separation of church and state: PM catches the fire, government already burning

It emerged this week that the Australian Prime Minister has recorded a personalised video message for the fundamentalist Christian group Catch the Fire to be played to a prayer meeting on Australia Day. According to the ABC:

In the video, Mr Howard says Christianity has been an enormous force for good and he congratulates Catch the Fire Ministries for organising the meeting.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, in the video the PM’s remarks include the following:

It’s also a time to reaffirm our commitment to shared values and our abiding loyalty to our nation, Australia.

Christianity has been an enormous force for good and has done more than anything else to shape the lives, not only of millions of Australians, but the character of our nation.

There is an obvious and fundamental issue with the most senior member of the Government, and the democratically appointed leader of the country, lending the credibility of his office to any religious group (the suggestion that Christianity has done “more than anything else” to shape the “character of our nation” is also highly dubious). Australia’s Constitution is not generally focused on individual rights or freedoms, and rather than entrenching the separation of church and state it establishes that the Commonwealth must not endorse or favour any particular religion in s 116 of the Constitution which states that:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

The High Court has not expanded or interpreted this section to effect any broader principle of separation. As such the question of how close is the relationship between the state and the church is an essentially political one, and it is a reasonable assertion (which Michael Hogan of the University of Sydney makes in this article) that the only real check on greater proximity between the two is the (perceived) political unpalatability of a Government being ‘in bed’ with a particular religion or religious denomination.

The recent record at a federal level is not encouraging, to say the least. In addition to our PM’s latest effort, we have:

• *the devoutly Catholic Health Minister’s interference in the release of an abortion pill
• *the same Minister’s more general agitation against abortion (see for instance the exerpt from a 2004 interview here)
• *the appointment of an openly anti-abortion church group to run publicly funded abortion counselling services
• *publicly funded hospitals run by the Catholic church forcing IVF programs out and refusing to offer abortion services or direct patients seeking those services to appropriate alternatives despite clear and direct opposition from the AMA
• *the Treasurer and other prominent politicians attending meetings of the evangelical Hillsong church group
• *the new leader of the opposition (who incidentally has received the Hillsong seal of approval) placing his strong Christian faith squarely in the public eye.

Meanwhile, a few fun facts about our friends at Catch the Fire:

*Central Catch the Fire figure, Danny Nalliah, has run in the past as a candidate for the highly conservative Family First Party (who Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce described as “not the sort of people you do preference deals with” in the lead up to the last election).

*In the 2004 election campaign Mr Nalliah released a pamphlet urging his followers to “Spot Satan’s strongholds in the areas you are living (brothels, gambling places, bottle shops, mosque, temples – Freemasons/Buddhist/Hindu etc …) bring it to your church and ask your intercessors, through the pastor, to pull these strongholds down.” (Source).

*Despite the spin currently being put on the judgment of the Victorian Court of Appeal, Mr Nalliah and another prominent member of Catch the Fire, Mr Scot, have not been exonerated following the finding of the Victorian Civil & AdministrativeTribunal that they had breached the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 (Vic) that a seminar run by Catch the Fire had the following effect:

the seminar taken as a whole incited hatred and contempt of and revulsion towards the religious beliefs of Muslims and thereby breached s.8 of the Act; that the statements made in the newsletter viewed objectively and in their totality were likely to incite a feeling of hatred towards Muslims and so breached s.8 of the Act; and that the content of the article, “An Insight into Islam by Richard”, when viewed objectively, incited hatred against and serious contempt for people who are Muslims and so too breached s.8 of the Act.

Whilst the Court of Appeal’s ruling means that that finding no longer stands, the effect of its orders is that the case against the two men and Catch the Fire has been remitted to the Tribunal for a new decision – not that the charges have been struck out forever (Court of Appeal judgment here).

*A recent post on the Catch the Fire website celebrates the record number of Muslims converted to Christianity in the last decade, describing this feat as part of a “spiritual revolution… underway throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.”

Such are the views of a group who receives the endorsement of the Prime Minister of our supposedly secular, liberal society. In 2005 some 57% of Australians were “worried” or “very worried” about “Islamic fundamentalism.” At what point should we worry about religious fundamentalism of all kinds, and the possibility that it is a threat not only because of bearded men with bombs, but because it is already directly influencing government policy in opaque and undemocratic ways?