The New Puritans
By Muriel Porter
Melbourne University Press, 2006
184 pages, $29.95
Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia
Quarterly Essay
By Amanda Lohrey
Black Inc.
111 pages, $14.95
REVIEW BY BARRY HEALY
Christianity arrived with a bang in Australia at the last elections when ALP preferences shuffled Family First into the Senate. Is the right-wing Christian tail wagging the dog of mainstream political power, or are the political players cynically using patronage in vote-herding deals?
Australian political science now requires a skilled reading of theology, history and politics as part of its armoury. These books provide some of that analysis, but certainly not all.
Muriel Porter's target is one player in the Christian scrum, the Sydney Anglican Diocese, and she warns Sydney readers: Sydney Anglicans are coming to get you! Conservative Archbishop Peter Jensen's mission is to get 10% of Sydney-siders (400,000 people) into "Bible-believing" churches by 2011.
Moore College, the Sydney Anglican's theological factory, is producing 10,000 part-time pastoral workers and 1000 full-timers as the cadre force. It will cost $500 million and already Anglicare, the church's welfare arm, is financially troubled because of it.
As a leader of the campaign for the ordination of Anglican women, Porter is an expert on the Sydney Anglicans' theological wrinkles and reactionary politics. But, while passionately polemical, she also unintentionally reveals why they have advanced their wrecking operation within Australian Anglicanism.
While thumping the Bible, Sydney Diocese actually uses Queen Elizabeth I's 39 Articles of Religion as its yardstick of correct thinking. Because of this, Porter says the Sydney Anglicans inhabit the mindset of the Puritans, those original Anglicans for whom the Reformation didn't go far enough.
She misses the point made by Christopher Hill, the great historian of the English Civil War, that Puritanism was essentially a revolutionary creed intending "the betterment of Man's life on earth".
Hating homosexuals and wanting to subordinate women, the Sydney Anglicans have quietly rewritten the theology of the Trinity (three equal parts: Creator, Saviour and Inspirer).
The Sydney Anglicans' Trinity has God the Father ruling over Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Why? Because if Father is boss in heaven, then father is boss on Earth.
This informs their line on "headship", women's subordination in the family and in the church. Women can't preside over the Eucharist because, seemingly, it takes bollocks to bless bread!
In November 2004 the National Marriage Coalition, a Sydney Anglican front, held a Canberra forum lobbying for amending the Marriage Act to exclude same-sex unions. Alongside PM John Howard, various anti-abortionists and right-wing academics, was the ALP's shadow attorney-general, Nicola Roxon. The ALP sold out in parliament, hoping to score a bit of the Christian vote.
Left-wing readers of The New Puritans will recognise the Sydney Anglicans' game within the Anglican Communion: split and wreck. They trade on the tolerance of mainstream Anglicans while building their forces, networks and hardening their cadre for the split.
But Porter only counterposes the "memory of the vibrant mainstream Anglicanism" of her childhood. Appealing to a different nostalgic period — though linked to women's ordination and toleration of homosexuals — cannot defeat reactionary politics.
Amanda Lohrey's 25,000-word essay covers more of the Christian right, delivering less theological background and more tantalising nuggets of information, but not enough. The politics filters in around page 40 and stops abruptly at page 70, though the essay lingers for another five pages.
Either Lohrey couldn't decide to write a thoroughly political analysis or she fluffed out scant material with literary wanderings.
She mentions such things as the Liberal Party's use of the Exclusive Brethren, one of the most obscure Christian cults, to publish attack ads against the Greens. In return, buried in the provisions of Howard's anti-union laws is a complete exemption for Exclusive Brethren-owned businesses from union organisers visiting their premises.
In certain areas of Australia, such as North Katoomba, where the Exclusive Brethren have business empires, that law will totally ban union organising.
Lohrey also traces the humbug of Family First in marketing itself as a broad party, while selling its vote to Howard in return for opposition to the abortion drug RU486.
She exposes, in passing, Peter Garrett's opportunistic sucking up to right-wing Christians. But his conservative Christianity through all his political life, including in the Nuclear Disarmament Party, isn't examined.
As Lohrey reports, Catholic cardinal George Pell insults Islam, Archbishop Jensen's trademark is gay bashing, and the savvy Hillsong marketers assemble massive audiences for Howard and federal treasurer Peter Costello to address.
Why each one has chosen that political niche, she doesn't say. Neither does she examine the political landscape that allows for these interventions: the ideological vacuum that is the ALP.
The Coalition has proven adept at rewarding churches that either adopt or mute their criticisms of free-market ideology. Mission Australia, the Salvation Army and Hillsong, among others, have space in the government tent — and funds for charity empire building.
But when it doesn't suit them, such as when church leaders criticised Howard's industrial relations laws, the government disregards the churches, revealing the true relationship of forces.
Why is there no discernable Australian liberation theology current? What happened to the Christians who built the huge Palm Sunday peace rallies of the 1980s? Unfortunately, those questions await other authors.