(2015) A Political History of the Secular in Australia 1788-1945 (Edited book chapter)

Religion after Secularization in Australia

Edited by Timothy Stanley

religion after secularization in australiaCopyright © Timothy Stanley, 2015.

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ISBN: 978- 1- 137- 53689- 1

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Religion after secularization in Australia / edited by Timothy Stanley.pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978- 1- 137- 53689- 1 — ISBN 1- 137- 53689- 6 1. Australia—

Religion. 2. Secularism— Australia. 3. Religion and politics— Australia. I. Stanley, Timothy, 1976- editor.

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CHAPTER 1

A Political History of the Secular in Australia, 1788– 1945

Stephen A. Chavura and Ian Tregenza

1. Introduction: Beyond the Secular/Religion Divide

On Wednesday March 1, 2006, Australian Democrats Senator Lyn Alli-son moved a motion to formalize a secular state in Australia. Although what she meant by a “secular state” was not clearly defined, she did

define the steps the government needed to take in order to move in that direction:

1. Remove religious references from statutory oaths and pledges. 2. Abolish official parliamentary prayers. 3. Remove tax advantages that solely apply for religious purposes. 4. Consider other ways of achieving a true separation of church and state

(Commonwealth of Australia 2006).

This episode occurred while Allison was spearheading a national campaign for “the separation of church and state.” As well as the points raised in her Senate motion, Allison’s campaign for separation and secularism interpreted these ideas as necessitating the occlusion of religious arguments and motives in the public sphere.1 Allison’s conception of Australian state secularity as akin to US- and French- style secularism (with a bit of John Rawls thrown in for good measure) is understandable if we look at some of the analysis on state secularism offered by academics around this time. In his discussion of Australian political ideas, Geoff Stokes had this to say about Australian secularism, which he considers part of the Australian settlement:

4 Stephen A. Chavura and Ian Tregenza

If we take state secularism to mean a rejection of religion or religious consider-ations in public affairs, then the abolition of state aid represents a prime exam-ple of this philosophy . . . Australian secularism embodies the major principles of Enlightenment rationalism and liberalism. The institutional requirements of Australian democracy can hardly be understood without them. (2004, 11)

Similar interpretations of Australian secularism as involving the occlusion of religion from politics and public institutions are evident in other well- known studies. Anna Crabb (2009) traced the increasing frequency of religious lan-guage in the national parliament in the early to mid- 2000s and made the rather bold claim that this represented an overturning of an apparently long- standing Rawlsian consensus in Australian politics. The secularist reading of Australian political history was best captured in Helen Irving’s polemical article in the June 3, 2004, Sydney Morning Herald, when she rejected the notion of an Australian Christian heritage— as suggested by then Federal Treasurer Peter Costello in the same newspaper days earlier (May 31)— and stated that Aus-tralia’s heritage is secular, which meant “its foundations were definitely and deliberately not Christian.” For Irving, Australia’s secular heritage entailed a sharp separation between church and state, and the architects of the federal Constitution in their framing of section 116 intended to go even further in entrenching a wall of separation than the Americans did in the First Amend-ment to the US Constitution. To return to Allison’s parliamentary motion, it was defeated by 43 votes, or 50 votes to 7. What is it about “secular” Australia that would result in such an overwhelming defeat for such a motion? Could it be that Australian secularity is not the ideological secularism that has sprung up (again) in Australia over the last ten years?

The trouble with the aforementioned accounts of Australia’s past and present is that they uncritically overlook the ways in which processes of secularization in Australia, in the nineteenth century and arguably up to Second World War, did not constitute a repudiation so much as a rechanneling of Christianity into new forms. If this argument is correct, then it shows that the emergence and evolution of the secular state in Australia followed many of the same trends in Europe, especially Britain (McLeod 2000). It is in this light that Australia’s experience of secularization can be better appreciated and therefore inform con-temporary debates.2

Much of the recent literature on secularism has demonstrated the problems, both historical and conceptual, of the religious– secular binary that seems to shape so much public debate. For instance, in his 2008 work A Short History of Secularism, Graeme Smith writes that the modern secular order does not con-stitute the end of Christianity but rather a “new manifestation of Christianity.” This claim, he suggests, is “not immediately obvious because [secularism] lacks

A Political History of the Secular in Australia, 1788– 1945 5

the usual scaffolding we associate with the Christian religion” (Smith 2008, 3). By the “usual scaffolding,” he means the doctrinal expressions of Christianity; if we make the mistake of identifying the essence of Christianity with its dogmatic forms, then we will tend to miss the more important historical links between secularism and Christianity. The chief legacy of the Enlightenment, Smith sug-gests, is not to have overturned or indeed to have superseded Christianity; it is rather to have banished the discussion of Christian doctrine from the public sphere. We no longer debate doctrine in public life, but our ethical ideals— as embodied in much liberal theory— retain a Christian heritage.

Smith is hardly a lone voice in making explicit the continuities between modern processes of secularization (in both theory and practice) and the pre-decessor Christian culture.3 The American legal scholar Steven D. Smith in his work The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (2010) makes the case that even in a Rawlsian public culture where we are supposed to draw a sharp line between private religious (or nonreligious) commitments and secular public reasoning, our political discourse has become increasingly shrill, not because of the return of religion, as is often assumed, but because our conception of public reason has narrowed and cannot recognize forms of reasoning and argument about fundamental conceptions of the good. But though much liberal theory, according to Smith, rejects as impermissible any discussion of a comprehensive or substantive notion of the human good in public life, it invariably smuggles in such substantive notions, which it fails to acknowledge. These smuggled- in goods— centered on competing notions of freedom, equality, autonomy, and human dignity— are not the progeny of secularism per se but have long “reli-gious” histories. In other words, modern secularism, unknown to itself, is trad-ing on its “religious” capital.

These insights would not contain huge surprises for many historians of secularism, for it is widely acknowledged that there were strong links between religion and the rise of toleration and liberalism in state institutions, particu-larly education. “The old Christian state was dismantled by Christians for the sake of keeping the people Christian.” So said the Cambridge historian Owen Chadwick in his 1973– 74 Gifford Lectures (1975, 93). This chapter offers a brief survey of the emergence and evolution of the concept of the secular state in Australia, as well as changing conceptions of the relationship between reli-gion, the state, and society. For the most part, Chadwick’s summation proves to be apposite for the Australian experience. Apart from small collections of Benthamites and Holyoakean secularists, most voices in favor of a separation of church and state, and a state conceived as secular, sprang from religious arguments— religious in the sense that they were based on theological grounds such as an affirmation of general Christianity and natural religion (often as a response to sectarian division) and also in the sense that their main object


was the preservation of the vitality of religion in light of the widely held belief (fueled by wide reading of Alexis De Tocqueville) that Christianity was declin-ing in Europe and flourishing in America.

This paper traces the decline of the de facto Church of England establishment in New South Wales (NSW) in the face of colonial religious (mainly Christian) plurality. It was in the face of such plurality that general Christianity, rather than Anglicanism, became the official pursuit of colonial governments in the form of the 1836 Church Act of NSW (1837 in Tasmania). The Church Act was an unlikely step toward state secularity, for it rejected once and for all the old, intolerant confessional state yet established numerous religions in its place, in the sense of church buildings and clergy stipends being largely funded by government coffers. It was not long before colonists like the Rev. J. D. Lang— and before him the founders of the colony of South Australia— began asking why the churches needed any government support at all, decrying such support as an affront to religious freedom and the very reason the churches were so cor-rupt in Europe and Britain. At the same time, heated debates were taking place over whether the state or the churches ought to be responsible for primary and secondary education in the colonies: the denominational system was accused of inefficiency and sectarianism, and the general system was accused of being, if not godless, then utterly insipid in the general Christianity it offered to students in religiously mixed classrooms. Ultimately the question hinged on whether gen-eral religious education could be substantial enough to teach the essential tenets of Christianity and also nonsectarian enough so as not to alienate any Christian denomination (Catholics in particular). It is in the education debates raging from the 1830s up to the 1870s that the concept of the “secular” emerged in the colonies, though its meaning was unstable, swaying between a robust advocacy of general (nonsectarian) Christianity and a system of instruction occluding all religion completely. During this period, “secular” is applied to the state, though its meaning mirrors that of its use in education debates. It must be said that, on the whole, advocates of secularity, in education and in government, did not look forward to a public sphere denuded of religion, and when the 1872 Victorian Education Act was passed, with its clause on education being secular, many— including George Higinbotham— saw this as an unfortunate consequence of the churches refusing to lend their support to a general education system containing general religious instruction. The great international intellectual figures driving these debates were, for the most part, British clerics or theologically astute social commentators and reformers such as Thomas Chalmers, Bishop Richard What-ley, and Thomas Arnold of Rugby. Other more secular thinkers such as Alexis De Tocqueville, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill were also represented, but (with the exception of De Tocqueville) it was the former figures who com-manded the most authority.


Furthermore, as the later sections of this chapter will outline, a religiously inspired tradition of new liberal political thought emerges in the last decades of the nineteenth century continuing well into the middle decades of the twenti-eth. While Stokes and others suggest that this is the point where Australian pub-lic life enshrines state secularism, this chapter will suggest otherwise— namely, that the new liberal political project, as reflected in some of the leading public figures of the day, involved a reworking of Christian themes into new forms. The Oxford idealist T. H. Green is central to this story, as he had many admir-ers and followers in Australia, and his promotion of citizenship as a form of Christian service had great resonance in Australia’s apparently secular public culture. This was just one of the ways in which Christian moral conceptions were “smuggled” into Australian political life (cf. Melleuish 2014).

Though the Catholic voice was generally marginalized in the Australian public sphere, there were some notable exceptions, such as Cardinal Moran in NSW, Bishop Mannix in Melbourne, as well as the contribution of Catholic social theory in debates over the establishment of the minimum wage in the 1890– 1910 period. Nevertheless, in this brief survey, Catholicism plays a lesser part compared to Church of England and even dissenting Protestant voices. This is simply a reflection of the reality of Catholicism’s status as a merely toler-ated religion in a Protestant British government and society.

2. Beginnings to the 1836 Church Act

When, in 1779, Joseph Banks first suggested that Botany Bay would be suitable as a penal colony, he also dared to entertain the possibility of a future “Civil Government” in the colony (Clark 1958, 27). Banks was not alone in his hope that the penal colony could one day be transformed into an outpost of European civilization (Gascoigne 2002), and for Europeans in the eighteenth century, a civilized society was one where the state sedulously promoted religion (Aston 2002; Gascoigne and Carey 2011, 1– 27). The common assertion that religious provision for the colony of New South Wales was an afterthought of the Colo-nial Office is complete myth, perpetuated even by those colonial ecclesiastics— Rev. Samuel Marsden and Bishop William Broughton— who should have known better (Macintosh 1978, 24– 30; Broughton 1839, 3). Few in the late eighteenth century, and especially after the French Revolution, could conceive of social order existing without established religion. Even utilitarians (sans Bentham) generally held back their felicific razor from the established church, affirming its usefulness.4 On April 25, 1787, prior to setting sail, Governor Phillip’s royal instructions ensured that New South Wales would be an Anglican goal:

And it is our further will and pleasure that you do by all proper methods enforce a due observance of religion and good order among the inhabitants of the new


settlement, and that you do take such steps for the due celebration of publick worship as circumstances will permit. (HRNSW, vol. 1, 90)

Governor Phillip’s orders were repeated to every governor of New South Wales subsequently. Similar orders were given to Philip Gidley King, superintendent and commander at Norfolk Island, “to cause the prayers of the Church of Eng-land to be read with all due solemnity every Sunday” (HRNSW, vol. 1, 138). Up until 1836, the Church of England was as established as an established church could be: convicts and settlers could and would be forced to observe the Sab-bath; the clergy and church schools were fully supported by the state; Catholics, Methodists, and Presbyterians got very meager funding in comparison, and it was always considered an indulgence by the state; and everyone accepted that the Church of England was established in the colony, even nonmembers.5 Yet, with the increased immigration of Scotch Presbyterians and the influx of Irish Catholics, mainly convicts, the vision of exclusive establishment became ever more fragile. From the 1820s, state funding of Catholicism and Presbyteri-anism could be described as a “liberal” indulgence (HRA, vol. 11, 342f.). By the mid- 1820s (before the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829), it was simply assumed that both Presbyterian and Roman Catholic clergymen would be sup-ported by the state, albeit not nearly as generously as the Established Church clergy (HRA, vol. 11, 520). By 1832, Viscount Goderich and Governor Bourke could correspond privately about augmenting support for the “Roman Catholic Establishment of New South Wales” (HRA, vol. 16, 727). With the collapse of the cumbersome Clergy and Schools Estates between 1830– 1833, Lord Stanley and Governor Bourke saw an opportunity to renovate entirely the ecclesiastical establishment in line with the “Spirit of the Age” rather than Bishop Brough-ton’s continued quest for Anglican ascendancy.

Governor Bourke’s Church Act of 1836 was an expression of the liberal atti-tudes then current in Britain, especially surrounding the repeal of disabilities against Catholics and dissenters in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Bourke sym-pathized with the complaint of the Catholic and Presbyterian colonists that they were supporting a massive Church of England corporation and themselves only getting the scraps off the table of government support (HRA, vol. 17, 205). Once the Clergy and Schools Estates had been officially dissolved in 1833, Bourke saw a vacuum in church– state policy and an opportunity to forward a new policy based on fairness and equality. He promptly wrote to E. G. Stanley,

I would observe that, in a New Country to which Persons of all religious per-suasions are invited to resort, it will be impossible to establish a dominant and endowed Church without much hostility and great improbability of its becoming permanent. The inclination of these Colonists, which keeps pace with the Spirit


of the Age, is decidedly adverse to such an Institution; and I fear the interests of Religion would be prejudiced by its Establishment. (HRA, vol. 17, 227)

Bourke’s vision of society was of a religious society— more specifically, a Chris-tian society— and the unique situation of New South Wales required state inter-vention to ensure such a society could grow strong roots and flourish:

At this early period of the Colony’s existence, it is I think necessary that the Government should grant pecuniary assistance for the establishment of religious Institutions, and take upon itself the nomination of the Ministers; or it might happen that the Ordinances of Christianity would become altogether neglected or its tenets perverted by incompetent Teachers. (HRA, vol. 17, 229)

Bourke’s ideal subject was Christian and tolerant. The state needed to aid religion to ensure the former, but it also had to resist establishment to secure the latter:

I cannot conclude this subject without expressing a hope, amounting to some degree of confidence, that, in laying the foundations of the Christian Religion in this young and rising Colony by equal encouragement held out to its Professors in their several Churches, the people of these different persuasions will be united together in one bond of peace, and taught to look up to the Government as their common protector and friend, and that there will be secured to the State good subjects and to Society good men. (HRA, vol. 17, 229– 30)6

Neither Bourke nor Stanley could countenance the idea of a state that did not support religion, at least until religion could support itself, but both also saw aspirations for English- style established churches in the colonies (and Ireland) as completely unsuited to a very non- English circumstance: plurality. Around the same time, Stanley was insisting to the South Australia Association— against the voluntaryist Wakefieldians and Benthamites— on the same sort of pluralist establishment; he never convinced them, but he forced it through just the same. The experiment of unassisted religion in such a new and fragile society was too much to risk (Pike 1967, 64– 67). For Independent church-man and Wakefieldian Robert Gouger, voluntaryism was a matter of religious conscience, indeed, religious freedom. Like many after him, he abhorred the suggestion that religionists “should be obliged to pay for the dissemination of doctrines differing from those they hold” (Pike 1967, 66). The disestablishment of the church in New South Wales and voluntaryism in the colonies was very much attributable to Protestant calls for freedom of conscience. If ecclesiastical


disestablishment is part of the narrative of the emergence of the secular state, then we see how the secular was to a large degree driven by the religious.7

Bourke knew that his whole system would face opposition, especially from William Grant Broughton, who had revealed his establishmentarian vision to Bourke privately. Broughton failed to stop the Church Act, but he succeeded in thwarting Bourke’s plans to introduce the Foreign Schools or Irish Sys-tem of education. Yet this only meant that Broughton found himself defend-ing denominational education even after Bourke had returned to England. It was the “Spirit of the Age” that Bourke referred to that Broughton was con-cerned with, for liberal policy was little more than a milder version of French Republicanism, which would in time overthrow all existing order, political and ecclesiastical, if its logic were followed. Broughton, appealing to the liberals in the Legislative Council, invoked the Whig Revolution of 1688, which never disestablished the church nor removed any of its privileges. The principles of the Whig revolution ought not be trampled by the principles of a more recent revolution:

I must say, that if we . . . should ever be induced to legislate upon the assumption, that exclusive privileges have necessarily the tendency and the termination which Your Excellency imputes to them, and that men have such absolutely equal rights, that these are infringed whensoever any privilege is established, which does not extend to all and is not approved by all, I am tolerably certain that, though the application of this may begin with the Church, it will not finish with it; but we shall find that, instead of resting under the shade of the monarchy, we are fast advancing, and even far advanced, towards the institutions of a republic; and I greatly fear also, a republic without religion. (Broughton 1839, 3)

Despite Broughton’s appeals to the English Constitution and the church as bul-wark against revolution, his dream was that of a dying age. The liberal and dem-ocratic spirit emerging in England and the colonies, which Broughton saw as an assault on order and truth, was now coming to pass (Shaw 1978, 94, 107).8

3. State Aid and Responsible Government

Broughton’s most formidable opponent would be Robert Lowe, the learned classicist and barrister, who arrived in NSW in 1842, having just been in a pamphlet clash with the Oxford Tractarians (Chavura 2014). As a Crown- nominated member of the Legislative Council— under Governor Gipps— Lowe sat as Chairman of a Select Committee on Education and wrote its final report, which spoke of the “scientific or secular business of the school” as opposed to “denominational” incursions into education (Lowe 1844, 453). For Lowe, this


“secular” business “teaches in the ordinary school hours as much of the truths of religion as can be imparted without entering on controverted subjects.” Lowe’s belief that secular education could be Christian was part of a more compre-hensive view he had of the relationship between religion and enlightenment, which, according to Lowe, were perfectly compatible. He wrote, “[Indeed] the great object of looking at nature’s works [is] to look up to nature’s God, and that in speculation on the effects they [see] around them, they [are] to be led to the contemplation of the cause” (1846, 499). Yet the more Lowe’s educational program was thwarted by the clergy, the more he reflected more generally on the relationship between religion and the state. Contrary to Broughton’s views expressed in the Legislative Council seven years earlier, Lowe told the Legisla-tive Council on October 9, 1846, that

it was no part of the duty of a state to see that its population were instructed in the doctrines of a finely drawn metaphysical faith, and to attempt such a system would only result in making such a state the degrading spectacle of a community torn, not by social or political disagreements, but by the more rancorous and deeply seated war of religious dissension.

Lowe was not a radical secularist, for he accepted the legitimacy of ecclesiasti-cal establishment in England. Yet New South Wales was not England, and new institutions were needed, for to import the English hierarchy to the colony would only beget dissention and strife rather than “one common brotherhood” (1846, 499). Lowe’s views on education profoundly influenced his admirer Henry Parkes, who would be one of the chief architects of the system of general education that would eventually prevail in New South Wales (Martin 1980, 89– 94).

Bourke’s plural establishment soon became the object of criticism not only by establishmentarians like Broughton but by self- described liberals, reli-gious dissenters, and religionists who had become captivated by the American experiment in the separation of church and state, so influentially discussed by De Tocqueville. By the 1850s, there was a polyphony of religious voices calling for the separation of church and state in the colonies. It was out of these heavily theological debates that the concept of the secular state emerged in Australia. The question was never whether the state should be concerned for the welfare of religion, but whether the welfare of religion was best facilitated by state aid or voluntaryism. Thus the Presbyterian minister John Dunmore Lang (1856, 43) stressed that

it is unquestionably the interest and the duty, not only of every government, but of every man, woman, and child upon earth, to promote [Christianity’s] influence


and extension by every means in their power . . . But the question is— whether a Government really does promote the influence and extension of the Christian religion, by supporting its ministers in the public treasury.9

For Lang, the answer was a resounding no. Not only was ecclesiastical establish-ment unnecessary for the flourishing of religion, as demonstrated by the United States, which Lang toured in 1840, but it was actually detrimental, leading to persecution, corruption, irreligion, and, indeed, the French Revolution itself! “And how can it be otherwise? An established Church is, to use the approved language of lawyers, the creature of the State, and must, therefore, be the tool of statesmen . . . that is for political purposes exclusively” (1856, 18; 14– 15).

Despite being in the minority, there were occasional calls for the complete separation of church and state and the occlusion of all religion from edu-cation, particularly from the more secularly inclined Benthamites. Sydney educationalist and Benthamite Henry Carmichael tended to define religion narrowly in terms of controversial, sectarian doctrines, arguing on this defini-tion that religion could have no place in public education (Carmichael 1844). On April 22, 1851, an anonymous epistler wrote to the South Australian Reg-ister, “We think it is Jeremy Bentham who says in framing laws or institutions respect must be had to the peculiar genius and composition of the popula-tions to be affected by them” (1851b, 2). The writer then went on to point out the Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Pagan nature of colonial demographics, concluding that religious teaching could not possibly be universally represen-tative and, thus, must be left out of a general education. Still, most advocates of separation did so via religious motives and arguments, most being Evan-gelicals. Protestant dissenters were indignant that their taxes would be used to support both the Church of England and, worse still, Roman Catholi-cism. It was out of these mid- nineteenth- century fears that Lockean notions of the church and the state being concerned with very different spheres of life became common. Thus the Geelong Advertiser reprinted an epistle from a rival newspaper decrying any state support for religion (Argus 1851a, 1). The spokesperson for voluntaryism partially justified his objection by drawing a cleavage between the concerns of the church and the state:

The voluntaries [sic] consider the church to be a spiritual body, bound together by spiritual ties, designed to answer a spiritual end. The state they regard as a politi-cal body, instituted for political purposes. The two organisations they regard as quite distinct. Their sphere of action is as different as the machinery they employ. Any amalgamation of the two, would in their view impair the efficiency of both.


Yet admitting that the state’s activities ought to be confined to the secular was not necessarily an admission that it ought to have no business in supporting religion, for religion was generally considered as much a secular boon as spiri-tual. Thus, in February 1851, the Bishop of South Australia, Dr. Short, gave an address defending state support of religion. Dr. Short confessed that the state was “purely secular” yet argued that its secular concerns— that is, peace and safety— were best secured by ensuring the health of religion (South Australian Register 1851a, 4). On July 28, The Argus responded to a similar speech from the Bishop of Melbourne, who argued for the necessity of state aid until the church should be able to support itself. The article pointed out that state sup-port corrupts religion and violates the conscience; furthermore, the state by its nature is not constituted for such purposes:

It is a most barefaced assumption, which nobody can utter a rational word to justify, that any Government, constituted for purposes secular, should pretend to govern the conscience of a single subject in religious matters, or should inflict a single disadvantage on any dissident, in the shape of support and homage for a favorite system. (Argus 1851b, 4)

With the attainment of responsible government for NSW in 1855 and Victo-ria, South Australia, and Queensland in 1856, questions of national character and its representation by the state led to debates over religion and the extent to which religion ought to be embodied in education and the state itself. In 1856, no less than eight tracts dealing with religion, education, and the state were printed in Melbourne. Although the concept of the secular state was rarely referred to explicitly, when it was, it revealed common notions that religion was every bit as relevant to this- worldly well- being as to well- being in the world to come. Thus the secular state could not afford to ignore the care of religion. Victorian Joseph Taylor (1856, 20) described the secular state in such terms:

I have said that the duties of the state are of a secular rather than a spiritual nature,— that it has to consult the well- being of the community over which it presides, by the enactment of laws calculated to promote the public good,— and that for these laws to be in the highest degree applicable to our wants, they must be in accordance to the precepts of Christianity. Religion, therefore, must be recognised and encouraged by the State.

We see here that the important term to understand in discerning the capacious-ness of the secular was not so much “secular” but “religion.” For Taylor and many others, the secular was, indeed, the sphere of temporal or “this- worldly”


concerns. But the utility of religion was considered as much this- worldly as it was otherworldly.10

In Australia, the notion of the secular state developed in debates over the legitimacy of state funding of religion and the “separation of church and state.” Most participants in the debates preferred to speak of the “separation of church and state,” rather than the “secular state.” As has been made clear, the terms were not considered by all to be synonymous: J. D. Lang lobbied for complete withdrawal of state funding to churches under the banner “separation of church and state”; a bishop could admit that the state was secular in concern but assert this very fact as proof for the continuation of financial support for the churches.

4. Free, Compulsory, and Secular: The Education Debates

The education debates in Victoria in the 1860s and 1870s bring out the prob-lems of affirming the state’s duty to support public religion in a pluralist nation. Unfortunately, the clergy could not agree on a way of teaching common Chris-tianity, or whether there even was such a thing. The great advocate of general education in Victoria, George Higinbotham, no orthodox Christian himself, still hoped for some general religious instruction in public schooling of a non-doctrinal form. For Higinbotham, religious instruction was something the state could not afford to ignore, as it was, according to him, the grounds of morality, and morality the grounds of good citizenship (Dow 1964, 94). Furthermore, like many, Higinbotham argued that “religion . . . as contrasted with sectarian-ism and dogma, is an essential part of a sound education” (Victorian Parliamen-tary Debates 1867, cited in Dow 1964, 102). Dissenters agreed but wanted that part of education imparted in the churches on Sundays; Higinbotham earnestly wanted it imparted in the schools, and the now famous 1872 Victorian [“Free, Compulsory, and Secular”] Education Act enshrined his failure to have general religious education as part of a normal public education. Indeed, the 1872 act that insisted that education be secular was seen by many of its supporters at the time as an unfortunate measure made unavoidable by the inability of the clergy to agree on the content of a general religious instruction (Gregory 1973, 133). Gwyneth Dow suggests that Higinbotham

had fought for religious education, hoping in the process to find a way of influenc-ing the laity and the churches to combine, to sink their religious differences . . . But once he was convinced that all methods would fail, he was prepared . . . to accept secularism rather than to sacrifice educational progress.

He was “only secular as a last resort” (Dow 1964, 104, 127).11


This act is often understood as occluding religion from education, but the act did not define what it meant by “secular,” and in introducing the act, Attorney- General Stephen tended to define religion as sectarian dogma and also did not define “secular” (Stephen 1872). In other words, the act itself was probably deliberately vague. Indeed, when Charles Pearson went to apply the “secular” clause of the 1872 act to existing textbooks, modifying existing read-ing comprehension exercises and replacing others with “secular” alternatives, in general he simply changed specifically Christian doctrines to broadly theistic doctrines— “evidence,” as Gregory writes, “that secularism did not mean total irreligion” (1973, 277). Still, the act was significant in that it allowed for reli-gion to be totally absent from education, depending on how it was defined or whether one believed that there could be such a thing as nonsectarian religious instruction, or secular Christianity: it seems that Pearson and Higinbotham did, but their view was not law.

More than half a century after “free, compulsory, and secular” schooling was established in the colonies, the new liberal Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Adelaide, G. V. Portus, could lament the compro-mise it was built on:

From a purely theoretical point of view, it is hard to defend the Australian com-promise. If religion is a vital part of life, it is surely unwise to divorce it from education. The Churches are associations within the greater unit of the commu-nity, and the State is also one such association, more universal and more powerful perhaps than any other association, but not sovereign over all other associations. It must insist upon its citizens having education, and where it provides universal education it should not deny to its young citizens the opportunity of religious education. The Australian answer to this is made in terms of history. (Portus 1936, 21)

Thus religious education was greatly privatized, left to the private initiative of parents and becoming the task solely of the churches and the Sunday schools, both of whom over the next century found themselves competing with Sunday trading, outdoor recreation, and television (Hilliard 2011; Brown 2001).

5. New Liberalism, Citizenship, and the Nation

Even beyond the education debates, it is possible to find strong links between liberal protestant Christianity and the rise of the new liberal political project from the 1870s to the Second World War. As with the earlier colonial period, this movement cannot be divorced from the broader British context. In this regard, it is worth mentioning the pivotal figure of T. H. Green, the Oxford


idealist and new liberal who inspired a generation of social theorists and reform-ers in both Britain and Australia.

Green’s influence in Australia has been well documented (Rowse 1978; Sawer 2003). The textbook readings of Green tend to minimize the religious dimensions of his thought, but his account of citizenship and positive freedom was profoundly shaped by Christian ideals. He talked about the idea of dying to self to realize our higher selves and held that “citizenship, correctly understood, is a form of divine service” (Boucher and Vincent 2000, 37). Apart from his important influence as a thinker and as someone who inspired many liberal reforms, Green is significant because he represents a certain kind of religious journey that was not uncommon in the period. He grew up in a pious Evan-gelical household, but as a young adult, he went through a crisis of faith in orthodox Christianity partly through his engagement with the emerging criti-cal biblical scholarship. But far from turning against Christianity, he redirected his Christian faith into nondogmatic forms, in particular into an expansive understanding of citizenship. In other words, unlike later liberal philosophers like John Rawls, Green’s conception of citizenship was at once political and metaphysical (Boucher and Vincent 2000).

The links between liberal Christianity and an understanding of citizenship as the realization of our higher selves is a common theme in late nineteenth- century liberalism. A number of Australian liberals follow a similar pattern of intellectual development to Green, including figures such as C. H. Pearson, George Higinbotham, Charles Strong, H. B. Higgins, and Alfred Deakin. The first three of these were émigrés— Pearson from England, Higinbotham from Ireland, and Strong from Scotland— and all had a major impact on Australian, and in particular Victorian, intellectual and political life in the latter half of the nineteenth century. There are strong personal and intellectual links connect-ing these figures, many of which have been documented by Stuart Macintyre (1991). As members of the Victorian parliament, Higinbotham and Pearson were major voices in the education debates of the period, which culminated in the previously discussed Education Act of 1872. A former student of the Scottish idealist Edward Caird, Strong came to Australia to minister at the Scots Church in Melbourne. In 1883, Strong would invite Higinbotham to present a lecture on “Science and Religion” to the church’s literary association (Higinbotham 1883). This lecture precipitated a crisis in the Scots Church and led to Strong’s eventual resignation and subsequent establishment of the Australian Church, which for a period of time was the church of choice for many of Melbourne’s theologically progressive Christians and spiritual seekers, including Australia’s second prime minister and leading architect of federation, Alfred Deakin, and the radical poet and onetime secularist Bernard O’Dowd (see Badger 1971).


As previously mentioned, this period is often considered to be a crucial moment in the emergence of a more secular public sphere, usually understood as the removal of religion from political debate and public institutions. Certain key developments are usually cited as evidence of this, such as the provision of “free, compulsory, and secular” schooling, the abolition of state aid to religious schools, the relaxation of Sabbatarian laws, and the insertion of section 116 into the Australian Constitution, which rules out the establishment of a state religion and religious tests for public office.

But to define state secularism in this narrow way is to miss much of the intel-lectual texture of the time. First, as mentioned before, it overlooks the variety of meanings of secular education that were employed in the education debates, one of which was that secularism referred to an idea of “Common Christian-ity” rather than the absence of religion. For instance, in 1884 in the Victorian parliament, Pearson undoubtedly spoke for many when he proclaimed that the State

cannot refuse now and again to interfere with religious matters. What right have we to interfere with questions of morality except on religious grounds? Have we not a religious question in connection with our schools . . . ? Sir, because this House is secular it is not therefore irreligious. On the contrary, we are profoundly concerned with religion, as something affecting the constitution of the commu-nity. (VPD 1884, cited in Gregory 1973, 153)

Likewise, Higinbotham argued for religious instruction in education, and he fought hard to find common ground among the Christian churches, claiming that he would “rejoice if half a dozen . . . sects . . . would consent to their own extinction, and would merge into some common form of Christian society” (VPD 1867, cited in Dow 1964, 104). He believed that the state should sup-port “the religion which recognises the religious sentiment of all without the fanaticism of any of the sects” (VPD 1869, cited in Macintyre 1991, 129). For Higinbotham, the religion of Christ (as opposed to the Christian religion) leaves all matters of government and church organization open- ended: “Every-thing except the central dogma and the rules of life dependent on it was left at large, and free to adjust itself to the different characters and habits and the vary-ing conditions of each nationality and age” (Higinbotham 1883, 18).

Furthermore, to describe state secularism as the absence of religion over-looks what the Catholic political philosopher Max Charlesworth referred to as the confessional character of the liberal worldview. Writing in the 1960s about the education debates of the late nineteenth century, Charlesworth wrote that “the liberal society is just as much a confessional society as any other” (Charlesworth 1973, 57).


This is a view explicitly defended by Pearson himself in his late, influential work National Life and Character: A Forecast (1894). According to Pearson, “The broad fact can hardly be disputed that secular civilisation . . . is informed with a moral purpose, and is steadily working out what we may call the Chris-tian law of life” (Pearson 1894, 23). Furthermore, “The religion of the State is surely as worthy of reverence as any creed of the Churches, and ought to grow in intensity year by year.” Pearson also anticipated a time when “the spirit of uncalculating devotion to the common cause . . . will become a steady principle of action, deserving to be accounted a faith, and lifting all who feel it into a higher life” (Pearson 1894, 238– 39).

Borrowing from other historians such as Ken Inglis (on ANZAC memorials) and Richard Ely (on civil religion), Stuart Macintyre has written about Pearson’s faith in citizenship as a “sacralization of the secular” (1991, 128; see also Bel-lanta 2010). Another expression that captures the new liberal faith comes from the early modern historian John Bossy, who wrote of the “migrations of the holy” that occurred when the state took on many of the functions of the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Bossy 1985). Though we might like to depict late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century liberals as ushering in a postreligious age, they were really involved in a kind of covert (sometimes overt) smuggling operation facilitating another wave of holy migration. Pearson nicely captures the continuities between old and new forms of worship:

Nothing is more remarkable in human nature than its determination to retain old forms while it invests them with a new life. Christianity took its temples, its stat-ues, its sacred days from Paganism; Protestantism mostly copied the old Church; and the most noticeable form of anti- Christian worship has been a servile parody of Catholicism. Humanity, as it were, outgrows its vestments; but it does not cast them off and go naked; it patches them and drapes them about itself in new folds. (Pearson 1893, 25– 26)

The “form of anti- Christian worship” that Pearson had in mind was likely to have been that conducted by the Australian Secular Association (ASA), which flourished for a short period in Australia from the early 1880s. Secularism as a political movement begins with George Holyoake in 1851, and the British Secular Association was formed in the 1860s (see Royle 1974 and 1980). The Australian Secular Association was formed in the 1880s and was soon headed up by Joseph Symes— an Englishman who had been a close associate of the leading secularist Charles Bradlaugh. Symes came to Australia in 1884 and quickly got to work. The ASA soon put out a regular bulletin, The Libera-tor, edited by Symes. They held regular Sunday morning services (“social ser-vices”) on Swanston Street, where there would be readings and songs and short


messages on science, religion, and public affairs. One of the members, the poet Bernard O’Dowd, put together the ASA “Lyceum tutor”— with songs, poems, and forms of declaration and response led by a “conductor.” In some ways, the ASA resembled the modern- day forms of new atheism proclaiming no truth but scientific truth, highly literalistic readings of the Bible, much moralizing about the evils of religion (especially the God of the Old Testament), and very Whig-gish readings of history with clear heroes and villains. Many proponents came from nonconformist backgrounds, and Symes’s memoir was notably titled from Presbyterian Pulpit to Secularist Platform. As Hilary Carey has written, “This was not a turning away from religion . . . so much as its obsessive mirror image and the debating hall was its natural church” (Carey 2012, 11). Though the move-ment would be marked by factional division and fade by the turn of the century (see Smith 1963; Royle 1980, 82– 84), its particular style of rationalist polemic has never disappeared from the Australian scene.

Pearson wrote the aforementioned passage toward the end of his life but as the movement toward federation was gathering steam. This “sacralization of the secular” is important to keep in mind when thinking about the federal movement and the crafting of the Constitution. Discussions about whether Australia was founded as a secular or Christian nation usually return to debates about the Constitution and the meaning of the mention of God in the pre-amble and of section 116. But focusing on these matters can lead us to ignore the widely held sense of providence in the founding of the Australian nation. As John Hirst wrote in the opening lines of his work The Sentimental Nation, “God wanted Australia to become a nation.” And while the federal movement was driven in part by material and political interests, and legal matters had to be settled, “to the federalists none of these things was sacred; the whole forty- two powers given to the Commonwealth did not make federation sacred. It was the making of the nation, apart from anything it might do, that was sacred” (Hirst 2000, 4, 15).

This sense was very strong in figures like Deakin, H. B. Higgins, and Andrew Inglis Clark. Deakin was mentored by figures such as Pearson and Hig-inbotham, and his sense of spiritual yearning is well known. While he might have had trouble accepting orthodox forms of Christianity, his conception of citizenship was, like Green’s, deeply Christian. Shortly after being elected as the Victorian delegate to the Constitutional Convention in 1898, he prayed,

God preserve this people and grant its leaders unselfish fidelity and courage to face all trials for the sake of brotherhood. Thy blessing has rested upon us here yesterday and we pray that it may be the means of creating and fostering through-out all Australia a Christlike citizenship. (cited in La Nauze 1965, 178; cf. Wil-liams 2013, 33– 44)


Higgins and Clark are also worth mentioning in this regard, since Higgins was reluctant to include God in the Constitution and Clark was a strong advo-cate for separating church and state along American lines. Nevertheless, Hig-gins had as strong a sense of providential order as Deakin (see Higgins 1896); G. V. Portus could write about Higgins that he had never met anyone “so aloof from religion in any sense of creed, whose life lay so deep in the things of the spirit” (cited in Rickard 1983). Clark was a committed Unitarian whose under-standing of the work of God through history led to a latitudinarian position no less strong than Higinbotham’s:

I decline to identify the Church in any age, or any branch of it, with Christian-ity . . . Christianity is a purely moral force that was implanted in humanity by Jesus Christ . . . and which has propagated itself with increasing volume from age to age by the contact of soul with soul, without depending on any special organ-isation or particular ritual or book. (cited in Ely 1975, 274)

Moreover, Clark’s religious liberalism was bound up with his political liberalism (Ely 2001), and the federal cause for Clark was no less a work of Providence than anything taking place in the church (Hirst 2000, 11– 13). In 1898, Clark could assert that “our highest duty to our children and to humanity is to do all that is within our power to ensure the development and maturity of the nation which Providence has appointed us to create” (cited in Ely 2001, 240).

Such providentialism would have its impact on the actual Constitution of Federated Australia. The question of the relationship between religion and the state was debated in the federation conventions of the 1890s (Ely 1976). Patrick Glynn, the Catholic representative of South Australia, said in the 1897 Adelaide debates,

This spirit of reverence for the Unseen pervades all the relations of our civil life. It is felt in the forms in our courts of justice, in the language of our Statutes, in the oath that binds the sovereign to the observance of our liberties, in the recogni-tion of the Sabbath, in the rubrics of our guilds and social orders, in the anthem through which on every public occasion we invocate a blessing on our executive head, in our domestic observances, in the offices of courtesy at our meetings and partings, and in the time- honored motto of the nation. Says Burke: “We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly that religion is the basis of civil society.”12

Edmund Barton, distressed that Glynn wished the topic to be debated at all, offered the most substantial discourse on the notion of a secular state in all the federation debates:


The whole mode of government, the whole province of the State, is secular. The whole business that is transacted by any community— however deeply Christian, unless it has an established church, unless religion is interwoven expressly and professedly with all its actions— is secular business as distin-guished from religious business. The whole duty is to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. That is the line of division maintained in every State in which there is not a predominant church government which dictates to all civil institutions. In these colonies, where State aid to religion has long been abolished, this line of demarcation is most definitely observed, and there is no justification for inserting into your secular documents of State provisions or expressions which refer to matters best dealt with by the churches, and which every righteous citizen will deal with in his church and at his time of worship, and not intrude into those matters which are themselves secular, and in themselves cannot be anything but secular.13

Barton’s speech was vague in terms of exactly what he meant by secular. Did he simply mean a state without an established church, or did he mean a state without “a predominant church government which dictates to all civil institu-tions”? Ultimately a clause recognizing God in the preamble of the Austra-lian Constitution triumphed, in no small part because of the popularity of such a clause at the grassroots level. The Commonwealth of Australia was broadly theistic in its Constitution and Christian in parliamentary ceremony, although the implications for this in a pluralist society would be debated from then on.

One of the major reforms established by the newly federated nation was the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, which, under its president, Higgins, established the principle of the living wage, one of the key pillars of Paul Kelly’s widely used (and contested) notion of the Australian settlement (Kelly 1991). Not only did the principle of a court- determined minimum wage enshrine a critique of freedom of contract that had been around at least since Green’s seminal 1881 essay “Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract”; it was also inspired by the strong strand of Catholic social teaching that had come to prominence in the wake of the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum. Hig-gins was one of many public figures deeply influenced by this body of ideas that, like the new liberalism of Green and others, sought to find a third way between classical liberalism and the kind of state socialism that was begin-ning to take hold.14 The living wage has been described as a “secularization” of the medieval teaching of the fair wage (Blackburn 1996), and it is another important manifestation of the interplay between the secular and religious in Australian political history.


6. The Gospel of Social Reform

Notwithstanding the influence of Catholic social thought, if there was a public philosophy in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was idealism. Deakin, Higgins, and Clarke are three representative public figures in this mold. Idealism was also the prevailing philosophy within the universities at this time. It was a time of university expansion, and many of the figures who took up academic positions were recruited from the old country— from places such as Oxford and, more important, Scotland. One such impor-tant recruit was Francis Anderson, who, like Charles Strong, was a student of the neo- Hegelians John and Edward Caird at Glasgow. Anderson originally came out to assist Charles Strong at the Australian Church in Melbourne. He soon took up a lectureship in philosophy at the University of Sydney and sub-sequently became the first Challis Professor of Philosophy at that institution.

Anderson was very much a philosopher in the Greenian mold who saw phi-losophy as directed toward action in the world (Anderson 1902). Also central to the idealist vision was an attempt to reconcile the conflicting elements of modernity, in both the intellectual and the social spheres. In the intellectual sphere, it meant trying to work out the relationships and the interconnections between the various forms of understanding— philosophy, science, history, art, and religion. In the social sphere, it involved reconciling the conflict between classes, between the world of work and the family, and crucially between the church and the state. So there was a strong tendency within this school of thought to resist compartmentalization, or what sociologists such as Durkheim and Weber called the fragmentation of the social spheres, an endemic feature of the modern secular age.

The theme of the necessary interpenetration of church and state or church and world is a recurrent theme within this literature, particularly for those (the majority) who had religious or spiritual inclinations. Thus Anderson claims that “Church and World to the philosophic eye represent two aspects of man’s life which can never be wholly severed or fully reconciled,” and “so long as soul and body are united, secular and sacred, temporal and spiritual will remain, complementary yet often conflicting powers ruling the lives of men” (Anderson 1923a, 5). These are two recognizably distinct spheres, yet it is both inevitable and desirable that that they will intersect. “Religion and Politics,” Anderson writes, “are not like two parallel straight lines, which being produced ever so far, do not meet. On the contrary, they cannot be kept apart without danger, and without a possible degradation of both” (Anderson 1930, 7).

Though less well known than his namesake and eventual successor John Anderson, Francis Anderson was a pivotal figure in Australian intellectual his-tory who, not unlike Green a generation or two before him in Britain, inspired


many of his students to live up to high ideals of citizenship and social reform. Many of these students became part of the loosely aligned network of scholar- activists known as the WEA intellectuals (Rowse 1978; Bourke 1988). The Workers Educational Association had been established in Australia by its British founder, Alan Mansbridge, who, along with William Temple (more of whom soon), visited these shores immediately prior to World War I. Writing about the WEA, Helen Bourke wrote that it “exhibited a missionary fervour” and “spoke of a knowledge ‘saturated with the ideal of social service,’ of the moral uplift and transformation of the worker into the informed citizen who would eschew the class war in favour of the social whole” (Bourke 1988, 52).

Tim Rowse justifiably describes this group of reformers as “secular evange-lists” but probably goes too far when he suggests that they “saw in social studies a secular substitute for the binding social influence of religion” (Rowse 1978, 45). This is because on the whole they did not see secular learning as incompatible or in competition with religion. Certainly Anderson, who was an early advocate for introducing sociology into the university curriculum (Anderson 1912), was nevertheless concerned to criticize much “latter- day psychology and sociology” for being “based on an abstract view of life and history; that while professing to be purely positive and scientific, they start with assumptions derived from defective philosophies of the past.” (Anderson 1923b, 217). In other words, he was concerned to critique those materialistic philosophies that cannot account for mind or for mankind’s spiritual interests. For Anderson,

The World is simply another name for Humanity, slowly organizing itself, by means of the powers divinely bestowed upon it, into a kingdom of justice . . . [which is] more and more . . . learning the significance of the simple prayer of the Nazarene “Thy Kingdom come.” (Anderson 1923a, 6)

In other words, the social sciences were not to be understood as a substitute for religion but as its necessary partner.

No doubt Rowse is right to say that some of Anderson’s students replaced religious faith with secular learning, but there was a sizable cohort of WEA intellectuals who took up Anderson’s concerns between the wars in an attempt to work out the right relationship between “Christianity and the social order.” This phrase was in fact the title of the great cleric and reformer William Tem-ple’s late work (1942), which is sometimes credited, along with the Beveridge Report, as providing a philosophical foundation for the welfare state in Britain. Indeed, Temple coined the phrase welfare state in an earlier work, Christian-ity and the State (1928), though what he had in mind was nothing like the bureaucratic Leviathan that emerged in the postwar period. Temple had a sig-nificant following in Australia, particularly among a number of liberal Anglican


reformers such as E. H. Burgmann, R. S. Lee, G. V. Portus, Kenneth Hender-son, F. A. Bland, J. S. Moyes, and others (Mansfield 1985). In the late 1920s and early 1930s, these figures were active contributors to the journal The Mor-peth Review, edited by Burgmann, Lee, and the anthropologist A. P. Elkin, who were all ordained Anglican clerics.

This publication was an amalgam of overlapping intellectual traditions, including British idealism, liberal Anglicanism, and Christian socialism, which sought to engage the issues of the day: poverty, unemployment, international conflict, among much else.15 And though it is not quite stated in these terms, central to the journal was an engagement with the nature of secularism. This was two pronged. One the one hand, the contributors to the journal welcomed many of the developments of secular learning and especially the new social sci-ence. Psychology in particular was taken up with much enthusiasm by Lee and Burgmann. But they were also deeply critical of the compartmentalizing nature of modern secularism and the way that it fragments knowledge into specialized fields and leads to divisions in the social realm. Both the individual and society are divided. The self is divided psychologically between reason and emotion and epistemologically torn between the claims of science and religion. In society, the running of public affairs is given over to “specialists without spirit” (to bor-row from Weber), and economics and public policy are understood as morally neutral concerns to be administered by technicians and managerialists. Most important, the divorce not only between church and state but also between religion and politics (as Anderson feared) degrades both church and state. The church had become insular, sentimental, and pietistic, and the state had lost an important source of moral critique. These intellectuals’ arguments about a hollowed- out public sphere given over to strictly utilitarian concerns, where “comprehensive conceptions” of the good are strictly off limits, continues to haunt debates about the secular state to the present day.

Burgmann succinctly stated the aims of the journal in a 1931 editorial. The Morpeth Review, he wrote,

attempts to study the whole man in all his reactions to his world environment. It therefore deals with his religion, ethics, politics, economics, and art, believing that these form a living whole and should only be departmentalised for the sake of a more detailed study. In life one and the same man is religious, ethical, politi-cal, economic, and artistic, and it is a fallacy to exalt any one of these elements in him to the exclusion of depreciation of any or all the others. (Burgmann 1931, 7)

The Morpeth Review came to an end in 1934, but many of the core contribu-tors continued to write on these themes until World War II and beyond. For instance, in 1942, Burgmann published a short book titled The Regeneration of


Civilization, a central concern of which is the right relationship between church and state. According to Burgmann, these two institutions represent perennial features of the human race. Reflecting his interest in Freudian theory, he sug-gests that the church represents the feminine principle in human affairs and the state the masculine. Both are necessary for individual and social well- being. But not unlike Higinbotham, Clark, and other nineteenth- century liberal Chris-tians, Burgmann suggests that the church cannot contain the spirit. Indeed, he says that the spirit of Christ is broader than Christendom. Though he is calling for the church to play a leading part in the renewal of civilization, he suggests that the church is “a larger thing than Christendom.” This is a view that “sees Christendom as one form taken by the Church, but it sees Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and the rest, somewhat as denominations within or fragments of the Church” (Burgmann 1942, 116).

7. Conclusion

The hostile secularism exemplified by Victorian secular humanists of the late nineteenth century right up to the present has never been widely adopted in Australia. Yet Australians have similarly failed to register much zeal for calls for a return to Australia as a Christian nation by religious conservatives, quasi- theocrats, and religious nationalists. These messages speak to ideological/con-fessional minorities but have gained little purchase in the wider populace. This has enabled the emergence of a state that is secular in the sense of not seeing its purpose in robust confessional terms yet at the same time always noting the immense worth of religion and religious institutions and usually willing to sup-port religious enterprises, be they schools, charities, or multicultural projects. The rise of multiculturalism itself during the 1970s may be described as another chapter in the relationship between religious conceptions of society and citizen-ship and the ever- present need to manage Australian plurality (Lopez 2000, 71, 139– 40, 151). The 2011 Australian Human Rights Commission’s Freedom of Religion and Belief in 21st Century Australia— explicitly drawing on the work of Charles Taylor— seems to capture Australian secularity as it has emerged over the nation’s history when it says “religion in a civil society cannot be ignored, nor can it be privatised, and nor can it be relegated to the margins. Religious groups contribute to the spiritual and social wealth of the nation” (Bouma et al. 2011, 80; cf. Bouma 2006).

This chapter has suggested that in order to appreciate the nature of the secu-lar state in Australia, it is necessary to put to one side the polarized assumptions of much contemporary political discourse as well as a certain strand of mod-ern liberal theory. Throughout Australian history, the secular and the religious have been closely bound up together, and to cast the Australian state as either


secular or Christian is to impose an anachronistic, distorting lens on the past. Much as the deconstruction of the Church of England establishment at the hands of Bourke was intended to assuage sectarian animosities and encourage the flourishing of Christianity in a strange society, so the deconstruction of state aid was almost entirely the initiative of religionists seeking a more vibrant, self- motivating Australian Christianity. The emergence of the concept of the secular state tended to be analogous with the concept of secular education— that is, ambiguous in meaning but in most cases open to general religion. In the case of secular education, this meant, according to Robert Lowe and George Higinbo-tham, nonsectarian religion; in the case of the state, this meant noncoercion of religion and a zeal to support religion owing, at the very least, to its social utility. As stated before, there were indeed what we may call secular humanists such as Henry Carmichael— and possibly Lowe himself— in the 1840s and 1850s and the Victorian secularists, but they tended to be on the peripheries of influence. For the most part, the architects of Australian state secularity were religious individuals and associations working for religious reasons.

Later in the nineteenth century, a tradition of Australian liberalism developed that had a complex relationship with secularism. On the one hand, many liberals of the period were promoters of “secular” learning who welcomed developments in science and critical scholarship and who promoted causes such as “secular” schooling and, for figures like Strong and Higinbotham, the relaxation of Sab-batarian laws so that people could attend public institutions such as libraries and museums on Sundays. These developments were seen as expanding the public sphere and creating the conditions for realizing a fully developed citizenry. The federation of the colonies into the Australian nation was a further development in this expansion of citizenship, often interpreted as the workings of providence and couched in the terms of a new faith. Far from relegating religion to the private sphere, this new faith in secular initiatives was seen as the realization of Christian ideals and even as a further step in the realization of the kingdom of God on earth. But if we continue to look at Australian history through a lens shaped by a liberalism that insists that religion is a thoroughly private affair, then we will not only misread the past but also be ill equipped to engage with those voices in the public conversation that can’t be contained by the strictures of a narrowly conceived notion of secular public reason.

Notes

1. “Self- identified Christians should not make religiously motivated decisions for those who do not share their beliefs” (Allison 2005).

2. Invaluable and complementary to this study is Stuart Piggin’s (2014) essay ques-tioning the trope— ubiquitous in the last decade— of an increase of religion in Australian politics. Piggin shows how an appreciation for history is crucial for


present- day normative discussion of religion and politics in Australia (or any-where else, for that matter).

3. Cf. Matthew Chrulew’s essay on Foucault’s account of “in- depth Christianiza-tion” in Chapter 7.

4. For example, the influential William Paley (1785 [2002]: Bk.6.10). 5. All this may be found scattered throughout the eight volumes of Historical

Records of New South Wales as well as the many volumes of the Historical Records of Australia, which reach to 1848. For excellent recent accounts, see the chapters by Brian Fletcher and Patricia Curthoys in Kaye et al. (2002).

6. For a recent treatment of Bourke emphasizing his religious motivation, see Stoneman (2014).

7. Separation of church and state— that is, the end of state funding for clergy salaries and church buildings— occurred over a 25- year period: South Australia in 1851; Queensland in 1860; New South Wales in 1862; Tasmania in 1869; Victoria in 1870– 75; Western Australia in 1890. It should also be noted that the religious motives for separating church and state and for the appeal to a common Christianity were, of course, not the result of a newfound spirit of harmony between the denominations but were often shaped by deep and often acrimonious sectarian divisions, as even a cursory reading of someone such as John Dunmore Lang reveals. Liberal reformers such as Bourke, and later Higin-botham, were motivated as much by a loathing of such hatreds as they were by their enlightened forms of Christian faith. In this respect, they were at one with earlier figures such as Locke, whose arguments for toleration and noncoercion in religious matters were built on a reading of the gospels no less than on dissenting and Enlightenment ideas such as freedom of conscience (cf. Zagorin 2003).

8. For Broughton and liberalism, see his letters to his best friend, William Coleridge, of January 3, 1844 (p. 341) and December 10, 1845 (p. 593), found in the Broughton Papers, Moore Theological College, Sydney.

9. Originally delivered as lectures in Sydney in 1842, following Lang’s tour to the United States of America. See also the letters— “Emancipate the People! Emanci-pate the Clergy!”— published in The Atlas, probably written by Lang, on May 17, 24, and 31, 1845.

10. The idea of the secular or worldly utility of religion was a common argument for general religious teaching in national or nonsectarian schools. Typical was the following letter written on December 2, 1851, to the Sydney newspaper The Empire, edited by Henry Parkes, in defense of a general, nonsectarian education system: “The truth of revealed religion should be a lesson strongly inculcated in the mind of the pupil, both on account of its influence on his eternal state, and of the important obligation which it imposes upon him conscientiously to fulfill his worldly duties” (Empire 1851: 3).

11. More recently, the former justice of the High Court Michael Kirby has suggested, “If it were possible for secularism to have a patron saint in Australia, George Hig-inbotham would have the first claim on the title” (Kirby 2013). If this is the case, then as with many saints before him, Higinbotham was a secularist saint malgré lui.

12. Official Report of the National Australasian Convention Debates, Adelaide 1897, C. E. Bristow, Government Printer, 1185.


13. Ibid., 1187. 14. For some discussion of the ideological maneuvers then taking place, see Tregenza

(2012). 15. For a fuller treatment of the journal and the thinkers associated with it, see

Moore (2012) and Tregenza (2014).

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