RELIGION AND AUSTRALIAN POLITICS Lecture 3 (23 July 2007) CHRISTIAN CHURCHES AND POLITICS UNTIL FEDERATION 1. General Themes • Church and State: constitutional, political and financial • Church and Society: relationship of church leaders with society, including own members • Inter-Church Rivalries: denominations very separate and rivalry between them for state benefits and for community support • Churches and Parliamentary Politics: internal politics of religious beliefs of parliamentarians and the external lobbying by church leaders • Don’t forget churches are/were all international organizations! 2. Church and State • Little explicit religious motivation for colonization. But considerable religious division and conflict in Britain where Dissenters (Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers) and Catholics excluded and persecuted. • Church not initially separate from State: Anglican clergy were magistrates • Compromise in which four churches were state supported: Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians and Methodists. Hogan, p. 39: “This was a curious resolution of the establishment problem. It entailed establishing all denominations rather than establishing only one”. • Churches as government agents: leaders ‘paymasters’ for communities • Education ‘question’ resolved in 1860s: Catholics saw church schooling as an ideological bulwark against liberalism (that is, individual freedom) • South Australia: Paradise of Dissent (Douglas Pike). Failed experiment by Dissenters, esp Methodists, to develop churches without state support 3. Church and Society • Demographic composition (Anglican majority). Anglicans were 40%, Catholics 20%, Methodists 10% and Presbyterians 10% (1891) • Colonists and convicts not particularly religious. Urban British working class was alienated from the Church of England seeing established church as part of state elite. C of E seen as :The Conservative Party at prayer” • Churches, including Catholics, agreed on basic values underpinning law and order, like family unit and sobriety • Moral order: role of families (women as “God’s Police”); respectability. Respect for authority and hierarchy, conformity to industry, chastity and honesty. All of this is highly political. • Industrial order: “Protestant work ethic”; cooperative industrial relations • Moral issues: age of consent; alcohol; anti-gambling; Sunday observance • Wowser (religious do-gooder). Hogan, p. 147 says wowser is a term “invented to describe the typical religious do-gooder [often female] who
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was determined to deprive the ordinary Australian [male] of his Sunday sport, his drink with his mates and his flutter on the races” Women’s Christian Temperance Union was an interdenominational Protestant movement of middle-class women (late 1880s) who were important in the drive towards women’s suffrage
4. Inter-Church Rivalries • Anglican/Catholic/Protestant. Bitter rivalries but grudgingly civilized. • Ethnic flavour: Irish Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians, Cornish Methodists, German Lutherans. • Sectarianism: “social conflict with religious basis”, esp. about education • Hogan’s 3 components of sectarianism: religion, ethnicity, class. Hostility between evangelical Protestants and Catholics was imported. British were either loyal or tyrannical, while Irish were either rebellious or oppressed. Protestant class had numbers and the wealth. • Churches and the Working Class: following among Salvation Army/Unitarians and some Catholics. Catholics: St Vincent de Paul Society (1881). Methodists: Central Methodist Mission (1884), Savation Army in Australia (1880s). Otherwise churches advocated hard work and did little about poverty. 5. Parliamentary Politics • Rivalry between churches and socialism for working class support. Catholic Church especially opposed to socialism. Splinter sects, like Salvation Army seen as rivals rather than allies by socialist leaders. Note Marx’s comment: “Religion is the opium of the People” • Churches were middle class: leadership and membership • 1890s: churches generally opposed industrial conflict. Weight of church opinion was against trade unions. Exceptions were Methodists, Congregationalists, Unitarians, plus one important Catholic leader, Cardinal Moran, Archbishop of Sydney • Church members, rather than clergy, involved with rise of Labor as general rule. Esp. in SA there were large numbers of Methodists in Labor. Clergy stresses hard work/social order, rather than opposition to capitalism • Cardinal Moran offered official Catholic support for Labor by diffusing church opposition to socialism Video (30 mins): Geraldine Doogue, “Kevin Rudd and the God Factor” (ABC Compass, 2005) with Rudd’s interpretation of the relationship between faith and politics (tutorial W2) and his plans to relate Labor and evangelical politics. See also Family First Party, Hillsong church, John Howard and politics and politics and religion in USA. History: role of Catholics, including Archbishop Daniel Mannix in Labor Split of 1950s. Academics include Marion Maddox (Reading Brick) and myself. Labor MPs include Julia Gillard and Carmen Lawrence
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