So, Kevin Donnelly, newly installed as Pyne’s curriculum advisor wants more religion in Australian public schools. Donnelly bases his arguments on the claim that “Australia is a predominantly Christian country“. More generally, his argument is that we need to inculcate a commitment to the”institutions, values and way of life” of the Australian majority.
Before making arguments like this, Donnelly might want to take a look at the 2011 census data which shows that barely 50 per cent of those aged under 25 stated a Christian religious affiliation. In a dicussion of this last year, we found a combination of demographic effects and switching, which implied that Christians will probably be a minority of the population by the 2020s, as they already are in the UK.
Since around 30 per cent of young people attend private schools most of which state a Christian affilation, it’s a safe bet that the majority of public school students are non-Christian. Certainly, “no religion” is the biggest single denomination for the under 25 age group. So, if you accept Donnelly’s “majority rule” argument, there’s a strong case for saying there should be more explicit atheism in public schools.
More generally, Christians should think carefully before lining up for this kind of culture war. Australia has been mercifully free of the kind of “new atheism” represented by people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Atheists, agnostics and the religiously indifferent have been happy to live and let live, without feeling the need to engage in denunciation of religion. But if Christian activists like Abbott and Donnelly want to use their current bare majority to impose their religous views on the rest of us, they ought to expect the same when they become a minority, as is virtually inevitable.
Religion is currently favored in all sorts of ways in Australia, from tax deductions and exemptions to publicly funded chaplaincy programs. There hasn’t been much fuss about this, but if the right chooses to engage in a religious culture war, all that will change.
John Quiggin 
@Luke Elford
Not to mention encouraging people to pretend to be catholic so that their kids can attend a catholic school.
Luke #47 the flaw in your argument is that a curriculum’s purpose is to teach kids what they ought to know, not to mirror what their parents believe. Defining learning outcomes to be achieved through a curriculum is unavoidably elitist. That’s why I’ve always mistrusted the Liberal obsession with using schools to teach “values”. It’s an abuse of government power, no matter what values are meant to be taught, in the sense they use the word (e.g. Howard’s incessant preaching the superiority of “Western values” in the context of Australia’s role in Asia).
Strangely enough, or maybe not, well known climate sceptic Richard Lindzen is supportive of this evangelical climate change denying group There could be a link between faith as in religion and faith as in modern business practices (eg follow our 5 step plan to personal wealth) however I also wonder if a little bit of proper religious instruction could assist students to be less susceptible to doubtful and dodgy marketing practices as employed by both (some) religious groups and business.
But probably not, philosophy would be a better subject.
Bobalot — yes you right. However the pagan Romans did invent it first even if the Anglo Saxons reinvented it later. Of course law is everywhere like language but Roman law and English common law have some very commendable attributes.
@Ken_L
It’s Kevin Donnelly who plays the Australia is “inherently a Christian society” and therefore the education system should be based on “a commitment to Christian beliefs and values” card, and rejects the idea of Australia as a “secular nation with a multicultural and multi-faith society” as “politically correct”, “postmodern” and “relativistic”. I’m simply describing what an education system that reflected the actual religious beliefs and practices of the majority of the population (as opposed to what Donnelly thinks they are) would look like. I’m not seriously advocating that the government should tell children whether or not to go to church.
I don’t mind proper teaching of religion in the classroom. When I was back in high school I quite enjoyed the classes as it gave me an excuse to point out the inconsistencies in the bible to my evangelical Christian teacher. One reason why he marked my essay down!
That being said, over the past few years I have increasingly understood the importance of religion even though I have not changed my views about God or a “supreme deity”. Teaching religion is a good way of looking at how different societies saw good behaviour, and placing religious belief in a historical context may help us avoid the fractured societies of other countries where religious groups faced off against each other.
@LukeElford
I think he is looking at the reality that much of our culture and laws are based on a Christian background. Christianity has had a much larger impact on our national culture and ethos than, say, Judaism or Islam. If our institutions had derived from a certain background then it is a better idea that people understand how those institutions evolved.
@Ken_L The Left want to teach “values” just as much as the Right. Look at the fact that National Sorry Day needs to be taught as well as a myriad of other public holidays. The people on the left believe that this is a necessary addition to teach children about Indigenous Australians and their suffering, while the right view it as the black-armband view of our nation. Pretending that only the right think in terms of “values” is incredibly blind.
faust #5 I don’t recall suggesting that “only the right think in terms of values” and I have no idea what “teaching a myriad of public holidays” means. Framing comments as what the left does or what the right does, and the use of terms like “incredibly blind”, is the kind of thing that has brought the whole blogosphere into disrepute. Why John Q perseveres is a mystery, but good on him for trying.
@Ken_L You wrote: “That’s why I’ve always mistrusted the Liberal obsession with using schools to teach “values”.” As though it was only a Liberal thing whereas the Left try to teach values just as much as the right. I brought up teaching public holidays to demonstrate this.
Mr Quiggan the “new atheism” is here already, and growing, thank goodness. Over 50,000 Australian school children are being homeschooled without registering with the Ed Dep’t and predominantly being educated by the Ken Ham ACE system. The Ed Dep’t are so scared of the religious right in this state they won’t do anything about it.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/home-schooling/3792578
Creationism being taught in publically funded religious schools and some public schools. Chaplains in schools. The onslaught at the child level is horrendous. The fruits are beinging to be demonstrated as groups of young people hit our steets to preach to the public.
Soldiers For Christ are being created through this organization, but they don’t call it that now. http://kidsinministry.org/about/
The women who heads it is called Becky Fischer of Jesus Camp fame.
http://vimeo.com/34473505
The organization has now gone international and there’s a chapter in Australia headed by a woman in Qld.
http://kimiaustralia.org/sscm/
The following Australian site was originally called Answer in Genesis because Ken Ham started it here before moving to the US where he built The Creation Museum and is now trying to build The Ark theme park. This page talks about homeschooling and education materials, etc.
http://creation.com/parents-corner
Ken Hams American and British Answers in Genesis site where many religious parents get their educational materials from.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/cec/curricula
I don’t know how naive you are Mr Quiggan, but it would be helpful if you didn’t denigrate your fellow citizens who label themselves as atheist to push back against the rising tide of dogmatic fundamentalism in this country. It too the religious right in the US approx 30 years to capture congress. We are well on our way down the same road here. Either help or get out of the way.
I’m a lefty and I along with every lefty I know would love a bill of rights. If you’ve been told otherwise you have been oropogandized to in order to further divide between the political left and right.@Mel
Pr Q said:
From 1788 to the present moment, “the institutions, values and way of life of the Australian majority” have been of the generally liberal Christian form. Up until the early seventies that would have been the vast majority (+ 90%). Even nowadays, Christians make up more than 60% of the population. And of course Christian schools now enroll a growing fraction of the overall student population.
Thus Donnellys statement is a simple re-iteration of anthropological arithmetic, the kind of banal majoritarianism that was unexceptional, even obligatory, up until a generation ago.
Perhaps Christian majoritarianism was all a terrible mistake, as evinced by the awful history of Australia up until the early seventies. Oh…wait a minute, that interpretation holds sway in post-modern liberal bizarro world. In reality liberal Christianity provided the anthropological basis for a very free and fair society, one that was the envy of the civilized world.
More importantly, every society needs some sort of institutionalised code to sanctify the altruism that underlies the provision of public goods, whether conducted by moral volition or legal compulsion. Christianity filled that bill. No secular agency has managed to come up with a better mousetrap.
It is highly significant that the relative decline of Christian profession in the elite and dreg stratas of society over the past two generations has been associated with a relative decline of institutional morality. Hence the rise of psycho-babbling counselors, ambulance-chasing lawyers and thought-policing political correctors to fill the spiritual void.
No doubt Christianity will eventually become a minority religion once society conforms to the a-religious values of today’s somewhat affectless < 25 year old youth. But until that cohort holds the whip hand I think it would be wise for all of us to pay heed to the accumulated wisdom of our elders.
Chesterton
So the question is whether Christianity reflects the majority. This in turn calls in question as to whether there is a consensus among Christians, and what indeed that might be. A democracy is the living – and there can be no other kind (despite the occasional votes from the cemetery) – requires respect for all and for minorities.
A cursory historical analysis will show that minorities, for example the Quakers, can have a influence greater than their numbers might suggest on social questions and outcomes. I am certainly hoping the Quakers will persist and prevail in terms of opposing war and structural violence as a means of “resolving conflicts”.
I expect that this will ultimately lead to an attempt to introduce into the science carriculum the notion of creationism and intelligent design
Abbott himself calls evolution an “interesting theory” and will not de drawn on wether he believes evolution to be true.
The fact is that there is boundless evidence for the natural creation of life, and absolutely zero evidence that there is a God, of any kind at all. But with a committee of two preparing the new carriculum the probability for an attempt to foist this psuedo science agenda onto the primary school and high school populous is high given the Abbott inner block groupthink, the amalgum of murdochism and this government, and the narrow ideological path that the Abbott government has launched itself down.
Lately most people claiming to be Christian are taking up an inordinant amount of time in Royal Commissions and the Courts being refered to as the RESPONDENTS
GEORGE PELL included
Weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living …
keep this in mind when abbott ummms about evolution and/or creationism.
john-paul #2, address to pontifical academy of sciences, 22 October 1996.
The death of Ariel Sharon should give us cause to reflect on the seeds of ruin that were sowed for Lebanon by the attempt to entrench Christian ascendancy in its political institutions on the basis of a transient Christian majority at the time of its independence.
Every tradition began as an innovation.
IIRC the left hasn’t had any problem getting behind proposals for a Bill of Rights when the issue had come up. The problem has tended to be with the ALP raising the issue and then losing its bottle.
This line of argument has some interesting consequences if extended to take account of the views and interests of the future generations who will vastly outnumber the dead and the currently living.
1) Bearing in mind that the decline of professed Christianity, of whatever description, from 90% to 60% took place in a much more explicitly christianised educational/legal/social system than we have today, there’s little reason to believe that what comparatively little Abbot & Pyne can do to the schools will do anything at all to reverse the trend. My school, for example, mandated compulsory church attendance eight times a week; the effect was a general conviction that we’d had enough of it, at the Australian average of 7 church visits a year, to last us for 222.85 years if we never went again, so in the main we didn’t.
2) Pyne thinks that children are being led astray by Marxist teachers and we should go back to having them led astray by religious teachers; but as the marxist teachers were themselves taught by the religious teachers, this seems doomed to fail.
3) The Australian drift away from religion isn’t a movement to atheism, it’s to Who Gives a Fuck, which is a much, much more attractive standard. Going to church is work; 8.8% of Australians do it once a week, 19% once a month, the rest weddings and funerals (and perhaps Christmas or Easter).
4) Just about the least believing nation on earth is England, which still has an established church.
5) Forty years ago Edna Everage was making jokes about catholic-protestant rivalry. That’s now a good deal deader than Sandy Stone. Fifty years in Australia and Sunni and Shia will have a hard time remembering which is which, or at least have a hard time thinking worse of the other sect than they do of Collingwood supporters.
Abbot and Pyne’s views on this are certainly evidence that they’re malign clowns, but we already knew that, just as we have lots of evidence that their policies tend to fold catastrophically because they have a firm belief that firm beliefs matter more than lots of evidence. If militant atheists were smart, they’d be supporting daily compulsory religious instruction in schools run by young-earth creationists.
“It is highly significant that the relative decline of Christian profession in the elite and dreg stratas of society over the past two generations has been associated with a relative decline of institutional morality. Hence the rise of psycho-babbling counselors, ambulance-chasing lawyers and thought-policing political correctors to fill the spiritual void.”
Apart from a small number of groups like conservative old white males, the majority of the population (e.g., females, gays, non-whites, people who arn’t conservative…) is vastly better off now than they were in the 70s on almost any measure, no matter what sort of hyperbole you can think of. Possibly even conservative old white males given many of them would have benefitted from all of the economic benefits that occurred from it.
I would rather pay heed to the wisdom of the elders who went out and studied the world, what it’s made of and the people within it for what they are, rather than that of the elders who cling desperately to superstition and possess a pathetic need for imaginary friends.
Mel:
Ugh. Bernardi is bad enough. I’d really rather not have an Australia Westbro that can hide its antisocial behaviour behind the constitution.
@alfred venison
Indeed, the political Christianism advocated, and sought to be privileged and entrenched, by the cultural right (sorry, Jack) has very little in commons with the actual Christianity practised by a majority of believers.
I think Jack should explain whether he personally subscribes to Christianity or whether his comment @59 was promoting “traditional” Christian belief as a Straussian “noble lie”.
Beyond that, the classical Burkean arguments for tradition and religion as a more reliable guide to social life than the unaided reason implicitly assumed a mono-traditional and mono-confessional society. For reasons that shouldn’t need too much elaboration the arguments don’t work as well when applied to multi-traditional and multi-confessional societies of the kind that Australia, and several other modern western democracies, have become. In such societies reason becomes the essential cultural currency and social lubricant.
@Mel
Actually, this is one of the constitutional rights we do have. Section 116 is modeled closely on the US church-state separation provisions. of course, the High Court has read it down a bit, hence school chaplains, etc.
I’ll support a bill of rights if you let me write it. Until then I’ll reserve judgement and await more details.
TerjeP, how would you handle religion in your bill of rights? Would you grant a right of freedom to exercise religion and thus weaken laws in respect of religious activities, or simply restrict the capacity of the state to actively support it?
A Bill of Rights might protect the offensive Westbro crowd but it might also rein in our more reptilian state governments and prevent people facing jail time for doing nothing more sinister than eating an ice-cream.
how dare they!
was this in the policy mix at the last election?
the assumption that respect must be shown to a claimed given authority and superior morality due to spiritual belief has a totalitarian miasma to it.
even the most cursory examination of the claims shows items like
a world wide pedophile network studiously ignored by devotees highly placed in our federal government.
a religious teacher advising
vulnerable youth that dress decides whether or not an individual can be considered “catmeat”.
a few years ago in Tasmania a religious sect distributing posters accusing a political party of associating with drug addiction, and sending the bill to anothe political party.
an ideology with enough sects that it could easily be called legion,with a record of tagging people with the labels äpostate”, “heretic”,”unbeliever”,”athiest”,”witch”,schismatic and having all of these labels constitute a death sentence.
an ideology that has a record(and currently does) of inflicting maniacal torture in the name of it’s righteousness.
an ideology that claims a divine right to be respected unconditionally while despising and relegating any who do not go along with it’s claims to an eternal torture chamber.
an ideology that requires the indoctrination of children to maintain it’s political powers.
(how many people do you know that have converted to various religions as an adult?)
an ideology that has failed historically and currently failed miserably in it’s own right the claims of compassion,mercy and goodwill.
an ideology that historically and currently has no compunction about religious war .
that historically and currently is massively biased against science to the extent that in Australia we do not even have a science minister.
we have an organisation receiving monies from the public purse for a huge number of schools,that if it were not a church,would be rounded up for crimes like forced labour,rampant hidden pedophilia,and irregularities that have been called money laundering.
these schools are not called religious schools, the are paraded to the electorate under the guise of ” independent”schools.
if anyone wants to teach or indoctrinate their own children in their own religion ,there is no reason why they cannot pay for such instruction themselves.
the smoke machine is on full blast.
they claim “family values”are owned by brand religion.
how dare they!
It might well be that the majority of students in public schools are not Christian, but the premise that the majority of students in private schools, even those with a Christian affiliation, is not correct or at least not necessarily correct. In my observations, religious motivation is only a minor reason, if it exists at all, why parents send their children to private schools, apart from a subset of Catholic schools, schools rarely stipulate religious conformity from their students, and the attempts at religious education, let alone indoctrination, are desultory at best. Such is the competition between private schools for students that they take all kinds, provided they pay the fees, of course. Private schools are full of atheist students or students with a family background of a different.
As for Donnelly, this is just a classic piece of trolling by Pyne, just as the selection of that IPA fellow to head up the Human rights Commission was trolling by Brandis. Donnelly will get to take an ideological dump on the national curriculum and that will be that.
There is often a difference between truth and majority opinion , eg; public torture in the dark ages ,cultures which sanction sex between children and adults ,its ok to kill 800,000 (I think) male dairy calves (before they are 5 days old) per year in Aust (thats what veal is) (I think) ,and, greed is good – these are all (debatable) democratically supported truths at some time and place.
No one is ideology free ,but crucially the Right often claim to be .Part of their claim is that it is the Left who think people need guidance ,but they (the Right) only want to leave people alone in their ‘natural’ state (as greedy Christians ?). A huge part of the Rights differentiation from the Left is that they are not into social engineering or mind control but those commies on the Left are.
If somebody said ‘We should paint it orange’ and when asked for a reason replied ‘Because it’s mostly orange now’, it wouldn’t sound like a good reason to me. Why do the orange parts need to be painted orange if they’re already orange? And why do the parts that aren’t orange need to have their colour changed? If the whole thing needs to be repainted because the current colour is fading away, why do we have to stick with the existing colour scheme? Yet Kevin Donnelly seems to be relying on an argument with the same logical structure.
oh for god sake, do these people not agree that god is ALL POWERFUL?
in their wicked vanity & sinful presumptuous imaginings do they honestly think ALL POWERFUL GOD is SO STUPID he could not have created the universe with evolution, if he wanted to?
are they then so consumed with their own vain & blasphemous fantasies as to PRESUME they know WHAT GOD THINKS?
denis o. lamoureaux, “i love jesus and i accept evolution”, eugene, 2009.
i reckon lamoureaux ought to know how to swing it for christians, he’s got phds in biology, theology and dentistry (evolution of the human jaw). he’s an evangelical who teaches “science & religion: an introduction” at a small catholic college in canada because no evangelical college in the usa will allow him to teach his “subversive” course on their campus without interference. but the catholics would, to which he said: “alleluia!”
if you know a stubborn thinking christian you nevertheless love you could do worse then point them to his books. the textbook he wrote for his course is “evolutionary creation”. i have read it, it is thick, it is a textbook – and it is a bona fide introduction to evolution suitable for christians ; he holds their hands, but he hides nothing, he tells the truth about evolution, in full, and assures them that it is compatible with belief in salvation through jesus, and that they will not go to hell for knowing how it works. he denounces creationism. -a.v.
@alfred venison
A good point.
In fact, when you think about it – ‘god’ could have created the entire universe at lunchtime today complete with planet earth, fossils, cemeteries, churches, all our knowledge, science, wisdom, history, memories, assets & liabilities etc.. as if they’d been here forever and nobody would be able to prove otherwise.
It’s not only possible, but would be consistent with a belief in such a god, being ‘all powerful’ and so on.
Funnily enough, I find myself agreeing with Mel regarding a Bill of Rights.
On the issue of what this would mean for religion, an important point is that protection of everyone’s freedom to believe, not believe or suspend judgement in religious matters requires limiting the prerogatives of any one religion, and establishing and maintaining a scrupulously secular state.
It is true that students at state schools are heathen; has it e’re been different?
Not so commonly acknowledged is that private school students are heathen also.
Polite heathen, and the more destructive for it.
Their “religion” is actually conservatism or neoliberalism, the texts for the middle class “religion”are actually Atlas Shrugged, Hayek and Plato’s “Republic”, despite their attack on the left for Platonist elitism.
But furthest from god is the individual who thinks they have god their pocket? .a@Uncle Milton
@ChrisB
No fan of Islamic sectarianism, but surely comparing either side to Collingwood supporters is going a bit far.
#40 That’s the problem, we don’t have a scrupulously secular state and the fact that most Australians don’t know this is why it’s an uphill battle to get one.
A couple of examples: I went to Mater public while in the middle of a miscarriage and asked my OBGYN to go ahead and “tie my tubes” as we had discussed earlier. He couldn’t because it was a public hospital run by Catholics. Religious zealots run the after school program at the public school my grandkids attend. They’ve told them hell exists!!
Too many of our politicans are congregating in parliament to share a prayer breakfast. The way it’s goung soon we’ll have them saying at the end if every speech: god bless you and god bless the commonwealth of Australia.
hi @Megan
during the kitzmiller -v- dover trial in 2005 when i was right into this stuff, i read about a school of young earth creationism (i don’t know if it is still professed) which held that, during the biblical six day creation, god put dinosaur fossils in the mountains to test our faith when we’d advanced to the point where we could uncover them, the modern crisis as it were. the obvious riposte of course is that would be the act of a cruel god & that the god that created us is a loving god. so, fail.
if anyone is interested, the finding of fact & judgement of judge john e. jones the third in the 2005 “panda” trial (kitzmiller et al. -v- dover school board), where a shifty attempt to infiltrate creationism into the local school curriculum was defeated for all states, can read it here:-
Click to access kitzmiller_342.pdf
i’ve read it, its good. its a 139 pages but it is at that a succinct summary of what was presented to the judge in court by both sides and his judgement on it and why. knowledge is power. -a.v.
@John Quiggin
You obviously never ventured near the scoreboard at Victoria Park, back in the day.
This worries me, with Quiggin.
Only Collingwood supporters would stoop to defending other Collingwood supporters.
Is it time for disclosures; for that painful moment when a person on an epiphany, finally recognises the breadth and depth of their intellectual and moral falling short?
Roxee, “Death of Cultural Memory”..it is indeed as you say .
I grew up in Reservoir which was a hotbed of Catholicism, Labor voting and Collingwood barracking, with a close association between the three.
Yes, had rellies out Reservoir way, great, honest folk.
My aunt, who lived at Thornbury, was red hot Melbourne.. during the Barrassi era.. only two things she loathed, Henry Bolte and “Dirty old Collingwood”.
…and yet it orbits the sun.