There is going to be a chap from the Australian Christian Lobby on ABC1's QandA this week and I was asked what I think of the organisation.
I absolutely know that in many conversations about politics, I confuse people because I do not fit into people's assumptions of what they think that my political standpoint is. I tend towards the economic left, which would make me a socialist but not an authoritarian communist; I sit roughly in the middle of the authoritarian/libertarian axis, which makes both ends confused; and when it comes to the issue of religion and the state, I absolutely think that people's opinions that are expressed should reflect their religious beliefs and I also think that the state and religion should stay unmeshed. To that end, I do not like the Australian Christian Lobby.
I do not like the Australian Christian Lobby because I simply do not believe that they are what they say they are.
Politics is the art of the negotiation and enactment of policy. Policy is the statement of what you intend to do. On the face of it, the Australian Christian Lobby should be about the enactment of policy of things that Christians care about. In a pluralistic secular society, which is simultaneously multi religious, areligious, and irreligious, the enactment of laws with regards to explicitly moral ends are not only impossible but downright dangerous. If one of the base assumptions of Christianity is that everyone is terrible (which is not that difficult to prove by demonstration), then giving people the ability to make laws on the basis of some moral standing can only result in the weaponisation of morality and the rank hypocrisy of people purporting to hold up that moral standard. The old proverb that it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the barrel is exactly backwards when you consider that there were no good apples in the barrel to begin with.
Possibly by accident Australia chose to invent its own political culture but by about the mid 1920s we reverted to looking a bit British and then from the 1950s onwards we staunchly refused to invent a truly unique cultural environment; instead choosing to import our culture and opinions from the United States. To that end, in America which has remained oddly religious, there has been a very deliberate cultivation of Christians as a voting bloc for the express purpose of the maintenance of power. Christians in America it seems, are just as easily duped into voting for awful people as the people of Germany were back in the 1930s; just as long as a few magic hot button words are bandied around.
In America, provided you can yell words like 'abortion' and 'gay marriage' often enough, then 35% of the electorate will vote for literally anyone. The Australian Christian Lobby was founded in 1995 and way after the Moral Majority in the United States had already pioneered the art of political engineering. As far as I can tell the Australian Christian Lobby appears to be operating from that same playbook because we are being culturally primed by broadly the same media sources.
The absolute earliest mention that I could find about them in the media, was from a 1995 article in the Sydney Morning Herald:
A Christian lobby group plans to poll all candidates in the next Federal election on morals issues, setting the scene for an American-style debate on abortion, euthanasia, pornography and homosexuality.
The Australian Christian Coalition (ACC) said it would widely publish the results of the questionnaire - a method commonly used by Christian Right activists in the United States to weed out candidates considered unacceptable.
There is a massive pendulum swing under way, which will sweep the anti-family forces away and those candidates who ignore this swing do so at their electoral peril," he said.
(The ACC's president,) Mr John Gagliardi, said the group was composed of "decent Australians who have simply had enough of noisy, dangerous minority lobbies ... foisting anti-family, trendy philosophies on the rest of the country".
- Jodie Brough, Sydney Morning Herald, 2nd Nov 1995
From the outset, it looks like the Australian Christian Coalition which then became the Australian Christian Lobby explicitly ran the same lines of political rhetoric. Perhaps that's not surprising as John Gagliardi was a former editor the Telegraph in Brisbane (which was the afternoon tabloid); then the editor of the Townsville Bulletin; then Chief of Staff of National Nine TV News.
While I do not have an in principle objection to a right-wing lobby group trying to influence politics for its ends, if from the beginning you have a former News Corp editor running a political lobby group, then please forgive me if I do not think that it appears to be very Christian in character.
I would hope that Christians are concerned about the same things that that Christ chap was concerned about. Since morality and things of a spiritual nature are best contested in people's hearts and minds, then the enactment of public policy should consign itself to the things that the state should be concerned about. On that front, both Christ and secular government have in interest in the welfare of people. Jesus was deeply concerned about the poor, widows, the sick, people from different religious backgrounds and cultures, and about demonstrating practical care for people. The thing is that I simply do not see that the Australian Christian Lobby even cares enough to bat an eyelid when it comes to these issues. I have never heard them speak out about our shameful treatment of refugees, I have never heard them speak about the subject of things like healthcare or homelessness, and when it comes to issues such as inequality, injustice, and inequalities which the Commonwealth has exacted and continues to exact, they are complicitly silent. In those respects, they appear not to be either able or willing to do the job that the name of their organisation suggests.
This makes me ask the question of what the Australian Christian Lobby is actually for, since it is demonstrably not about lobbying for the things that Christians should be concerned about. My suspicion is that it is not about lobbying governments but is about lobbying Christians; who can be led in places that they wouldn't normally go. The end point is not about influencing government to enact Christian principles (because in 25 years I just do not see the evidence that that has happened) but rather yelling a few magic words to make Christians vote in a certain way.
It is very easy to fleece a flock if you've pulled the wool over their eyes.
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