Freedoms religious and social: an Australian stock-take

Historically, Christians have stood in ambiguous relation to various states, whether supporting them, being helped by them or contesting them. A constitutive element of liberal democratic states and the faith groups within them will always be what historian Martin E. Marty calls "collisions and doubts". Marty contests the worn-out metaphor of a line of separation between Church and State, or of a "wall" between them: "[t]he line has always been messy, the wall has always had breaches, and this will always be so." For K.A. Grant, the better metaphor is of a sea with unruly currents: "[w]ading into the turbulent waters of the relationship between church and state is always a treacherous affair, whether entering from the church or state side."

In other words, the subject of religious freedomis, to the uninitiated, basically one hot mess. It is a mess of people who do not and often cannot agree. But viewed generously, perhaps it has been an acceptable mess, having yet delivered a life together that remains one of the most peaceful on the planet. Although egregious (often indigenous) exceptions remain, the nation effectively educates its children, gives reasonable access to healthcare, and assists the disadvantaged to reengage with society-activities where faith-based organisations work in productive partnerships with Australia's nine jurisdictions. There is reason to hope that continued wading into these turbulent waters can make us stronger together, however scarifying is each generation's new flashpoint.

A common metaphor associated with discussions around religious freedom, borrowed from the third U.S. President and Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, was the notion of a "wall of separation" between the church and the State. However, this metaphor has created a quite unworkable frame for modern polities. Clearly churches are not "absolutely separate and distinct from the commonwealth", and the boundaries between them are not "fixed and immovable", to borrow from the conception of the eighteenth-century English philosopher John Locke, on whose thought Jefferson drew. It may be seductive to claim that heaven and earth are "things most remote and opposite" and that to mix them is to jumble opposites, as Locke also put it. But the notion is frankly preposterous, even if in many respects the purposes of churches and states do differ. The problem is that religion is not solely an inner matter of private belief and feeling.Christians, Muslims, and Jews know that they have an enormous amount to say about relationships, social structures, human wellbeing, and shared cultural and material space.

For the kernel of truth in Jefferson's "wall of separation" is that at all times and in all places, Christians have good reason to contend for a fundamental distinction between the Church's ministry and the State's acts of governance. Logically, however, this distinction cannot sustain hard notions of separation. Absent of tyranny, there can be no final disentanglement of religion from the political life of a community. There will always only ever be negotiation around various flashpoints and "common objects of love". When fights about the freedom of religion (or the lack of it) become couched as someone's utopian aspirations for freedom from religion, we enter totalitarianism.

Flagrantly abusing an historical moment, I will close with a parable of sorts.

In Richard Johnson Square on the corner of Hunter and Bligh streets in Sydney we find an obelisk that bespeaks the messy origins of Christian religion in Australia. Around the base of the memorial we find four plaques. The first simply advises that the obelisk was laid down by the N.S.W. Head of State in 1925. The second explains that it is "To the Glory of God", and commemorates the first Christian service held in Australia on February 3, 1788, about a week after the First Fleet landed in Port Jackson; and that Richard Johnson, Chaplain to the Fleet, was the preacher.

The third plaque continues that Johnson spoke on Psalm 116:12: "What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits to me?" This was either a great sermon, as convicts and jailers marvelled at their landfall after a long and treacherous sea-voyage, giving thanks to God for the hope of a new start. Or it was a terrible sermon, as the convicts eyed their chains; their jailers; the drab, alien and unremitting bush before them; and perhaps even timid onlookers peeping from that bush, almost invisible, with their skin coloured to match a summer sun more unbearable than any London slum-dweller had ever endured.

The fourth plaque tells us that the first church was built on the same site as that first sermon, but only lasted five years for reasons to do with the key verb on that final plaque. I wonder if we see some laconic 1920s humour in the ambiguity of this verb: it "burned". The verb is either a passive, as in "the church burned down"; or it is active, as in "they burned down the church". As it happens, convicts did the latter.

"Freedom" may be an odd notion to bring to those troubled times. But Johnson brought with him the freedom to hope in a generous God despite the apparent circumstances, while those convicts effected a "freedom" of sorts to find and live out their own kind of peace. The flaw in this "parable", of course, is an actual church burning, which we'd prefer not to condone; let us compassionately attribute it, in their case, to lives somewhat stressful. Of course for every church-burning convict, we might also point to a nineteenth-century Lutheran immigrant or to more recent Christian and Muslim asylum-seekers, all fleeing to our shores for an end to religious oppression.

Whatever the upshot of our most recent difficulties, Australia can continue to be the kind of place where competing accounts of peace are negotiated in good faith and despite the anxieties we all feel along the way. I pray that negotiations with Israel, and our community's deliberations on them, can lead us towards this place.