essay | Peter Holding

HOWARD’S BELIEVERS
Religion, culture and the future of progressive politics

LATE IN 2004 Mark Latham reacted to Tony Abbott’s attempt to reinvigorate debate on abortion by stating that religion and politics don’t mix. Latham confirmed Labor’s commitment to the secular state in his speech to the Victorian ALP’s state conference on 20 November 2004. But in the same speech he also stated that he appreciated the “social capital” created by evangelical churches that were active in his electorate. Social capital, contemporary sociological jargon for community cooperation and development, played an important role in Latham’s politics. In From the Suburbs: Building a Nation From Our Neighbourhoods, Latham says that community development matters more in an age of globalisation. He says that it is in the local realm that trust and co-operation are learned. He says that government should broker relationships and connections between people and that communities, rather than just demanding better services, should be running them. “The objective” says Latham “is to create a new kind of solidarity that crosses economic and class barriers, one that goes beyond personal identities and prejudices.” In the aftermath of the election Latham was criticised by Gerard Henderson in The Age for the fact that he “does not attempt to disguise his lack of empathy with believers – of any religion”.
      Henderson was referring to the ABC TV Compass program on the beliefs of Australia’s political leaders aired on the Sunday before the election. He pointed out that John Anderson emerged as an “active Christian” while John Howard depicted himself as a believer who chooses not to “share every private moment with the public”. Latham called himself a humanist and an agnostic. In July 2004, Peter Costello, a lay preacher in his youth, addressed 20,000 members of the fundamentalist Hillsong congregation at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. Costello told those assembled that more lives had been “transformed by faith in Christ than by editorial writers”. (Interesting that Costello mentioned editorial writers and not politicians.) Henderson pointed to comments made to Lateline by former ALP pollster Rod Cameron on the impact of Costello’s visit to Hillsong and of evangelical Christianity in the electorate. Cameron told Lateline: “You tend to find these churches in the outer suburbs and in regional Australia and that’s where the marginal seats are … and that’s where John Howard will think he can do very well”. As we now know Howard did “do very well”. One example was that a member of the Hillsong church won the once-safe Labor seat of Greenway for the Liberals. According to Henderson, Latham failed to get the message that the Coalition had endorsed “Judeo-Christian values” and that Labor’s failure to do so was an electoral negative.
      By late September 2004 senior religious figures had entered Australia’s election campaign. Catholic Archbishop Dr George Pell joined his Anglican counterparts, Peter Jensen and Peter Watson, to criticise two aspects of Labor’s education policy: the proposal to effectively cap government funding to schools within the non-government schools sector and the decision to take money from some non-government schools and give it to others – supposedly because this latter measure was likely to benefit schools of one faith background largely at the expense of another. Pell had met with Tony Abbott in the lead-up to the election and his intervention in the education debate was extraordinary. He was clearly agitating against the interests of his own flock. Overall, Catholic schools were likely beneficiaries of the ALP’s policy. Only one Catholic school, St Ignatius’ College in Sydney, made it onto Labor’s list of sixty-seven (predominantly Anglican and Protestant schools) that stood to suffer a funding cut under the policy.
      All of this, together with the obvious impact of religion on the US election result, the emergence of the Family First Party in Australia and the apparent worldwide growth of charismatic churches, leads one to look again at the relationship between politics and religion. It also leads to the question of how Labor, or those on the progressive side of politics in general, should deal with religion.
      In Australia, the ALP has always been composed of a mixture of secular humanists and those for whom religion has played a role in their embracing egalitarian values, the politics of social reform and support for human rights. Social disadvantage led many of Irish Catholic descent to join or vote for the ALP. And religion lay at the heart of the ALP’s own greatest and most bitter schism – the 1954–55 split, inspired by Cold War anti-communism, Dr Mannix and B.A. Santamaria – which resulted in the formation of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).
      In the postwar era, many secular humanists on the Left and intellectuals in general no doubt believed that religion would eventually ‘wither away’, particularly with improved educational standards. Empirical studies of French and Italian Catholics seemed to confirm the decline of religion as inevitable in a society in which modernisation was an ongoing process. This type of research formed the backbone of research in the sociology of religions until the late 1960s.
      Although 95 per cent of Italians say they are Catholic, only about 30 per cent attend weekly services (as Catholicism requires), a figure that has plummeted since the 1950s. A recent New York Times story explored the strange paradox of religion in Italy. By tradition, public schools post crucifixes, yet few Italians see the church as a political force, and most simply will not tolerate it meddling in their personal lives. As the Times reported, “In one recent poll, only 32 per cent of Italians surveyed said it was right for religion to have an influence on the laws of the state”.
      Australia has seen similar trends. In 1971 slightly fewer than 90 per cent of Australians stated an affiliation with some type of religion but this had dropped to 73 per cent by 2001. Only 23 per cent of Australian adults had participated in church or religious activities in the three months prior to the ABS 2002 General Social Survey and this included those who had gone to a religious funeral or wedding.
      The USA on the other hand remains a deeply religious society. In the year 2000 around 85 per cent of the population identified themselves as religious. 76.5 per cent identified themselves as Christian, an increase of 5 per cent since 1990. But perhaps the best indicator of religiosity in the US is church attendance. In the US 51.6 per cent of Christians identified themselves as attending church on a weekly basis in 2001. Anglicans had the lowest rate of weekly attendance (30 per cent) and the highest rates were Mormons (71 per cent), Assemblies of God (69 per cent) and Pentecostals (66 per cent).
      In the USA organised religion has undoubtedly become a potent political force. A US secular Republican has become almost as rare a creature as a Wet in the Liberal Party of Australia. The Christian Right has seemingly been able to persuade a significant number of voters to place so-called ‘moral issues’ ahead of their own economic self-interest in determining voting priorities. George W. Bush was returned to the Presidency because he won the state of Ohio. Had John Kerry won Ohio he would have won the Presidency without winning the popular vote (as Bush himself did in 2000). Ohio is a state in which some 250,000 jobs were lost during George W. Bush’s presidency. Yet exit polls across the country showed 21 per cent of voters saying that ‘moral values’ (principally opposition to gay marriage and abortion) determined their vote ahead of either Iraq or the economy.
      Some observers have continued to point the finger at poor educational standards as an explanation for the persistence and influence of fundamentalist religious belief. Tim Berra referred to poor educational standards in Ohio in his book Evolution and the Myth of Creationism. He notes that “well over half the biology graduate students surveyed at Ohio State University favoured teaching creationism in public schools … Another survey showed that only 12 per cent of Ohio’s high school biology teachers could select from five choices the phrase that best described the modern theory of evolution!”8 But poor education in the USA is nothing new and seems of itself an inadequate explanation of the emerging dominance of the US Christian Right. More satisfactory explanations lie in the spread of Bush’s faith-based social welfare strategy, the improved level of grass roots political organisation by the Christian Right and the accompanying success in convincing followers that they should engage in secular politics rather than focusing exclusively on spiritual issues.
      Barbara Ehrenreich has suggested that “the faith factor” in the US election is the direct result of what Mark Latham might refer to as the ‘social capital’ that has been created by the Christian Right. Ehrenreich says of the right-leaning churches:

They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on ‘faith’ but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients … Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and you’ll find the McLean Bible Church (MBC), spiritual home of Senator James Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the ‘Career Ministry’; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in DC and operates a ‘special needs’ ministry for disabled children. What makes the typical evangelicals’ social welfare efforts sinister is their implicit – and sometimes not so implicit – linkage to a program for the destruction of public and secular services. This year the connecting code words were ‘abortion’ and ‘gay marriage’. Of course, Bush’s faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytising social services; not only do they attack candidates who favour expanded public services – but they stand to gain public money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral dimension of American life, that the Democrats have failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state.

Ehrenreich’s observations illustrate the blindingly obvious. Not all ‘social capital’ is progressive in its politics. It does not necessarily create (to quote Latham) “a kind of solidarity that … goes beyond personal identities and prejudices”, let alone “class barriers”. Community development can operate to increase prejudice and suspicion of outsiders or minorities. In Australia religious organisations such as the Brotherhood of St Lawrence and St Vincent de Paul have provided charity to the poor as an adjunct to social services. But these services have been rendered without proselytising and the organisations have generally advocated against rather than in favour of cuts in state-supplied welfare. Nevertheless, the US experience confirms that community development is not a value-free process.
      Professor Jim Ife has rejected technocratic, instrumentalist, value-free and apparently ‘non-political’ approaches to community development. He points out that: “In a value-free sense, perhaps one of the most successful community development projects of the twentieth century would be the Hitler Youth. It really engaged young people, it gave them a real sense of connectedness and belonging, it gave their life a purpose, it had a high level of participation. It was also part of one of the most shameful regimes in human history”. Of course the US right-wing churches are not the equivalent of the Hitler Youth. They oppose totalitarianism. They are not necessarily anti-Semitic. In fact some even strongly support Israel on obscure religious grounds related to the Rapture and the Second Coming. Undoubtedly these churches produce their share of seemingly pleasant and happy individuals such as Guy Sebastian, who learned his music through Australia’s Assemblies of God Church. Yet there remain some disturbing similarities shared by those who participated in Nazism and the right-wing churches. Both display a Calvinistic obsession with cleanliness, purity, dress code and destiny. Both share the desire to yield one will’s to an external overwhelming authority figure (described by Erich Fromm as the fear of freedom). Both tend to support militarism and a punitive approach to law and order. And both regard homosexuality as depraved.
      The social capital developed by the Christian Right has been institutionalised in the USA in a manner that will not necessarily occur in Australia. The Bush Administration has established the Whitehouse Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives which has channelled billions of dollars to faith-based organisations that proselytise in the process of delivering services. The March 2004 issue of Church and State reported that Jim Towey, who heads up the Bush administration’s ‘Faith Based Initiative’ had announced to reporters that $40 billion was now available to religious charities. By studying White House press releases and the White House web site, Daniel Zwerdling found that religious groups could apply to more than a hundred federal programs that gave out more than $65 billion. In addition, religious groups could apply for more money through state-administered programs.
      But while historical factors render the USA a far more religious society than Australia, the US pilgrim experience of religious persecution in Europe led the US founding fathers to ensure a constitutional separation of church and state. The First Amendment’s religion clauses embrace two key concepts: the government will not endorse or oppose any particular religious viewpoint (or religion generally), and will not interfere with the right of citizens to practice their faith. As Thomas Jefferson put it, the American people created a “wall of separation between church and state”.
      The constitution has largely prevented state aid being given to religious schools in the US. It has even facilitated successful legal challenges to the placing of the Ten Commandments in publicly owned spaces. But Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn has stated that Bush’s re-election will lead to more attacks on the “Church-State wall”. Lynn says that the country can expect more battles over divisive issues such as same-sex marriage, religion in public education, “faith-based” initiatives and displays of religious symbols in government buildings. The most bruising battles, says Lynn, will occur when there are vacancies on the Supreme Court. There are likely to be two to four openings on the court within the next four years. According to Lynn, Religious Right groups will demand that high court appointees agree with fundamentalists on issues like legal abortion, gay rights, government funding of religion and religion in public schools.
      In Australia the barriers to a Conservative Coalition government channelling taxpayer funds to right-wing churches or their fronts seem primarily political and cultural, not legal. They lie in the facts that Australia is nowhere near as religious a society as the US, that the right-wing churches are not as well organised politically here or do not have the same proportion of adherents, and that such action by the Coalition would risk political backlash.
      John Howard has been reluctant to wear his religion on his sleeve like George W. Bush. Howard is a cautious and practical politician whose assessment of political opportunities and limitations is usually accurate. He is more into the religion of politics than the politics of religion. He has dipped his toe into the latter but only so as to measure the political opportunities and risks. He has found that there are mixed results. His attack on public schools for their failure to teach “sound values” (implying that private/religious schools do teach them) seemed to create a backlash. He reigned in Tony Abbott’s attempts to reinvigorate the abortion debate in the immediate aftermath of the election. This appears to have been a politically astute move given that 77 per cent of religious Australians (and even 53 per cent of evangelicals, defined as Baptists, Lutherans and Pentecostals) are pro-choice. His appointment of Peter Hollingworth as Governor General was a failure. Other measures have probably been politically neutral or electorally positive, although, in the case of the latter, not necessarily due to their ‘religious’ appeal. These measures have included:

• federal legislation to amend the Sex Discrimination Act to prevent IVF treatment for single women (mainly lesbians);
• overriding Northern Territory euthanasia legislation;
• unnecessary amendments to the Marriage Act to appeal to anti-gay sentiment and to wedge Labor;
• agreement with the Family First Party that all government policies should be audited as to their effect on families;
• increasing the role of religious charities within the Job Network for the political aim of cutting costs and destroying the heavily unionised Commonwealth Employment Service. (A measure which, according to Michael Duffy, became a gently festering issue within the religious organisations themselves);
• the appointment of Major Brian Watters from the Salvation Army as Chairman of the Australian National Council on Drugs.

Howard has astutely developed a conservative moral agenda without appearing to mix religion and politics to an extent that would alienate those Christians or secular conservatives who see religion as essentially a private matter. But there is nothing to be gained by the ALP in trying to emulate Howard’s agenda. Such an approach will only serve to make it more indistinguishable from the Conservatives, which is the last thing it needs. Labor should be wary of the possibility of right-wing churches growing and becoming more politically organised, but should not be unduly spooked by the US experience. It should neither ignore religious opinion nor pander to it.
      Labor needs to recognise that it is unlikely to ever win significant electoral support from those right-wing churches that have always formed a natural constituency for the Liberals. If, for example, a person holds religious views that lead him or her to see material wealth as a sign of salvation and poverty as a sign of moral degradation, Labor simply has nothing to offer them. This type of view is anathema to the egalitarian values that Labor must continue to espouse. Labor needs to focus on winning support from the more mainstream churches in an effort to push the right-wing churches onto the fringe of the religious community.
      An idea of the battle lines might be gleaned from the first case to test the Bracks Government’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001. This act prohibits the incitement of religiously based hatred, serious contempt or revulsion. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal found that persons associated with the Catch the Fires church had vilified Muslims. The Catholic and Uniting Churches and the Islamic Council have supported the decision and Labor’s legislation. Pentecostal and evangelical churches and the Presbyterian Church have called for its repeal on the grounds that it prohibits free speech.
      In any event, Labor needs to remind the electorate that, at least in part, secularism developed to ensure freedom of religion. It should point out that most religious people in Australia are pro-choice. They are quite capable of accepting that one’s personal views about abortion are distinct from support for laws outlawing abortion, that would effectively impose these views on others. Similarly it is for the Churches to decide whether they wish to celebrate religious marriages between gay people or ordain women priests. This is quite distinct from the question of whether or not the state should maintain general laws outlawing employment discrimination against women or should prohibit civil unions for gay people. The claim that gay civil unions are an attack on the traditional family is a paranoid fantasy. John Stuart Mill’s distinction between self-regarding and other regarding actions should be turned by Labor against a Liberal Party that has abandoned basic liberal philosophy for the politics of bigotry.
      There are three responses to Gerard Henderson’s criticism of Latham’s alleged failure to endorse “Judeo-Christian values”. The first is that Henderson’s theory that this was an electoral negative is unproven. Bob Hawke always described himself as ‘agnostic,’ with no apparent negative electoral consequences. Keating was a Catholic, again with no apparent electoral consequence. The second is that either there is no coherent set of ‘Judeo-Christian values’ or the values are so universal that they are likely to be shared by other religions or by atheists. The phrase itself seems to conveniently overlook almost two thousand years of Christian-based anti-Semitism, persecution of dissidents within Christianity itself and the fact that there are some 34,000 separate Christian groups in the world today, whose views on social issues are as diverse as their interpretations of the Bible. If Henderson is referring to the Ten Commandments it can hardly be said that the Liberals have ruled in accordance with them. They support weekend trading, have supporting killing other than in self-defence, have coveted East Timor’s oil and their leader is widely acknowledged to have born false testimony on a regular basis. The third response is that if Henderson is correct and electoral gains are to be made by endorsing ‘Judeo-Christian values’ (nebulous as the concept is), Labor should focus on those values that are consistent with a progressive political agenda. There is no reason to limit the scope of so-called ‘Judeo-Christian values’ to the conservative preoccupation with the way individuals choose to use their bodies. Latham occasionally tried to use this tactic. When Tony Abbott was Minister for Workplace Relations, Latham claimed that his support for individual contracts and abolition of unfair dismissal laws made him “a heretic in the Catholic Church”.
      Nevertheless Ehrenreich’s comments about the US Democrats may have some applicability to the ALP: “Democrats should not be flirting with faith but re-examining their affinity for candidates too mumble-mouthed and compromised to articulate poverty and war as the urgent moral issues they are. Jesus is on our side here, and secular liberals should not be afraid to invoke him. Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is for the most part silent, or mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion.”15 Many on the Left are atheists and regard religion as nonsense, or worse still as an opiate of the masses. But whether religion is nonsense, or eases the pain of poverty, or gives meaning to lives that might be otherwise dominated by rampant consumerism, is largely irrelevant to the issue of the role it invariably plays in politics. That role will vary from country to country and even from electorate to electorate. But religion and religious motivation are, and probably always will be, facts of political life. In Latin America, for example, it is impossible to perceive that socially progressive movements, reformist or revolutionary, will advance without the participation of progressive Christians.
      In the end the most that can be said is that it should be possible for atheists and agnostics to work with ‘believers’ who share common goals. This must be distinguished from pandering to the values espoused by the emergent right-wing churches or allowing them to become the primary beneficiaries of attempts by government to empower communities or decentralise services. And while it may be politically unwise for leftie parliamentarians to publicly mock religion, the same tolerance that a pluralist society extends to religion means that having a good chuckle at John Safran v. God, at least in the privacy of one’s own home, is well and truly allowed.

Peter Holding is a Melbourne barrister and member of the ALP. These views are his own and have no ALP or SL endorsement.

Overland 178–autumn 2005, pp.38–43