words by Dominic Cadden
Jesus had it tough first time around, dealing with all the bitching and bullying from the Pharisees and the Romans, but it’d be no picnic if he comes to Australia now.
If the Heavenly Body descended for a third (or is it fourth?) time and landed slap-bang in the middle of Australia, he (or she) would become a tad confused and get stuck into that persecution trip again. Lots of people would be yelling His name, but paying Him no attention – they’d be talking to their footy team. The AMA would go after Him for practicing medicine without a licence, and the Department of Health would nail Him for opening graves. He’d find it hard to impress the surfers at Trigg Point with his walking on water, too, unless he actually cut some sick moves inside the barrels. Mind you, Aussies would probably milk that wine-into-water move for all it’s worth – just until the Liquor Licensing bureau turns up after there’s a Responsible Service of Alcohol complaint.
Australia is a tough gig if you are a Messiah, prophet, saint or even the one and only true God.
Attitudes to religion in Australia range from aggressive atheism to the fanatical, but with a sea of indifference in between. Australia has historically had a cynical attitude to religion, largely thanks to the Poms. It goes right back to the convict days, especially with morals crusader Governor Hunter ordering convicts to be flogged for even picking their nose in an ungodly manner. The convicts could handle the floggings, but they couldn’t stomach being forced to go to the church on Sundays, so they burnt it down. Then came Samuel Marsden, ‘The Flogging Parson’, who prayed for the convicts’ souls on Sundays and spent the rest of the week flogging the bejeezus out of their bodies. Many of them tattooed their backs with images of Christ on the cross and angels holding cups of blood, in order to give the impression that when they were being flogged, Christ himself was being whipped. In Tasmania, the convict women launched a more impressive protest in 1838. They were tired of morals campaigner Rev. William Bedford’s hypocrisy, so one day when he was giving a speech in front of the Governor, all 300 female prisoners at the Cascade Female Factory turned around and mooned him.
Christianity remains the number one religion in Australia, with a tad over five million Catholics and 3.7 million Anglicans (2006 census). Conveniently, Christianity is arguably the most ambiguous of all the major religions, allowing for the “Yeah, but … nah, but…” interpretation and selective adherence policy Australians tend to have towards rules and procedures. Even so, the proportion of the Australian population calling itself Christian is 64 per cent – considerably less than the UK’s 72 per cent – and a mere 15 percent of these Christians (at best estimate) attend Church every week.
Nearly 12 per cent of Australians confused census officers by crapping on about ‘spirituality’, denying any allegiance to a particular religion, but not putting themselves in the atheists’ camp (18.7 per cent) either. Obviously, it is typical for Australians to have a problem with the idea of any superior being, whether that’s the guy next door who hit the big time, a boss, or the Queen, so the concept of an all-powerful being is a bit much for some. (“Yeah? And who made YOU the boss of ME? You think you know EVERYTHING!”)
At the other end of the scale, Australia has long been the Promised Land for some of the more radical religious sects on the planet. In fact, the Aum Sect, the Japanese doomsday cult that killed 12 and injured 5500 in a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, was at home right in WA. Apparently WA was considered relatively safe from the doomsday prophesy, so they bought a 190,000 ha property 600 km north-east of Perth as a base to bring about bring about 'Armageddon'. There, in 1993, they practiced their sarin gas attack on sheep.
A very angry branch of the Indian spiritual sect Ananda Marga was also based in Australia. They were accused of bombing the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sydney in 1978, after also being involved in a knife attack at the Air India office in Melbourne and the assault of an Indian military attache in Canberra the previous year. All kinds of crackpot Christian cults set up here, no doubt attracted by the extremely generous tax exemptions on religions, including their commercial activities. Even in recent years, with much of the nation still bristling over Australians killed by the bombs of radical Muslims in Bali, whack-job Islamic extremists use Australia as a sounding board. Take Sheikh Wahwah, who was considered so extreme that he was banned from an Islamic conference in Indonesia. Yet in 2007, he publicly backed the use of suicide bombings in Iraq and Palestine, even if they killed Australians. Imam Sheik Al Hilaly, an Australian Sunni Muslim leader, felt OK about comparing women to uncovered meat. So freedom of religious expression is alive and well here, but typically Aussies will call for any radicals to pull their bloody head in quick-smart. In the case of Al Hilaly, there was such an outcry in the media and from Muslims themselves (especially the women) that he retired from his position.
Over time, the word ‘wowser’ has become a derisory term for anyone seeking to use religious morals to put down the typical Aussie dinky-di lifestyle of drinking, rooting, gambling, perving at porn or shopping and playing sport on the Sabbath. Despite this, Australia has been getting more religious this century. Between 1980 and the late 1990s, most Australians would talk about their religion like it was a genetic defect – it was just something they were, rather than something that was a result of their own conscious action. The break-up of religion in Australia has changed a lot, too. Since 2001, there are more Buddhists than Baptists, more Muslims than Lutherans, more Hindis than Jews and a shitload of Sikhs. This and other factors has seen Christian Australia firming up the battlefronts and getting on the attack.
Ironically, Christian Rightists have been using the same grassroots strategies as the Taliban. Local councils have become the great abortion clinics to terminate so-called immoral elements before they have a chance to gestate. With no reimbursement for election spending, local government candidates are particularly susceptible to blackmail (read: donations) from set voting blocks made up of Christians groups – if such groups haven’t already bankrolled a candidate of their own. At this level, they have often blocked proposals for the development of adult businesses and, most recently, Islamic schools. The worst case was in the Camden region, south of Sydney, where there are eight Catholic schools and three Christian schools, but Muslims are as welcome as a pork chop in a mosque. A proposal for an Islamic school led to protests and even pig heads left on the site at one stage. Only last year did the local council reluctantly open up 70 burial sites for Muslims in a site where 3000 graves remain, so the many Afghani, Iraqi and Iranian immigrants in the area had better plan on living a long time.
This incident at least showed how Australians usually beat down bigotry. Yes, apparently Allah is as fond of taking the piss as the next deity when things get out of hand. ‘Uncle Sam’, an Aussie Muslim comedian, responded to the Camden fiasco by running for mayor on an Islamic extremist platform that no doubt prompted a few calls to the National Security Hotline.
"I will build 10 Islamic schools, 10 mosques, 10 halal butchers and 10 halal taxi ranks! And we will make it the first Islamic state in Australia!" Uncle Sam told LIVENEWS.com.au. He also campaigned to remove all pubs, segregate women and men in their own cars, and encourage a ‘build what you like’ programme, where taxpayers could choose what infrastructure was developed, including playgrounds made from used Scud missiles, "as long as they were pointed at the infidels". Most saw the joke, but some people found it hard to tell after the ‘Reverend’ Fred Nile, the NSW Senator and leader of the Christian Democratic Party, had just the previous year called for a 10-year ban on Muslim immigration.
Ayatollah Fred Nile has been in State Parliament since 1981, harassing homosexuals, stamping out smoking, gambling and non-violent erotica, while keeping the really fun stuff, like opening Parliament with prayer (to his god only). Nile and the Christian Democrats were largely out on their own for years, but that all changed at the 2004 Federal election. Suddenly the Christian morals-based Family First came to power in the Senate, and the Australian Christian Lobby began bashing politicians with the ‘four per cent rule’ – the threat of mobilising a voting block of hard-line Christians (estimated to make up at least four per cent of all voters in most electorates) if a candidate or party met certain Christian values. This strategy is still going strong, most recently with pressure on politicians to support the proposed internet filter that would block 10,000 sites and in the process create nice government jobs for some hairy-handed monkeys.
Former Prime Minister Howard and his Deputy, Peter Costello, each had meetings with an obscure sect called The Exclusive Brethren while in office. The Exclusive Brethren, who number about 15,000 in Australia, essentially believe the world is evil, so they cut themselves away from it except to screw the rest of us for money. They have their own schools free from the contamination of non-Brethren and the devilish influence of computers. In 2007 there were 838 students in Brethren schools in Australia receiving $50 million in taxpayer recurrent funding (that’s just under $60,000 per student). They work in their own businesses (including office supply firm, National Office Assist), forbid members from going to university and they even have a special exemption from Australia’s compulsory voting system. But their party donations bought them time with the sitting Prime Minister. Since 2004 many Exclusive Brethren members (always acting alone, apparently, never on behalf of the sect) have turned up to be behind anti-Green campaigning in State elections, most notably in Victoria and Tasmania and anti-development campaigns in local councils.
Australians may try to lord it over you by boasting about their nation’s separation of church and state. This is rubbish, of course. Australians were in such a hurry to get together a Constitution so that the Federation could start on January 1st, 1901 ( a nice, easy date to remember), that the nation’s fathers forgot about things such as a bill of rights, or a separation of church and state.
That’s why a High Court challenge against the Federal and NSW State funding of the World Youth Day in Sydney last year (over $150 million combined) came to nothing. In a strange hypocrisy that typifies religion in Australia, the Pope’s major masses took
place at a horse track, and for its troubles the Randwick Racecourse was compensated $41 million. Worse, the Premier at the time, Morris Lemma, a Catholic, rushed through ‘annoyance laws’ so that $5,500 fines could be slapped on anyone who, for instance, handed out condoms to pilgrims, or politely invited them to a gangbang. Even Catholics were embarrassed. It was like Jesus calling for a police escort on Palm Sunday.
So while a ‘New Puritanism’ has risen up among the few, the majority of Australians still feel separated from both church and state. Their main temple is outdoors and they worship at various altars to sport, with all the Sabbaths from Friday to Sunday abused equally. Nineteen of the world’s 22 major religions are represented in Australia, making a kind of Lions side, with Buddha throwing his weight around in the forwards, Jesus and Muhammad looking to strike from either wing, while Krishna feeds the scrum. Hopefully they can all gel as a team.
