter the birth of Christ in Luke 2 are not the spiritually sophisticated ones.

They are not the ones who have been performing religion longest or most publicly. They are shepherds — workers, night-shift laborers, people whose job was too messy and too rural to be considered religiously serious by the standards of their time. And they are the ones who, when the angels appear and tell them the news, immediately say: "Let's go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened." Not let's discuss it. Not let's form a committee. Not let's see whether this aligns with our existing theological commitments. Let's go see.

That response is fair dinkum. It's genuine, unmediated, not dressed up for an audience. It's the response of people who haven't spent enough time in religious performance to know that you're supposed to be more cautious than that.

And they find the baby. They find Mary. They find Joseph. And they find that the angel's announcement was, in every particular, exactly true.

Fair dinkum. Fair dinkum, indeed.

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✦ MARK! The Herald Angel — a fair dinkum Christmas story. Available at MarkTheHerald.com.