Religion's dying swan act: secularism is banishing it from the public square

All of the above, and much more, is simply omitted from the public square discussion.

I suggest the push to get more religious discourse into the public square will never work. The public are over it. But many of the religious will never get over it and will continue to grandstand from academic forums to evangelical pulpits.

I say good luck to them. They are serving the cause of the non-religious very well. The longer this dying swan act continues, so the more disaffected citizens will turn off. Politicians of all faiths and none will continue to pass laws based on the exchange of their very different views, and in the light of public opinion.

The conservatives among them can continue to come up with contrived secular reasons why, for example, Australia should not have gay marriage like New Zealand, or voluntary euthanasia, as elsewhere, or become a republic. Good luck to them too. They will hold out for as long as they can, but the weight of history, as detailed above, is against them.

And, of course, from the perspective of the advocates of the public square thesis this decline in overt religious commitment, and discussion of religious views in parliament, and the media, has got nothing to do with religion itself.

It has got nothing to do with the Royal Commission into institutional abuse of children in Australia and on-going, frequent mention of their privileged tax-exempt status and other privileges like exemption from legislation.

When your basic starting point is flawed like this, chances are the rest of your reasoning will be flawed.

Even more to the point, their attack on secularism refuses to engage a perspective such as that of American Presbyterian T. David Gordon ('The Decline of Christianity in the West? A Contrarian View' Ordained Services Online, May, 2007) who argued that if Christianity was waning, it is more due to the religious themselves having sufficient trust in their faith to be persuasive, absent the coercive power of the state.

He said: 'if religious people disbelieve in the power of the Christian gospel to compete on a level playing field; if religious people no longer believe that Christ's example and words have the power to attract people to him, then perhaps Christianity is indeed in decline. But the decline has nothing to do with assault from without, and everything to do with unbelief from within.'