Carey, Hilary M. "Secularism Versus Christianity in Australian History." In Secularisation: New...

CHAPTER TWO

SECULARISM VERSUS CHRISTIANITYIN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY

HILARY M. CAREY

In November 1886, in the Academy of Music,Adelaide, South Australia, the FreethoughtLecturer Isaac Selby, and the Reverend M. WoodGreen, Christian Minister, fought a vigorousmental duel on the theme ‘Secularism versusChristianity’.1 For over a week, the speakers

1 Isaac Selby and M. Wood Green, Secularism Versus ChristianityBeing a Full Report of Eight Nights’ Debate in the Academy of Music,Adelaide, South Australia, in the Month of November 1886 (Adelaide:Carey, Page & Co., 1886). For similar British debates,see Brewin Grant and George Jacob Holyoake, Christianityand Secularism. Report of a Public Discussion (London: Ward, 1853)on the question: “What advantages would accrue tomankind generally, and the working classes inparticular, by the removal of Christianity, and thesubstation of secularism in its place?” See also: DavidKing and Charles Bradlaugh, Christianity V. Secularism. A Reportof a Public Discussion, Between David King of Birmingham Evangelist AndCharles Bradlaugh, of London, President of the National Secular Society(Birmingham: D. King, 1857). The subjects in the latercase were: “1. What is Christianity? 2. What are itslegitimate effects? 3. What is secularism, and what canit do for man that Christianity cannot?”

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debated: ‘Is Secularism superior to Christianityas an Ameliorator of Mankind?’, ‘Is Christianityof Divine Origin?’, and ‘Is there a God, and isthe portraiture given of Him in the Bible arational one?’ The event had a high profile andthe Mayor of Adelaide presided for the last fivenights, sometimes, it was reported, having hiswork cut out to keep order.2 While there was nowinner, it was a notable occasion for the AdelaideSecularists given that Jill Roe estimates thattheir monthly meetings usually gathered no morethan 30 souls in 1877.3 The encounter betweenSelby and Green was one of many similar events,which pitted Christian orators and secularists inthe ring for programmed bouts across the Britishworld. While often excellent entertainment, it isless clear whether these encounters tell us verymuch about the broader forces of socialsecularisation and disengagement from formal andinformal religious belief and practice, which somehave seen as beginning to get underway at thistime. While there was debate and questioning inthe wake of the discoveries of Darwin and Lyelland the New Criticism of the Bible, few wouldseriously doubt, in the words of Owen Chadwick,that in an “age of unsettlement” the Victorians at

2 “Our Australian Letter,” Otago Daily Times, December 6,1886, 4. Both Selby and Green were originally fromDunedin, New Zealand.3 Jill Roe, Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia, 1879-1939(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1986),35. The South Australians also produced a Review, whichsurvived for a year, from March 1878 to April 1879.

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home and abroad in the colonies were both areligious and a questioning people.4

Today, more than 125 years after Selby andGreen’s debate, the balance of power betweenreligious and secular worldviews has beentransformed in the West. The signs are evidenteverywhere in terms of church attendance, beliefin God, and the political and social influence ofreligious leaders, but perhaps the smallerindicators are the most telling of the profundityof the change. In July 2013, for example, it wasreported that the Australian Girl Guides haddecided to remove references to both God and theQueen from their oath of allegiance and, in orderto encourage membership from girls of all faiths,to change their pledge to support for “thecommunity” instead.5 In his recent review of thehistorical process of secularisation in Australia,David Hilliard considers that religion has becomesomething largely experienced as a personallifestyle choice with profound changes in belief,culture, and practice impacting on all the majorhistorical denominational traditions.6

Despite this seismic shift in the Australianreligious landscape, recent decades have seen an

4 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, vol. 2 (London: A&CBlack, 1970), 149.5 “God Vow Dropped from Girlguiding UK Promise,” BBCOnline, accessed June 19, 2013,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-229599976 D. L. Hilliard, “Australia: Towards Secularizationand One Step Back,” in Secularisation in the Christian World, edsCallum G. Brown and Michael Snape (Farnham, Surrey:Ashgate, 2010), 75-91.

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explosive return of the old battle betweensecularists and religious proponents on a globalscale with a widespread acknowledgement that thesecularist grand narrative of the inevitabledecline of religion as a product of modernity canno longer be assumed to be universally valid.7

While static in some parts of Europe and theUnited States, Christianity, far from fading away,appears to be achieving new visibility in regionssuch as the former Soviet Union and newlycapitalist People’s Republic of China. Other worldreligions are experiencing similar revivals.Secularist regimes in the Middle East have beenbrought down in Islamist popular uprisings,radical Hinduism and Judaism are on the rise innominally secularist India and Israel, and thereis an alarming resurgence of a phenomenon whichmost western democracies had thought was gone forever, namely religious terrorism. Secularismitself, no longer defined in rhetorical oppositionto confessional Christianity, has emerged as afield in its own right with its own journals,websites, and conferences, covering a widespectrum of non-religious belief and ethicalsystems. The lively Nonreligion and SecularityResearch Network, founded in 2008, aims to cover:“the atheistic, agnostic, religiously indifferentor areligious, as well as most forms ofsecularism, humanism and, indeed, aspects ofreligion itself. It also addresses theoretical and7 For summary of the debate and a defence of principlesof secularism and the principles of social harmony andcultural cohesion, see Paul Cliteur, The Secular Outlook. InDefense of Moral and Political Secularism (Chichester, WestSussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

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empirical relationships between nonreligion,religion and secularity.”8 At the same time, theold sport of intellectual ping pong betweensecularists and religionists continues to attracta popular audience for writers such as RichardDawkins in the United Kingdom and Philip Adams inAustralia.9 The gods, to paraphrase the title ofChristopher Hitchen’s witty anti-religiousbestseller, may not be great – but neither, itwould seem, are they entirely dead.10

Discussion of the secularisation thesisretained its intellectual currency through thework of sociologists and some social historianswriting in the tradition of Karl Marx, Max Weber,and Émile Durkheim. In the mid 1960s, sociologistssuch as Bryan Wilson argued that the statisticaldecline in denominational religious adherence wasan indication of declining religiosity for societyas a whole, and that this process was unlikely tobe reversed. 11 Historians were more sceptical—with8 “About Us,” NSRN Online: Nonreligion and SecularityResearch Network, accessed July 1, 2012,http://nsrn.net/about/ The Institute for the Study ofSecularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC), TrinityCollege, Connecticut, has recently launched a newacademic journal for the field titled Secularism andNonreligion.9 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Black Swan,2006). For a representative collection of views bycontemporary Australian secularists, see Warren Bonett,ed. The Australian Book of Atheism (Melbourne: Scribe, 2010).10 Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion PoisonsEverything (London: Atlantic Books, 2007).11 Bryan Wilson, Religion in a Secular Society (London: Watts,1966).

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a notable intervention by the late Alan Gilbert—pointing to the complexity of the entanglementbetween society and religious formations over thelongue durée, and the way the relationship had waxedand waned in different historical periods.12 Therewas also general agreement that the decline ofpublic performance of religion, encompassingcensus data on denominational adherence, churchattendance, membership of religiously-basedpolitical parties, or rituals performed on stateoccasions such as prayers before Parliament, wasan imperfect measure of personal religiosity andthe potential for religious revival.

The more recent explosion of scholarly interestin the secularisation thesis owes much to CharlesTaylor’s seminal study, A Secular Age (2007),originally presented as the 1999 Gifford Lecturesin Edinburgh. Taylor’s influence stems from hiscapacity to ask the right probing questions, ofwhich one of the more sentient was: “why was itvirtually impossible not to believe in God in,say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000many of us find this not only easy, but eveninescapable?”13 His answer to these kinds ofquestions was that religious belief wasincorporated into the worldview of people of an

12 For the UK, see Alan Gilbert, The Making of Post-ChristianBritain: A History of the Secularization of Modern Society (London:Longman, 1980); Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils, AHistory of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times tothe Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Hugh McLeod,Secularization in Western Europe, 1848-1914 (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 2000).13 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.:Belknap, 2007), 25.

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earlier age in three important ways: firstly, Godwas part of the natural world and religious forceswere assumed to be responsible agents for creationand natural events. Secondly, God formed anintegral part of political society from elite tolocal level, from kingdom to parish, so that, inTaylor’s words: “One could not but encounter Godeverywhere.” Thirdly, people in the West lived inan “enchanted world” by which Taylor meant toinvoke the antonym of the “disenchantment”(German: Entzauberung) proposed by Max Weber (1864-1920).14 More than one eminent thinker hasnominated A Secular Age as the most important work toappear in their lifetimes. For example, in arecent piece for a popular online journal, theChicago historian of religion Martin Martynominated five books to exemplify the theme ofReligion and Secularism in History of whichTaylor’s A Secular Age was the first.15 Taylor, for

14 Weber discusses the process of disenchantment invarious places, but most famously in 1918 at a lectureat the University of Munich on the theme ‘Science as aVocation’ in which he argued that the growth of scienceled inevitably to the decay in religious explanationsof reality. “[E]mpirical knowledge has consistentlyworked through to the disenchantment of the world andits transformation into a causal mechanism.”15 Martin Marty, “An Interview with Martin Marty onReligion versus Secularism in History,” FiveBooks.com,accessed June 21, 2012, fivebooks.com/interviews/martin-marty-on-religion-versus-secularism-history Marty’s other choices forreview were R. A. Markus, Saeculum: A History of Society in theTheology of St Augustine; Ronald Gregor Smith, World Comes ofAge: A Symposium on Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Eugen Resenstock

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Marty, encourages us to question the secularistrhetorical claims for modernity and itsrelationship to the Enlightenment.

Taylor has, in his turn, sparked considerablediscussion of secularism by philosophers,sociologists, theologians and other intellectuals,though historians have been slower to follow hislead. A major conference was held in April 2008 atYale University devoted to the complex themes andissues raised by Taylor’s work.16 In the presentcollection, Ian Tregenza has chosen to take Tayloras his starting point for a critique ofcontemporary philosophical debates aboutsecularism, notably the suggestion that Taylorprivileged Western models of secularisation andfailed to recognise the extent to which the debateabout secularism has now extended to become aglobal conversation. In the edited papers from aReligious History Association workshop on Churchand State, John Gascoigne and I also raisedquestions about the Taylor thesis as it related tothe transplanted Christianities of settler andcolonial societies of the Southern world.17 In

Huessy, Out of Revolution; Richard Fenn, The Dream of the PerfectAct.16 Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Craig Calhoun,eds. Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2010). Contributors includeRobert N. Bellah, John Milbank, Wendy Brown, SimonDuring, William E. Connolly, Akeel Bilgrami, ColinJager, Jon Butler, Jonathan Sheehan, Nilüfer Göle, JoséCasanova, and Saba Mahmood with an afterword by Taylorhimself. 17 John Gascoigne and Hilary M. Carey, “Introduction:The Rise and Fall of Christendom,” in Church and State in Old

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Taylor’s introduction titled “What does it mean tosay that we live in a secular age?” he refers onlyto “‘we’ who live in the West.... or otherwiseput, the North Atlantic world,” suggesting thatsecularity is a condition constrained in time andspace to a Northern moment, against which the non-secularities of contemporary Islamic, Indian, orAfrican societies, and the pre-modern history ofEurope itself, appear as anomalies against aWestern norm. In addition, patterns of post-colonial emigration have led in some cases to areturn of old-style European denominationalismthrough the impact of African, West Indian, andPacific Islander emigrants and clergy who havebeen successful in reviving observant and morallyconservative Christian communities in the West.18

A rather different debate has emerged in thecontext of experiments in national secularism bystates as different as France, India, Turkey, andthe United States.19

The development of an Australian perspective onthis vital international debate is long overdue.20

and New Worlds, eds Hilary M. Carey and John Gascoigne(Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1-30. 18 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994).19 Linell E. Cady and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, eds,Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age (Houndmills: PalgraveMacmillan, 2010). This volume was the result of amulti-year comparative investigation of secularism byan international team. It suggests the limitations ofanalysis of secularism restricted to western models.20 Although, some studies have been undertaken, see forexample Hilliard, “Australia: Towards Secularizationand One Step Back”; Carole Cusack and Christopher

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There are now many studies of the relationshipbetween church and state in Europe and in thecolonised states of the East and the global South,as well as the vast religious workshop of theUnited States. However an important gap remains inrelation to the “new Britains” of the secondBritish Empire including the settler states ofAustralia, New Zealand, and Southern Africa. Thediscussion that follows seeks to consider howmajor terms in the secularisation debate emergedhistorically and how they relate to the particularcircumstances of secularism in settler societies.It will be argued that it is important to considerthe long pre-history of the battle between churchand state in order to understand the strength andresilience of the issues, even in colonialsocieties such as Australia, which were neverburdened with an established, confessional church.Secondly, it considers the clash betweensecularism and Christianity in settler Australia,providing an intellectual genealogy to theAdelaide debate considered in the opening to thisessay. Finally, it makes some reflections onsecularism in post-colonial Australia withthoughts for directions in new research.

Secularism and Secularisation in the OldWorld

Theories of secularism tend to distinguish‘secularism’ from ‘secularization’, that is, the

Hartney eds, “Virtual Issue: Secularism,” Journal ofReligious History, 36:1 (2012), accessed April 28, 2012, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291467-9809/homepage/secularism__virtual_issue.htm

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move to transfer control of property andinstitutions from church control to that of thestate, though the two processes have necessaryconnections.21 In its legal and political form,secularisation has been responsible for some ofthe most violent and culturally destructive actsin human history and has occurred wherever andwhenever the donation of property to religiousinstitutions has allowed for the accumulation ofmaterial wealth over time. Historically, it isimportant to think in terms of cycles ofsecularisation during which the relationshipbetween church and society rose or fell inintensity rather than a single march towardmodernity and ever-increasing secularity as itsinevitable accompaniment.

As defined in the previous paragraph,secularisation has a longer history thansecularism. German historians consider that theFrankish strongman Charles Martel (c.688-741) andhis ancestors carried out the earliestsecularisation program in the seventh century ontheir path to the establishment of the Carolingiandynasty.22 Other landmark events in the history ofsecularisation include the suppression of theKnights Templar (1312) by Philip the Fair ofFrance, the Albigensian Crusade against the Catharheretics of southern France, the property seizures

21 For terminology in English, French and German, seeHartmut Lehmann in “Secularization,” Religion Past andPresent: Encyclopedia of Theology and Religion, vol. 11, ed. HansDieter Betz et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 568-570.22 Hans J. Humer, Politics and Power in Early Medieval France(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 77.

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associated with the Papal Inquisition in Europeand the Spanish empire, and the seizures andtransfers which followed the ProtestantReformation. Henry VIII of England (1509-47)preserved some church property for churchpurposes, although Henry’s monastic confiscations,and those of his son Edward VI, ensured that vastterritorial holdings, which had been held by thechurch, fell into secular hands. Even more violentseizures were associated with the Thirty Years War(1614-48) and the uneasy peace secured as a resultof the Peace of Augsburg under the brutalpragmatism of cuius regio, eius religio (“Whose realm, hisreligion”).

While confiscation of church property wasusually accompanied by transfer of religiousadherence to new institutions approved by thestate, this was by no means always the case.Secularisation has led in many cases toirreparable loss of community resources forworship, education, health, and social welfare.Nor should it be assumed that secularisation orstate transfer of church property invariablyattracted popular support. Some secularisationmovements have been accompanied by popularagitation, but many have been actively resisted.Popular revulsion at the Tudor suppression of themonasteries was reflected in the Pilgrimage ofGrace in York in 1536, brutally suppressed by theHenrician regime. The continuing adherence ofIrish Catholics in the face of the forced transferof property to the Protestant state church, andthe resilience of popular Protestantism inCatholic Bohemia, or of Welsh Nonconformity priorto the disestablishment of the Church of England

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in Wales in 1914 are just a few better-knownexamples.23

The wars of religion of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries led to a profound distrustof religious solutions to political problems and acommitment to Reason, rather than God, as the truefont of human wisdom. Enforced secularisation withexpropriation of property was associated withstate formation throughout the eighteenth centurywith the Jesuits targeted first in the PortugueseEmpire (1759), then France (1764), Austria and thetwo Sicilies (1767), and the Spanish Empire (1769-1771), with the order completely dissolved from1773 until it was restored by Pope Pius VII in1814. Paradoxically, the Jesuits had been closelyassociated with the promotion of enlightenedhumanism through their secondary schools andseminaries across Europe and the New World, whichprovided an alternative to state Protestantism andCatholicism which was generally a vehicle forroyal and aristocratic privilege. The Jesuits werealso forced from their South American reductions,with significant negative consequences for theirIndigenous missions. Jesuit colonising effortswere regarded with particular opprobrium byenlightened critics such as the Jesuit-educated23 The phrase is attributed to Joachim Stephani (1544-1623). While achieving an end to the war, it did notlead in all cases to the unity of prince and peopleunder a single religion. For the case of Ireland andBohemia, see Tadhg Ó Hannracháin, “The Consolidation ofIrish Catholicism within a Hostile Imperial Framework:A Comparative Study of Early Modern Ireland andHungary,” in Empires of Religion, ed. Hilary M. Carey(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 25-42.

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Voltaire (1794-1778) whose novel Candidedelightedly imagines a revolt by the Paraguayannatives who decide to turn on their educators bypreparing them for the cooking pot. “A Jesuit, aJesuit!” they shouted, “We shall be revenged, andshall have a good meal.”24 More recent scholarlyinvestigations have been less hostile. In hischapter for this collection, Roberto Gonzalez-Casanovas considers the Jesuit Reductions inBrazil and Paraguay arguing that these Catholicmissions were the work of the first globalmissionary power. This work was less about theextension of the church—which at this stage wasstill fused to the state everywhere in Europe—thanof something recognisably part of theEnlightenment, rationalising ideal. Indeed,Gonzalez-Casanovas suggests that the Jesuits werethe first “modernising” religious order whosemissions enabled the Jesuit humanist project to beenacted on a global stage and escape theconstraints of the European confessional state. Inaddition to church planting from the home churchesof the United Kingdom, Australia benefitteddirectly from the political difficulties of theJesuits in the age of revolutions which, beginningin 1848, encouraged Austro-Hungarian Jesuits tosend chaplains to support a mission to settlers inSouth Australia.25

24 Voltaire, Candide (London: Penguin Classic, 1997), 39ff.25 Austin Kelly, “Jesuit Pioneers: A Page of AustralianMission History, 1848-1901,” Catholic Truth Society,accessed March 17, 2013, http://www.pamphlets.org.au/docs/cts/australia/html/acts1063.html.

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The material allure of church propertycontinued as the symbolic and real target ofrevolutionaries and reformers across Europe in theAge of Revolutions with the French Revolution(1789) only the first salvo in a wave of formaland informal dissolutions, which included thesecularisation program of the Hapsburg EmperorJoseph II in the late eighteenth century, the lossof the Italian Papal States in 1870, and theKulturkampf of 1871 to 1878 mainly directed againstthe power of the Catholic Church. Not till theWeimar Republic (1919-33) were the German churchesable to recover some of their former dignity inrelation to the state.26

In Europe, state-led attacks on churchestablishments were accompanied by the emergenceof a secularist intellectual critique of religionwith anti-clericalism attached to emergingphilosophies of the state and society includingsocialism, communism, and the cooperativemovement. In opposing the Old Religion with theOld Regimes, the new non-institutional religionsof deism, unitarianism, and secularism sought thehigh intellectual moral ground, provoking in turna Romantic backlash, and the turn to the emotionsof evangelicalism, pietism, and the Catholicrevival. While advocates of secularism have tendedto argue that religion is responsible for theviolence associated with these historical episodesand for resistance to liberal and democratic

26 This short narrative draws on Rudolfine Freiine vonOer, “Secularization,” in The Encyclopedia of Christianity, vol.4. trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Leiden: Brill, 2005),901-903.

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reforms, the evidence for this is mixed.Regardless of the opposition or denominational hueof the established church, the end result ofindustrial development in the West was thecreation of societies characterised by greaterhuman freedom and participatory democracy. It hasalso been argued that religion, or at least someProtestant forms of it, were responsible for thework ethic and time-based diligence which was anessential precondition for industrial modes oflabour. E.P. Thompson suggested that the moreimportant religious movement of the nineteenthcentury, Methodism, was a religion for rather thanof the poor, which inculcated habits of industryand frugality, and provided a functioning ideologyfor the emerging proletariat.27

Overall, the polarisation of the secularisationdebate into an artificial conflict between thosein favour of Christianity and those against hasbeen an impediment to understanding the complexways in which varieties of church and state wereentangled with each other. In some cases, thecreation of a ‘modern’ secular state has led togreater cultural integration, but not always, andthe price of stability has all too often been thecrushing of religious and ethnic minorities. Therecord of the institutional churches in opposingdemocratic movements is also mixed. In Europe,certainly, the major state-supported churchesincluding Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and mainlineProtestant churches were hostile or doubtful about

27 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class(London: Gollancz, 1963), 37, 350-374.

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democracy.28 But in Britain, NonconformistProtestants were stout defenders of the expansionof rights and, in both the UK and Australia,Established and Dissenting Protestant churchesdeveloped representative institutions well inadvance of the secular legislature.

In the older European literature, secularism—meaning the strict separation of church and stateand the transfer of power and influence fromreligious to secular authorities—has generallybeen distinguished from secularisation, and fromthis point I intend to do the same. Nevertheless,the shadow of the violent pre-modern history ofsecularisation continues to hover in theinterstices of colonial discussion about the roleof the church in the modern state. The historicalmemory of forced appropriation of property by thestate and the advancement of an established churchat the expense of disenfranchised dissenters froma large cross-section of colonial society fuelledhostility to religious claimants in the new worldand enhanced the political claim for thesecularisation of the public sphere in the newworld. Yet, partly because of the myth that theAustralian colonies were ‘born modern’ andbypassed the older history of religious oppressionand church establishment,29 there has been atendency for secular histories of Australia to

28 John W. de Gruchy, “Democracy,” in The BlackwellCompanion to Political Theology, ed. Peter Scott and WilliamT. Cavanaugh (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 443.29 For this theme, see review essay by Nicholas Brown,“Born Modern: Antipodean Variations on a Theme,” TheHistorical Journal 48 (2005): 1139-1154.

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omit discussion of religion or to downplay itssignificance. The most important discussions todate have addressed issues such as state aid tothe churches for education, a key forum for thecontestation of rival visions for society, as wellas the short-lived colonial experiment in directstate aid for the building of churches andclerical salaries for chaplains, and religiousissues in the framing of the AustralianConstitution.30 The next section will contributeto literature by focussing on the reception ofBritish secularism in the relatively benignenvironment of the late nineteenth centuryAustralian colonial city.

Secularism in Settler AustraliaIn the Anglo-American tradition, ‘secularism’ as aword and a tradition has a relatively recentintellectual history, generally seen to date fromthe work of the English freethinker G.J. Holyoake(1817-1906) to invoke the gradual decline of therole of religion in everyday life and thought.30 For earlier studies of church state issues inAustralia, see Richard Ely, Unto God and Caesar: ReligiousIssues in the Emerging Commonwealth, 1891-1906 (Carlton:Melbourne University Press, 1976); J. S. Gregory, Churchand State. Changing Government Politics Towards Religion in Australia(Melbourne: Cassell, 1973); Michael Hogan, The SectarianStrand: Religion in Australian History (Ringwood: Penguin, 1987);Walter Phillips, Defending “A Christian Country”: Churchmen andSociety in New South Wales in the 1880s and After (St Lucia,Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1981);Walter Phillips, The Protestant Churchmen’s Campaign AgainstSecularism in Australia in the Late Nineteenth Century (Melbourne:Uniting Church Historical Society, 1983).

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Secularism in this sense is seen as the modernistantithesis of religion, “a view of reality whichexcludes reference to the transcendent orsacred... [and] requires the rejection ofsupernaturalist religious beliefs,” as a recentreference book puts it, citing authorities fromEpicurus (341-270 BCE) to John Lennon.31 Holyoakedoes not stand alone, but emerged from a broadermovement concomitant with the rise of industrialsociety. Thomas Paine (1737-1809), Thomas Carlyle(1795-1881), and Robert Owen (1771-1858) each intheir different ways attacked the Old Regime andthe alliance of established church and aristocracythat it represented. Holyoake’s secularism was theinstitutional heir to the ultra-radicalism ofOwenism, chartism, and European communism and wasa movement that married well with the intellectualand social aspirations of the self-educatedartisan elite.32

Secularism arrived in Australia by travellingdown the imperial pathways and networks, in muchthe same way as other itinerant lay speakers whotoured the provincial lecture circuits in Englandand Scotland and spread across the Atlantic andinto the southern British world.33 Through his

31 Trevor A. Hart, ed. The Dictionary of Historical Theology(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2000), 519.32 For the northern British context of Britishsecularism, see Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins ofthe British Secularism Movement, 1791-1866 (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1974).33 For network theory, see David Lambert and AlanLester, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering inthe Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University

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lectures and publications, Holyoake aimed to showthat “where freethought commonly ends secularismbegins.”34 The defining campaign for the Britishmovement was the struggle by Charles Bradlaugh(1833-1891), founder of the National SecularSociety (1866) who, upon his election in 1880 asthe member for Northampton in the House ofCommons, fought for the right to take his seatwith a non-religious affirmation of loyaltyinstead of an oath. According to Royle, secularismas preached by Holyoake never enjoyed the level ofpopular success of earlier chartism or Owenitesocialism, possibly because of its antagonism toreligion, though good speakers could gatherconsiderable crowds to public lectures and thiswas no less true in Australia as it was in thesecularist heartland of northern England.35 InAustralia, as Frank Bongiorno has been the mostactive in articulating, radical religion and anti-religion including secularism, freethought,Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other radical creeds,often came coupled together in an alternative

Press, 2006); Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identitiesin Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge,2001); Garry M. Magee, and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire andGlobalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World,c. 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2010).34 George Jaocob Holyoake, The Origin and Nature of Secularism.Showing That Where Freethought Commonly Ends Secularism Begins(London: Watts, 1896), 58-87.35 Royle, Infidels, 287. For further assessment ofHolyoake, see Graeme Smith, A Short History of Secularism(London: Tauris, 2008), 172-173. The hardcoremembership may have been as few as 3,000.

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program for the individual and society, whichencompassed sexual, religious, political, andsocial reform, albeit for what was a smallintellectual elite.36

Secularism for Holyoake and his heirs was seennot just as an observable social phenomenon thatmight be measured by reference to churchattendance and the prominence of religious ritualsin public life, but as an organic process movingsociety in a more positive, modern, and, indeed,millenarian direction. It was partly because ofsuch claims that secularism became a target forhostile critique by theological and politicalconservatives as more or less synonymous withatheism, ‘modernism’, and an undefined conspiracyto overthrow Christian society and replace it withgodless socialism. While Holyoake’s Australianfollowers were few in number,37 the churches were

36 See especially Frank Bongiorno, “In This World andthe Next: Political Modernity and Unorthodox Religionin Australia, 1880-1930,” Australian Cultural History 25(2006): 179-207. The categories of ‘Unbelief’ in theAustralian Census from 1901-1933 included Agnostic,Deist, Freethinker, No Denomination, Rationalist,Socialist, Spiritualist, Other, No Religion, Atheist,and No Reply. See Roe, Beyond Belief, 385, table 6.37 For followers of Holyoake in Australia, seeAustralian Dictionary of Biography entries: C. E.Sayers, “Syme, George Alexander (1822-1894),” accessedMay 5, 2012, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/syme-george-alexander-4938; C. E. Sayers, “Syme, Ebenezer(1825-1860),” accessed May 5, 2012, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/syme-ebenezer-4680; C.E. Sayers, “Syme, David (1827-1908),” accessed May 5,2012, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/syme-david-4679;

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sufficiently mobilised by the perceived threat ofsecularism that there systematic attempts tocounteract its most alarming features. WalterPhillips has written the history of the Protestantcampaign to provide legal protections forChristianity, effectively bolstering Australia’sclaim to be ‘a Christian country’ more or less forthe first time. This was a curious developmentgiven that establishment was in general anathemato British Nonconformity, which suggestsconsiderable acclimatisation to Australianconditions.38 Despite their fears, denominationalChristianity was not under any realistic threat atthis time, partly because of the immense field ofopportunity that was being opened up to theChristian churches in the British Empire. Thefever for mass emigration to the new settlercolonies was at its height at more or less thesame time as anxieties over the religiouscommitment of the working classes. For bothproblems, religious authorities suggested thatmigration may provide a solution to the problem orat least send the problem somewhere else.

The hostility and defensiveness of theinstitutional churches to secularism arose fromthe perception that it was, potentially at least,

E. M. Finlay, “Supple, Gerald Henry (1823-1898),”accessed May 5, 2012,http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/supple-gerald-henry-4670; G. W. Symes “Ross, John (1833-1920),” accessedMay 5, 2012, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ross-john-4507. None were influential in launching a secularistmovement in Australia. 38 Phillips, Defending “A Christian Country”; Phillips, TheProtestant Churchmen’s Campaign Against Secularism.

29


a fully-fledged rival to religious systems ofthought with its own humanistic philosophy andsystem of moral norms. This might be demonstratedby reference to the life story of the HenryElliott (1814-1857), Anglican chaplain to theconvict penal station of Norfolk Island.39 In1862, when secularism was beginning to beorganised into its societies in Britain andelsewhere, the Reverend E. Strickland published abiography of Elliott that was probably intended toprovide motivational material to encouragecandidates for the hard-pressed Anglican colonialministry. Another, however, was to demonstrate thecapacity of the national church (that is theChurch of England) to achieve conversions fromwhat Strickland referred to as “the mazes ofsecularism.” The early chapters of the book aredevoted to recounting Strickland’s successfulcampaign to secure Elliott’s conversion toChristianity and a vocation on the colonialministry. Elliott studied Platonism, Spinoza,Berkeley, Strauss, and the “French infidels”before adopting a resolutely secular philosophywhich be believed as good as Christianity:declaring:

I abandon all my previous professions, religiousand political; I go to no place of worshipwhatever, and yet I think I am as moral as manywho do go. I have no confidence in the purity ofthe text of Scripture, on account of thevariations of manuscripts. I discard all miracles;

39 E. Strickland, The Australian Pastor: A Record of the RemarkableChanges in Mind and Outward State of Henry Elliott (London:Wertheim, Macintosh & Hunt, 1862).

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and yet, accept the morality of the New Testament;because, in all my reading, I never met with sucha sublime concept as this: ‘Love your enemies,bless them that curse you, do good to them thathate you, and pray for them which despitefully useyou, and persecute you’.40

Strickland states that he visited Elliottfrequently over a period of three years to argue“heathen v Christian philosophy” until Elliottcalled on him one night to announced that the hadbecome a “conformist.” Strickland began traininghim for the Anglican ministry almost immediatelyand was instrumental in securing him anappointment with the Society for the Propagationto the Gospel to Norfolk Island.

Without the financial resources of theestablished church and its missionary societies,secularists were hard-pressed to provideinstitutional support for converts to themovement. Holyoake went some way to providingsecularist alternatives to traditional religions,such as ethical rules that could be followed insecularist schools and secularist rituals fornaming of children, marriage, and memorials forthe dead. While hostile to the truth claims madeby institutional religion, he argued thatsecularism as a creed was completely tolerant andeven-handed to religious beliefs of all kinds andpromoted inter-creedal harmony where Christianitydemanded exclusivity and conflict.41 Such views

40 Strickland, The Australian Pastor, 11.41 Holyoake, Secularism, 68. This work concludes with achapter on ‘Secularist Ceremonies’ on marriage, namingchildren (where he recommended that names be avoided

31


have traditionally been used to promote secularismas preferred government policy. For example, DrJohn Wilkins argues that secularism is not hostileto religion but was a means to promote pluralismof belief and thus protect religion fromideological coercion.42

Despite Holyoake’s aspirations for tolerance,secularism had a belligerent streak and proveditself to be an effective vehicle for anti-clericalism in Australia. As a settler colony witha dynamic, moving population of recently arrivedmigrants—mostly from the United Kingdom andIreland—Australia soon acquired Secularistsocieties of its own, part of a rich cornucopia ofreligious commodities of every colour and creed.43

Australian secularists provided alternatives forthose who wished to maintain household rituals andmoral teaching without the forms devised by theinstitutional church. To this end, the AustralianSecular Association issued a ‘Lyceum Tutor’ foruse at the Secularist Sunday School. This allowedthe neophyte to build their knowledge of thesecular system and provide their own forms of

which created expectations that the child might notwish to live up to), reading at a grave, where hesuggested Esdra and Uriel as ‘an argument in which theProphet speaks as a Secularist’, or at the grave of achild.42 John Wilkins, “The Role of Secularism in ProtectingReligion,” in The Australian Book of Atheism, ed. WarrenBonett (Melbourne: Scribe, 2010), 314.43 For religious settlement throughout the settlerempire, see Hilary M. Carey, God’s Empire: Religion andColonialism in the British World (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2011).

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moral education, burial service, and ethicalpractice.44 It recommended that freethinkers formthemselves into twelve groups to make up a fullLyceum, which would be called by suitable namessuch as Liberty, Fraternity, Harmony, or Dawn.Typical meetings included marching, record ofattendance, reading of poems and anthems whichwere called “Leaves of Liberty” and “Flowers ofFreethought,” as well as Calisthenics, singing,and lessons.

Students were instructed: “Wear badges on leftbreast. Breathe deeply while reading or singing.Be punctual. Let everyone who can bring flowers.Be courteous.” The flowers were not literalblooms, but poems and moral epigrams. Appropriatechoices for ‘Freethought Flowers’ includedextracts from the Transcendentalists poets such asWalt Whitman. For example, Whitman’s “Selfhood”celebrated the principle of masculine independencefrom the burden of civic and religious duty: “Othe joy of manly selfhood!/ To be servile to none,to defer to none, not to any tyrant known orunknown,/To walk with erect carriage, a stepspringy and elastic/ … To be a man indeed.”45

Another good choice was the Scottish politicalhymn “The Tree of Liberty,” attributed to (and

44 Bernard O’Dowd, ed. The Australian Secular Association LyceumTutor (Melbourne: Tyzack & Picken, 1888).45 O’Dowd, The Australian Secular Association, 8. For a readingof the poem by Robbie Coltrane and a discussion of thequestionable attribution of this poem to Burns, see“More About this Poem,” BBC Scotland, accessed June 22,2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/the_tree_of_liberty/

33


rendered in standard English by) Robert Burns(1759-1796) though these days there isconsiderable doubt about whether Burns did writethis: “Heard ye of the tree of France?/ I know notwhat’s the name of it/ Around it all the patriotsdance,/ Well Europe knows the fame of it./ Itstands where once the Bastille stood,/ A prisonbuilt by kings, man,/ When superstition’sloathsome brood./ Kept France in leading strings,man.” Freethinking children were also trained todefend themselves from “superstition’s loathsomebrood” and other demons of idolatry. For example,a Conductor was instructed to lead through alengthy question and answer sequence of which thefirst few exchanges went as follows and included arejection of all forms of belief – past andpresent, Eastern and Western:

Conductor. What has been the prevailing feature ofthe religions of the past?Lyceum. The worship of IdolsConductor. What is an idol?Lyceum. Something made by man for the purpose ofworship.Conductor. How many kinds of Idols are there?Lyceum. Two, Physical and Mental.Conductor. What are physical idols?Lyceum. Real things, which through ignorance, manconsiders worthy of worship.Conductor. What are Mental idolsLyceum. Those created by man’s imagination.Conductor. Give examples of Physical idols!Right Division. The fetishes of the Negroes, thejosses of the lower Chinese.Left Division. The golden calf of the Israelites,the sacred cats of the Egyptians.

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Conductor. Of mental idols!Right Division. The Jove of the Romans, theJehovah of the Jew and Christian.Left Division. The Woden, the Thor and the Freyaof our own ancestorsRight Division. The Brahma of the Hindu.Left Division. The Manito of the Red Indian.Conductor. Is it right to worship idols?Lyceum. No it is a crime against reason.Conductor. Beware of it in every form, it can butstunt the growth of three mind, and clip the wingsof the airy aspiration!Lyceum. Idolatry is concealed in many beautifulbeliefs as poison often lurks in lovely flowers. Conductor. When we are unable to provescientifically the existence of a thing, we haveno right o assume its existence and to worship it.Lyceum. For our experience is our only guide tothe realms of Truth?46

If these tussles with idolatry provoked any childto fears of the night, there were also soothingwords to settle them, such as “A Request” by W.W.Collins:

Let the shades of evening gather round my bed.Let the sweet soft light come streaming near myhead....Let no superstitious priest stand near my bed,Bring no cruel ghastly symbol near my head,Let no word of idle meaning vex mine ear,Let the soft, soft hand of kindness ever dearSmooth my pillow, ease my pain, clasp the handthat colder grows;Hushed my voice, my eyelids close in last repose.47

46 O’Dowd, The Australian Secular Association, 10.47 O’Dowd, The Australian Secular Association, 8.

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By 1887, the Sydney secularists (who wererather more successful than their brethren inAdelaide) had funds to build their own hall, whichthey claimed would be devoted “to teaching thehighest of all religions – the Religion ofHumanity.”48 Despite these ambitions, Jill Roenotes that secularism and its rituals never reallyacclimatised to the Australian scene and peteredout in the harsh economic times of 1890sdepression. Equally indigestible for respectableworking-class intellectuals who might otherwise beattracted to the movement was the sexualadventurousness and malleability of the beliefs ofsome of its major proponents, a number of whomfollowed a trajectory from radical Protestantism,particularly various kinds of Methodists andBaptists, via Unitarianism, ‘Socialism’,Secularism, and Atheism, then back to esotericreligion of which Theosophy and Spiritualism werethe most successful. This was not a turning awayfrom religion—as other historians of Victorianunbelief have noted—so much as its obsessivemirror image, and the debating hall was itsnatural church.49

Another important vehicle for the secularistagenda in Australia was provided by the debateabout state funding for education. The strength offeeling generated by this issue is difficult formodern Australians to appreciate, as many haveinherited the assumption that the state takesresponsibility for the funding of free,48 Quoted by Roe, Beyond Belief, 35.49 Quoted by Roe, Beyond Belief, 33-37.

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compulsory, and secular education. This consensus,however, was not achieved without a significantstruggle that was probably the single mostimportant political issue in the middle decades ofthe nineteenth century in the emerging Australiandemocracies. The next section will consider howthese residual debates were played out in thesecularising age of the late twentieth century.

Secularism in Post-colonial AustraliaAs a post-colonial settler society, Australia hasprovided an interesting laboratory for thesecularist thesis, with ongoing decline of allmainline Christian denominations, but alsoresilience and revival in some sectors of thereligious spectrum. Reflecting their origins inthe British secularist movement, Australianadvocates of secularism in education have tendedto align with the political left. This dominantinterpretation is very evident in the collectionof essays edited by Max Wallace, entitled RealisingSecularism. This book was the outcome of conferencesheld in 2008 in Sydney and Wellington. The Sydneyconference was sponsored by the NSW Greens,particularly John Kaye and Lee Rhiannon. TheWellington conference was sponsored by the NewZealand Humanist Society (NZHS) and the NewZealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists(NZARH). The object of these conferences was toassert Australia’s secular credentials and to‘realise’ the secularist project against Christianlobbyists: “our collective purpose was to countermany Christian advocates, who, since our nationswere colonies, have attempted to unfairly identify

37


our nation with their faith. We say the diversityof our citizens and their beliefs should berecognised through the political structures of ourgovernments and their practices.”50 Counteringclaims by Christian lobbyists, Bill Cooke, forexample states: “New Zealand is not a ‘Christiancountry’. It was not ‘founded on Christianprinciples’, and the secular nature of the countryis not a myth.”51 He backs up his argument withstatistics showing the contemporary decline ofchurch attendance and historically by assertingthat Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and theUtilitarians had more impact on the foundingcharacter of New Zealand than the variousreligious beliefs of the settlers.

In essence, these views represent a continuanceof the ‘Eight Nights’ Debate by Selby and Green in1886 and—like that earlier debate—there can be nofinal winners for the excellent reason thatcultural issues are not open to definitivesolutions. Religious beliefs, like a politicalcommitment to secularism in contemporaryAustralian society, reflect personal views thathad been shaped in many cases over generations.The debate is not one for historians, because onboth sides of the debating table there is a lackof detachment. Hence, I profoundly disagree withthe view of Lloyd Geering, that: “Secularization[...] is irreversible because it has come aboutbecause of the great increase in our knowledge

50 Max Wallace, ed. Realising Secularism. Australia and New Zealand(Sydney: Australia New Zealand Secular Association,2010), preface.51 Wallace, Realising Secularism, 20.

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about this world – the world we live in. And thatknowledge is not going to be replaced in somefuture time by our former ignorance.”52 This ismore or less a restatement of the thesis proposedby Max Weber about science and the disenchantmentof the world. Yet this is precisely what is mostopen to debate and discussion. Scientificknowledge has been no impediment to the co-existence of alternative, religious explanationsof reality in Australia or elsewhere. I am evenless convinced by Geering’s assertion that therise of secularism in New Zealand was the productof the activities of the various Secularist andFreethinker Societies, or the success of the movesto secularise schooling, interesting though theseare in indicating the influence of Holyoake in thedecades after his death.

A much less explored problematic in relation tothe secularism thesis in the West has been theimpact of postmodernism. Religious historians havebeen slower to take on the implications of the newterms of debate. Yet they have wide implicationsfor the way in which we continue to read religiousdiscourse. The Cambridge theologian, John Milbank,has formulated the transformation in traditionaltheology wrought under the impact ofpostmodernism. One of the more interesting hasbeen the re-engagement with theology byphilosophers whose discipline had been severedfrom it by the Enlightenment disengagement fromreligion. Milbank begins with the proposition thatthe fundamental change has been the overturn ofthe acceptance that there is a single universal

52 Wallace, Realising Secularism, 40.

39


truth toward which modern intellectual endeavouris leading us, or, to put this in his own words:“The end of modernity, which is not accomplished,yet continues to arrive, means the end of a singlesystem of truth based on universal reason, whichtells us what reality is like.”53 In the place ofa single reality described in the chimericalmodernist project, ‘postmodernity’ posits theexistence of what Milbank supposes to be anendless series of true narratives of reality,which are not random and disorderly, but whichhave their own subjects, theses, and plots. Whatinterests the postmodern scholar is not thediscovery of points of truth in this infinitespace of competing realities, but rather therelationships between propositions and how theyare structured and given legitimacy.54 Animportant corollary of this is the collapse of thehierarchy of the sciences with particularly severeconsequences for modernist discourses that madepressing claims to explicate the meaning of thesubject, both in individuals and in human history.Those named by Milbank are Freudianism, Marxism,and sociology, but he might also have mentionedthe secularisation thesis – namely that every day,in some way, we are getting better and better,more modern, less religious, and less enchanted bythe religious solutions provided in the past.

53 John Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: AShort Summa to Forty-Two Responses to UnaskedQuestions,” in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed.Graham Ward (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1997),265.54 Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” 266.

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Milbank alerts us to the existence of a similarchallenge posed by postmodernism to the modernistdiscourse of history. Like theology, history has apre-modern genealogy that exists in uneasyalliance with modernist and postmodern narrativesof the past. The allure of secularisation is thatit suggests that history may in some ways becapable of being reversed, or at least fractured.Instead of a single path to modernity, there aremany, and some at least will involve theintensification of religious expression andcommitment and new arrangements and accommodationwith the state.

ConclusionThis essay has explored some themes in the longhistory of the secularist movement as these relateto Australia. I would like to conclude bysuggesting that religious historians have animportant role to play in the secularisationdebate. In the first place, they can resist grandnarratives of secularism and modernisation which,as noted in the first section that considered thelong history of secularisation in the old world,have acted as legitimating rhetoric for theconsolidation of power by opportunistic elites.Religious historians can remember the counternarratives of religious minorities and the deeperhistories of the rise and fall of particularregimes and their particular strengths andfoibles. They can remember the dignity andabsurdity of small events such as the Adelaidedebate between the Reverend R.M. Green and hisadversary, Isaac Selby, whose dispute so

41


challenged the chairmanship of the Adelaide LordMayor in 1886, or the unfortunate fate of theReverend John Elliott, whose conversion fromsecularism to Anglicanism ensured him a longsentence as convict chaplain on Norfolk Island.

We can also benefit from conversations withscholars in related disciplines, includingsociologists, theologians, and religious studiesout of which many of the most fruitfulinterpretations of the historical implications ofsecularisation theories has come. We would do wellto follow the example of the eminent Englishhistorical sociologist, Hugh McLeod, who has beenactive in providing a critique of deterministtheories of secularisation and those which providetoo short a time scale for the tides of history:“The idea of secularization was familiar longbefore the word was widely used,” he suggests, andthe idea that Christianity was under attack fromthe ‘world’ (saeculum) is almost as old asChristianity itself.55 He notes that the manymodern secular thinkers who argued since the 1820sthat religious decline was inevitable andlaudatory have not lived to see the reversal oftheir views by the evidence of the new visibilityof religion in modern times. He takes note ofcriticism that such views are effectively “wishfulthinking by the secularist intelligentsia” or that

55 McLeod, “Secularization,” in The Oxford Companion toChristian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000), 653. For contributions to thesecularisation debate that draw on McLeod, see CallumG. Brown and Michael Snape, eds, Secularisation in the ChristianWorld (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).

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secularisation as a thesis may be true, but onlyin relation to Europe.56 The United States, the‘other’ worlds of the global South and East, andpossibly the new European settler coloniesincluding Australia, appear to have been lessvulnerable to the phenomenon. Religion in thecontemporary world being remade in the wake of thecollapse of Communism, and Soviet and Americanpolitical and economic ascendancy over formersatellite and client states in the Middle East andAsia, is equally uncertain. He concludes thatwhile secularisation in Western nations appearsindisputable, what are its causes and whether itis irreversible is much more doubtful. A similardoubt lies over the extension of thesecularisation experiment in Australia though itis to be hoped that researchers will continue tocollaborate, as they have done for this volume, onexploring these central issues for our times.

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