Simon Kennedy is an  historian of Christianity, who focuses on the intersections between religion, law, and political thought. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, based in the T. C. Beirne School of Law. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest. From mid-2025, he will be a Research Fellow at Alphacrucis University College.  Tuesday Dialogues would like to thank Simon for raising this issue which, in our increasingly multicultural country, contributes to our earlier discussions on what it means to be Australian.  

Overview

The key theme of this discussion arises out of a citation by Simon of Manning Clark who wrote that the Enlightenment, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism were the great influences on Australian culture and society.  However the number of Christian adherents is falling rapidly and Christian churches, once prominent public institutions, are declining in their influence on public life.  Simon focussed on two questions, what is the meaning of Australia’s Christian heritage for today and what are the roles of Christianity and Christian institutions in Australia.  

Key points made by Simon Kennedy

At the time of Australia’s foundation

• The British, Irish and Scots who founded Australia identified as Christian people with the mores, habits and culture of Christians. 

• The civilisation that got off the boat was Christian and continued to be so.  There was no single established church but all colonies supported the building of churches. There was a link in the minds of the colonial elite between Britishness and Christianity with the government providing funding, cultural priority and moral authority to the Christian Church.  There was no doubt that the God referred to in the preamble to the Constitution was the Christian God.

• This does not mean that they were necessarily pious practising Christians, far from it. 

• Australia’s Christian consensus was not necessarily primarily built on piety (though it may have been) other important social dynamics have shaped the country including Enlightenment liberalism and a form of utilitarianism. 

Aspects of a Christian society

• Simon referred to TS Eliot and three aspects of a Christian society, (i) a Christian State with a legally established State / Church connection, which Australia has never had, (ii) a Christian elite with the habits and manners of Christianity, and (iii) a Christian community the members of which would have led a pious Christian life.  The distinction is between the impious but still culturally Christian and those who attend church regularly, the pious. 

Decline in numbers identifying as Christian and impact of decline

• Census data shows that the number of people identifying as Christian is declining both percentage wise (and in raw numbers) from 80% in 1971 to 43% in 2021. And even this number of 43% hides the fact that probably only 10% have a lively Christian faith, with the other 30% being cultural Christians.

• With only 10% being active Christians it means that the institutional heft of the Christian churches in Australia is outsized with hospitals, schools, churches, Christian MPs in state and federal parliaments, recent Prime Ministers, Morrison, Howard, Rudd, Abbott, and Albanese who has “gone back to church”.  Christian leaders remain prominent with the Archbishops of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, whether Anglican or Roman Catholic continuing to speak publicly.  Though some of these institutions are loosening their ties to Christianity, others like the independent school sector are growing.  

• How long will this Christian influence last if European Australians depart from the faith and if Australia continues to import migrants from the Indian subcontinent, East Asia and the Middle East and what would its decline mean?  If we don’t keep the Christian cultural foundations we lose the will to continue to be Australia.  For example, the UK has become something quite different from its cultural origins.  The institutional forms are there but they won’t last under different cultural conditions. Montesquieu (18th C ) argued that certain forms of government required certain types of people. 

• Civic engagement has been declining at the same time Christianity has been declining.  The advent of the car, television and the smart phone, mean people are not thinking locally any more and have no need of the Church for social engagement.

• How does a dying church continue to run church schools and hospitals? They don’t!  Islam may run schools and hospitals once they reach critical mass but what impact will this have on our current culture.  Enlightenment liberals are not founding schools.

Outcome of Christian legacy

• Simon is inclined to see Australia’s remarkably benign and effective  political and civic culture as the fruit of a Christian legacy. 

• Nations can continue without Christianity but the flame inspiring that nation has to change.

Comments generally from the table

Impact of our founding document

• We refer to God in the preamble to our Constitution but does anyone other than academics question what god this is? Ie does this inclusion in our founding document have any impact on the type of society we are, Christian or otherwise?

What does the Church currently have to offer

• Is there any evidence that the church is trying to change to offer something other than a sermon on Sunday where people sit in a church and get preached at? We don’t need the church for social engagement as much as previously as this happens through the family car, internet, TV.  What is the Church offering?  Response was that some churches are very good at social services such as parental programs, financial support, courses, charity work such as helping women who have escaped abusive situations.  It was argued the church has played a large role in terms of civic engagement, helping the poor, getting homeless people off the streets, in establishing institutions and encouraging civic activity around those institutions.  

• Organisations like Rotary and Apex which were based on Christian values are dying.  It was suggested that there has been a degradation in morals away from Christian virtues such that it is now regarded to be someone else’s responsibility to care for the less fortunate, not the family and not the community, and in fact it is primarily regarded as the responsibility of the government. 

• The query was made as to whether the fact that religions are not aligning themselves to the values of societies is one reason contributing to their decline., eg marriage equality, gender equality.  It is worth noting that not every church was against marriage equality, the Uniting Church for example, though there was division, ultimately supported it.

• If Australian values are not aligning with the churches, how does a church make itself relevant? It was challenged - should it align with these new values if they are seeking the truth? It was noted that there is a willingness of Christians to take a position different from their Church leaders.  In the debate around marriage equality the tenor of the criticism from the “Yes” side against the “No” side was noted and it was felt most of the criticism was really against the Catholics and not necessarily other groups.  Yet the majority of Catholic people, as did the Anglicans and those who attend the Uniting Church, voted “Yes” despite “copping most of the flak”. The religious groups who did not support marriage equality were in fact the Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. 

• It was suggested that if people do not agree with the Christian position on, for example marriage equality then they should not regard themselves as Christians. 

• One thing the church does well is collective action and collective identity. The suggestion was that we need a lot more of that.  The way individualism has gone is that the new god has become money.  This transaction has been in the interests of irrational choice, self interest, but to what end. We have billionaires who don’t really know what to do with their lives because they do not have any ideology beyond greed. We have been bombarded with hyper-individuality for the last 50 years and it has affected us.  However it was noted not everyone is out for themselves. We do have groups like the bushfire brigade who leave their jobs to rescue people from fires and floods and we recognise that as an important part of our culture.  

Division amongst Christians

• There has always been a lot of competition and division between the different Christian churches.  For example for a long time Catholics only married Catholics and non-Catholics did not even consider marrying Catholics. The Roman Catholic Church had a big influence and presence in the labour movement and in a way it still does through the tradies and the union movement.  Whereas the natural home for the Protestant was a conservative liberal establishment.  Now however the boundaries are more fluid as society has shifted so much. 

• There could be a lot of unity between Christians and non-Christians based on questions of class capitalism or taxing the rich.

Are Christian institutions supporting Christianity

• With regard to institutions like the Mater Hospital or the Cannon Hill Anglican College, is there any single thing that distinguishes them from just being called an NGO or a private company?  The Anglican College delivers very little Christian education. Anglicare in Eight Mile Plains delivers services on behalf of the government.  They are indistinguishable from private companies doing the same thing.  These organisations would all claim a mission, but does that make them Christian organisations? Some suggestions that identify the organisations as Christian were made: (i) It is believed you would not be able to obtain an abortion in a Catholic hospital. (ii) Reference was made to Jesuit schools where (at least in the recent past) you had to pray every morning and attend Mass three times a week.  (iii) It was suggested that it is still the case that to be a teacher in a Christian school you have to identify as a Christian.  It was queried whether this was legal or whether it would fall foul of the anti-discrimination legislation.

• Two things have happened in Australia in the last 48 years, the government started funding religious schools, and the government dismantled the bureaucratic welfare groups and gave the responsibility to the private sector – the church took to this like a duck to water, so these charitable institutions run by the Catholic Church, the Methodist Church and the Anglican Church started taking government money, they started working for the government. So now these schools, for example, which originally only really had Christian students from the churches that founded them, now are massive and are about 80% nonchurch students and 20% church students and are almost unrecognisable  in terms of their Christian ethos.  All because they took the money.

• The relativism of Judeo Christians has been discouraging. King Charles a few months ago stated he doesn’t actually see himself as the Defender of the Faith, ie of the Anglican faith, but as a supporter of multifaiths.  No head of any other religious group in any other part of the world would say that.  The Australian Catholic University is going through a process of “decatholicalisation”.  The head of ACU is not a Catholic, all but one person in the leadership is either non-Catholic, from another religious group or not religious. They are appointed into these institutions by saying they believe in social justice and in the dignity of the human person and that is good enough.  Other faith groups police the parameters of their faith more robustly.  We are walking away from some of our principles and values. There will come a time when the caravan has moved on and we are wondering why our society does not resemble the one we remember and value. 

Impact of cultural diversity

• Is cultural diversity destroying Australia as a Christian nation? 

• Are we different from the UK?  It was suggested that our only difference is that we have a big ocean between ourselves and the rest of the world.  We are welcoming a lot of people from all over the world from countries that do not share our foundations.  The UK is evidence that this is not working very well. It is creating massive social disintegraton and instability.  A recent theorist has postulated that civil war in the UK may occur some time in the next 20 years. We are different from the UK in many ways but we do think the same in that we welcome all comers and think everyone can assimilate.  This current migration is different from the postwar migration and different from the southern and eastern European migration to the US during the 1880s to the 1920s.  It is different because of religion and other cultural factors.

Christian ethics vs doctrinal Christianity

• If you say that the increase in cultural diversity changes Australia, what exactly does this mean?  Is it doctrinal Christianity or Christian ethics that is at the heart of the Australian identity.   Scepticism was expressed about whether institutions will change if the doctrinal commitment changes because  you can have Christian ethics without a doctrinal commitment. The heart of Christian ethics is common to all civilisations.  It is not a doctrinal commitment that is holding Australia together. These doctrines were loose complex and muddled and nobody who goes to church really knows them anyway. The issue is really the morality.

Can Australia prosper as a secular society

• If we believe there is a lack of social engagement since the decline of the Church, we only have to look at sport to see that this is not true as it is through sport that the community is coming together.  This is a connective tissue and it is something that generally survives tribal differences. This is despite the fact that, for example, many years ago all the soccer teams were ethnically based and used to actually fight one another.    This was stopped as it was ruining the projection of the sport. 

• The view that Christian ethics will just go on while the doctrinal is left behind was challenged. While the Christian mandate is to forgive your brother, nowadays it is a much more transactional relationship. The question is not about the narrow consideration of (for example) netball games it is about the wider society, where there are factions, where we are starting to speak in different languages. It was suggested that Christian morality is not continuing and we are entering into low level nihilism, utilitarianism, consequentialism, transactionalism and we will need to negotiate with each other no matter what contextual background we start from, whereas in the past, even though we fought wars, we spoke a common language. 

• Question, are we just privileging the Christian ethic?  How can this be democratic?  Are social justice values all Christian values?

• Should we not set out an ethical position, what is best for our society?  Why should we keep hold of these institutions which are not representative of our values? 

• For quite some time every society was religious.  It was hoped that a society without such a narrative could succeed but it was suggested that there is no society that has been able to pull it off. China and Russia have tried but not very successfully. Some people have put forward a sort of secular enlightenment, a rationalism as the foundation on which we could build a post Christian society, one without a god necessarily involved, a universal belief that all people can gather around and believe in.  Perhaps though we are now adapting to a new society, the next stage of the narrative which does not necessarily have a god involved.  Scepticism was expressed as to whether this is something on which you can build a whole civilisation.  The view was put that the Enlightenment came out of Christianity so there is a genealogy that requires something more than just secularism.  Religion provides a balance.

• Other non-Christian cultural groups also have this sacredness which is in fact a religious quality and this is part of how people associate and cohere.  One can argue that what they are doing is not rational but a lot of what we do in life is not rational.

• Reference was made to an article in The Conversation of two incommensurate points of view where you have on the one side a cosmological framework where there is order, human life rhymes , there is man and woman, the natural currents of life, a transcendent God and all these sort of elements that people want to adhere to.  On the other side there is the civic space which is not religious and in this civic space gay people (for example) had the right to argue for marriage equality.

• There was discussion about the work of McGilchrist who spoke of the right side of the brain being about the “flow”, with everything changing, provisional and needing to be understood in context, and the left side of the brain being mechanistic, atomising everything and wanting to explain everything in this very rational way.  This division is in all of us. 

• It was suggested that secular humanism cannot be the thing that unites people but we already know that Catholicism doesn’t do that in Australia and neither does Protestantism.  How do we create this sort of united society – tongue in cheek – take over the State, enforce religious conformity, make laws in the light of divine inspiration, revelation?

• Australia was a Christian nation for 100 years before it was a democracy.  Democracy coexists with a Christian nations but it is also able to coexist in countries like Japan and India which are not primarily Christian. 

• The argument is that a good society should not forget its roots irrespective of its faith commitments.  When it comes to the Judeo Christian tradition, it is notable how quickly people are prepared to move on from it.  This is at odds with what is going on in the rest of Australia.  Noone is saying Indigenous people should move on.  There is a tension here.  The Indigenous people are encouraged to return to their spirituality.  Christians are not and are moving on.  Noone is saying they have to, they just are.

• Victoria classed religion as entertainment during covid. 

• Every story in the Hebrew bible where the city looks like a sort of liberal democracy usually ends in that city getting destroyed by Goliath. 

Why should we support Christianity

• What we as Christians are concerned about is maintaining a seat at the table.  Disintermediation is happening everywhere, meaning we are not part of the cultural conversation.  This is not just a problem for Christians but a general problem.

• The Judeo-Christian tradition has been able to sit relatively seamlessly alongside liberal democracy.  Now we are seeing change in our own country  and around the world, free movement of capital people, people of other faith groups.  

• Although Christianity has been able to coexist with liberal democracy, this is not the case with all other faiths.  The Catholic Church went through a reformation which made it align with the world in a more constructive way.

• The Enlightenment is not perfect but it came out of Christianity. It was linked to the dominant ethos of the day.