Why people are still yearning for religious values and connection

Politics is, among other things, the art of expecting and managing unintended consequences of action, and the great politician, as opposed to the theorist or the administrator, is one who can turn on a point, with a new plan and purpose.

Even so, what has come to pass with the handling of the religious discrimination bill has been an exemplar of the principle that if you try hard enough, you can make the very exact opposite of what you wanted to happen come to pass.

The top-level stuff-up was the stuff of future legend: a religiously devout, not to say obsessive, prime minister sought to extend the reach of religion in life, and wedge Labor with those uneasy at its strong orientation to secular progressivism. Instead, he split his government, made Labor look unified and focused, revived the long buried social-liberal wing of his party as openly defiant, supplied an organisational frame to them from without, and created such a disaster of the bill that after 24 hours its sponsors were urging cancellation. That is Night of the Long Prawns stuff.*

But if the fun has something more portentous to it, it’s the deeper pull of what the Morrison centre and his religious supporters sought to do. The RDB’s purpose was in the field of education above all, to renormalise the “standard” sort of childhood and teenagerdom, that of straight, body-congruent gender identity — and away from the relativisation and pluralisation that various state government programs have applied.

But that move quickly reversed itself when protection of LGB children — anachronistically labelled “gay” — was offered up to dissident Liberals, whilst holding the line on the permissability of excluding trans children was maintained to appease religious orgs with schools.

Once these categories were established — in contradiction of the increasing fluidity between identity and sexuality, as a reality on the ground — the move looked less like the reinforcement of traditional values than some grotesque act of child sacrifice in which the smallest minority of children would be singled out for a social execution.

It was as if a committee, after months of drafting an exacting rural production policy, had come to the unavoidable conclusion that the wheat harvest could only be saved with the human sacrifice of three children on an altar in the fields — and moderates and hardliners were now arguing about the number. Maybe five? Would two do? Three to be sure.

The political horse-trading had thus rendered the trans child as a fetishised object, and thus a scapegoat, bearing away the sins of the world. But that then reversed, and the trans/non-binary/genderfluid child regained their place as the standard by which the system was to be judged. That reaffirmed the very cultural framework the churches were trying to challenge. No wonder, as the bill headed towards the upper house, that various religious peak bodies told the government to give up on it.

That in turn points to the impossibility at the heart of what religious organisations are trying to do, in drawing a line round their multi-branching empires. No one really objects to religious organisations controlling who gets to be admitted to their actual “faith staffs” — their priests, their divines, their helpers — or their congregations (those few who do are definitely secular totalitarians).

But as soon as the organisation is extended to running schools, hospitals and the like, a secular and universal standard must take over — one which acknowledges that such institutions are plugged into an open and pluralist society, in which multiple discourses of self and life are going at all times.

This is encoded in the fact that we have state registration and standards for being a school or a hospital, which demand certain minimum conditions of practice — subjects offered, standards adhered to. The compulsory nature of maths and science teaching enforce the idea that there is a common and universal truth attached to the practice of science, with whatever religious variations are laid on top of that.

In that sense, no school is really independent in the way that one could simply set up a school in the 19th century and let the market judge the usefulness of your teaching methods. The system gives some sort of exemption to various “alternative method” schools, especially at lower levels, and it doesn’t require schools to offer every subject — but those subjects offered have to conform.

So really, there is simply “school”, with a few different front-ends, and it is implicit in the system that — aside from the question of actual religion — any child should be able to go to any school in the system. The school might choose children whose families profess its religion, over those who don’t, for its limited places. But the idea that the school’s religion can or should allow the rejection of a child for “other qualities” is, at its root, a logical sleight-of-hand.

The question then is, how far does that extend into the positive value system that the school teaches? Should literalist monotheistic schools be able to teach proper science in science classes, but then teach in religion classes that that is simply the master’s discourse, required to pass state exams, and that Earth is really 6000 years old? I would say, yes, they should be able to do that.

Should they be able to teach some of these noxious cosmologies that suggest that the disabled are paying for the acts of a previous life? I would have said no, because — in its post-1960s mindfuck Christian form — it wholly undermines the capacity of the disabled child to see themselves as an equal in a way that makes citizenship and flourishing possible.

That is, essentially, the application of an irreducible secular minimum to group beliefs, a limit to pluralism that is particularly associated with personal development of a non-adult. There should obviously be no ban on teaching the idea to adults, or professing it — it forms the centre to the new age self-help books of Louise Hay, for example, which have sold millions of copies. But what of Hindu or Buddhist schools, teaching karma and reincarnation, which have (less persecutory) aspects of that stance?

The Catholic church argues that same-sex attraction is not a sin but acting on it is, and the same-sex attracted should respond with celibacy. Should they be allowed to teach that to children? I would have thought yes, but possibly no. But in none of these cases should permission to teach such partial doctrines license the exclusion of anyone from the school itself.

The standard secular/progressive response to these complexities — and in some cases, perversities — is to simply argue for a wholly secular, government-run school system. Well, good luck. Religion is growing as every other framework for shared social meaning is coming apart, battered by the spread of a nihilistic markets, the de-socialising, hyper-individuating effects of social and communicative technologies, and the de-concretising effects of generalised scientific understanding.

Religion is what people are reaching for as an antidote to the very things that secular progressives are offering as a cure for hidebound tradition.

Indeed, one of the reasons that the ALP has been so wary of being seen to persecute religious organisations is less to do with literal religionists than with those not-very-or-at-all religious parents sending their children to religious schools to gain a degree of internal socialisation, self-command and capacity for obligation and service to a fixed moral code — one they see as lacking in secular state schools, open to the flows of mass culture, and teaching forms of secular hyper-individualism, whose insufficient capacity to “ground” children and teenagers may be as much or more to blame for high-risk and self-harming behaviours as the actual persecution of marginal groups.

Many parents, in that sense, aren’t paying for the shaping of a mind with trigonometry — all that stuff can be got in a trice later — but for the shaping of a soul.

It’d be better that that form of grounding were given to children by a form of education that combined growing, tending, building, art practice, embodied immersion in art and culture, with writing and screens, but that ain’t going to happen en masse anytime soon either — and it may well be that decades of progressive educationists have put too much hope in changed forms of education alone. It may be that some form of the transcendent sacred — of a generous and expansive, not brittle and literalist type — is necessary for the optimum development, even if it is discarded later.

Many parents availing themselves of these schools don’t want to see the state dictating how they teach too greatly, for fear they might wreck the formula that makes the education work. As atomised nuclear-family individualism becomes the dominant mode by which people will live their lives — as the capacity to even imagine being part of kin, clan, neighbourhood, trade, profession, locale or abiding workplace becomes so diluted and attenuated that many grow up without it, religion becomes the sense of community you can carry around with you.

Hence the spread of explicit religion among the actively political centre-right, as seen in the Liberal Party, where there once would have been lip-service to Christian culture and de facto agnosticism in the ranks.

So no form of enforced secularism is going to win. Any attempt to do so will simply revive imperious religious assertion faster than it would otherwise recover after this tactical blow. No single, simple principle is going to be able to applied to the question, and certainly not one privileging secularism in its totality. Crafting a real agreement on the boundaries of religious and secular values, of group rights and individual ones is going to be messy, particular work performed not in the airy heights of reason, but down in the foul rag and bone shop, the heart of the heartless world.

*In 1974 Labor lost its Senate majority after being unable to get their hands on the signed resignation form of a DLP senator, whom they were frantically searching for through the corridors of Parliament House, not knowing that the bloke, usually ostracised, had been tempted into the office of a scheming National Country member, who kept him past submission deadline, with company, beer… and a feast of unlimited amounts of his electorate’s succulent shrimp and yabbies. It was effectively the first scene of the 1975 coup.