Faith and Modern Australia

Peter Kurti is Director of the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Australia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an ordained minister in the Anglican Church. Kurti has written extensively about issues of religion, liberty and civil society in Australia, and is the author of the excellent The Tyranny of Tolerance: Threats to Religious Liberty in Australia and Euthanasia: Putting the Culture to Death?, both published by Connor Court.

In his latest book he examines many questions about the place of religion in society and the role of Christianity in liberal Western societies. Other faiths, most conspicuously Islam, are also examined in this book, thus providing an important reminder that modern democratic government is distinguished by the robust capacity to foster cohesion amidst diversity. The lucid essays in this collection are a search for appropriate balances between the needs, beliefs and concerns of all citizens, both those who hold religious beliefs and those who do not. The essays examine these matters and uphold the classical liberal tradition of individual freedom under the rule of law.

Kurti shows that a true democracy must afford effective protection from arbitrary and capricious government. In Chapter One, “Culture and the Displacement of Virtue”, he identifies “a growing anxiety that, in Australia, something has changed for the worse in our culture”. As a result of the present emphasis on the “sensitivities of the individual”, he argues that the idea of “rights” has been weaponised and anti-discrimination laws are increasingly used to stifle expression of opinion, rather than simply to challenge bad behaviour. He explains how the value of “cultural diversity” is now wielded “as a sword by, or on behalf of, minorities to enforce acceptance of [their] practices and beliefs by the majority”.

Australia’s official policy of multiculturalism commenced in the 1970s under the Whitlam government. As Kurti notes, the concept of multiculturalism challenges assumptions about the extent to which a particular culture can be shared by all and held in common. As a result, “culture has become a contested arena in which factors of equality and power are considered to be both important and formative”. Because these factors are “weaponised” he believes that a “dictatorship of virtue” has emerged that is profoundly intolerant of freedom of speech, religion and conscience when the exercise of these freedoms is deemed “offensive” to someone. This mounting intolerance, which Kurti regards as “characteristic of a fetish of diversity”, poses a threat to individual freedom and the rule of law.

Kurti calls, therefore, for “a renewed understanding of culture as that which expresses a shared, common vision for our human and social flourishing”. Such flourishing, according to him, depends on recognition and protection of fundamental human rights and freedoms—including religious freedom, “not as a subordinate right but as one right coexisting with others”. Unfortunately, however, the present determination of the political establishment to defend self-identifying “victim” groups has, in Kurti’s opinion, produced “an oppositional confrontation between competing groups, each of which tends to deny it has any obligations to any other group”. This is not about preserving diversity, he says, but rather of regulating it and separating citizens into lines of ethnicity and so forth, which it does “by treating society as a collection of separate ethnic groups that are dependent upon government-managed responses to diversity”.

In Chapter Two, “Religion and the Ethics of Citizenship in a Secular Society”, Kurti examines questions arising in the search for an accommodation between the needs of religious people and the demands of citizenship in a secular society. “A broader culture war against religion is being waged in Australia,” he says. For instance, “when same-sex-marriage activists urge removal of anti-discrimination exemptions from religious groups committed to a traditional form of marriage, they effectively seek to impose their views and beliefs on those with whom they disagree”.

Kurti contends that the liberal order stands for peace through toleration and for individual freedom protected by the rule of law. He reminds us that respect for diversity needs always to be tempered by the rule of law. He sees a great danger in the ideological construct of “identity politics” eventually becoming “a source of social division and the diminution of liberty”. Support for “diversity” “must not give way to the strictures of identity politics that elevate the notional rights of a group above those of the individual”.

In our society, there are those who find any religious argument or reason for a policy unacceptable. In the hands of radical secularists, “the absence of justificatory dependence on God (or the Bible) is often elevated to a concerted effort to banish altogether any element of religious influence, in any circumstance, from the public sphere”. Yet, as Kurti points out: 

An Australian secular society denuded of religion will be an impoverished society because religion continues to shape the outlooks and aspirations of many. Religion … exerts an important influence on the way they participate in families, communities, and wider society. It thereby makes an essential contribution to our shared public life. Continuing antagonism to religion in the name of secularism can only diminish that public life and, with it, the lives of all Australians.

Chapter Three provides an examination of religious diversity from the perspective of the economics of religion, which “employs the same assumptions that inform economic enquiry into facets of life such as the family, education, and marriage”. According to Kurti, a supply-side analysis of the religious market and the behaviour trends of religious consumers would indicate that religion in this country is healthier than its secular critics realise. This analysis would demonstrate that religion remains a significant component of Australian life and culture.

Chapter Four surveys the religious roots of Western civilisation. Kurti notes that the very existence of our liberal-democratic society is built upon principles derived from Christianity, and that “Western civilisation would be changed beyond recognition were the Judeo-Christian inheritance excised altogether.” This chapter is primarily about the crucial role played by religion in the discovery of the individual, particularly in acknowledging the inalienable (“God-given”) rights of the individual. The Christian tradition forms an essential foundation of individual rights and the rule of law. “A belief in the capacity of the individual to do better, to change and improve,” Kurti explains, “is a mark of the impact of Christianity on Western civilisation”. He calls for the renewal of our commitment as a free and democratic society to the faith that has given us individual rights and the rule of law.

Kurti is a well-known expert on the moral implications of the legalisation of euthanasia. The next two chapters arise from his interest in arguments surrounding such legalisation. He explains that pre-approving this form of suicide is completely antithetical to the notion of human dignity, and it involves a rejection of the social obligations human beings owe to one another. As he points out:

By harming the web of social relations and obligations comprising community and family life, claiming a “right to die” actually threatens to tear the fabric of civil society and do irreparable harm to the social roles and attachments constitutive of individual identity.

Of course, pro-euthanasia advocates will offer a different perspective. They often argue that providing assistance in suicide is a means of safeguarding the dignity of the individual. Kurti sees nothing dignifying in a person taking his or her own life. To the contrary, he believes that the “rhetoric of rights” deployed to promote euthanasia entails a grotesque inversion of the very principle of a “right”:

Developed for the protection and preservation of the individual against the demands both of the state and other individuals, the language of rights has now been commandeered to promote the wants and demands of the “self” that include a desire for self-negation.

Kurti also contends that the phrase “dying with dignity”, or other similar terms used to morally justify euthanasia, “are all euphemisms intended to break the taboo surrounding suicide”. For him, the very idea of someone “dying with dignity” by means of assisted suicide involves a rejection of the duties we owe each other. He argues that such an idea poses a threat to the norms sustaining civil society, because of its moral assault upon the dignity of every human being.

The seventh chapter examines the nature of religious violence, particularly Islamic terrorism. Those who commit these terrible crimes in the name of religion claim they are theologically justified in doing so. Yet, governments in Western countries invariably respond to acts of Islamic terrorism by assuring the public that such violent actions are not representative of the religion in whose name the perpetrators proudly claim to have acted. Speaking in the House of Commons after an Islamic attack, Theresa May, the then Prime Minister of Britain, notoriously stated: “It is wrong to describe this as ‘Islamic terrorism’, it is not ‘Islamic terrorism’, it is a perversion of a great faith.” As Kurti points out, statements such as these, which imply that an attack by a Muslim has “nothing to do with Islam”, or, in May’s own words, is a “perversion” of Islam,

indicate that politicians—and indeed, also, police forces, journalists, and even religious leaders—are unwilling, or unable, to understand that religious violence often has theological and ideological roots. They also indicate that those who perpetrate such acts are very serious about the claims they believe their religion makes … Failure to take seriously the religious component of such violence is an avoidance of the issue: yet to assume that because many people do not take religion seriously, no people take it seriously, is transparently erroneous.

Kurti understands that the determination of secular politicians to avoid associating 9/11 and other terrorist attacks with Islam reveals their unpreparedness to confront the religious roots of Islamic terrorism or to comprehend their depth. Secular commentators fail “to take seriously the fact that when religious actors claim to be acting in the name of their faith, they mean precisely that”:

The events of 9/11 in New York , or 7/7 in London in 2005, and of March 2017 in London, have brought to the attention of the world the willingness of determined zealots to die in the name of their religious beliefs. Islam has an inextricable political component: one of the objects of which is to establish Islamic law and governance in non-Muslim societies.

Despite the undeniable connection between Islam and these appalling terrorist attacks, politicians and journalists have gone out of their way to explain the terrorists were not, and could not have been, acting in the name of religion: “Islam and barbarism are incompatible, they are likely to tell us.” Such a fear of being branded “Islamophobic”, according to Kurti, “stifles many politicians, journalists, and community leaders from criticising Islam. They prefer to say attacks were a ‘perversion’ of Islam.”

However, as Kurti also explains, “a harder question is whether jihadist violence actually has deep doctrinal, scriptural, and historical roots in mainstream Islam”. Westerners are under a clear threat from those who are determined to destroy their society. Deadly Islamic terrorist attacks against ordinary people have become a regular occurrence, and these acts of terror pose a serious dilemma for Western democracies long accustomed to a social and political ethos of tolerance and liberty. Confronting Islamic terrorism, Kurti correctly warns us: 

requires a commitment to upholding the cultural, moral and legal stability of a democratic society … Encouraging an open and vigorous exchange of religious ideas, including criticism of doctrine, without fear of attack or legal action, will not eliminate the threat of religious violence; but it will temper and moderate the environment in which religious violence incubates.

What else is to be done? For Kurti, “upholding and defending an open, liberal society needs to be a priority for all who are prepared to engage in the philosophical contest provoked by religious violence”. There is an urgent need to dislodge the ideas of death-obsessed religious extremists which, in his opinion, means renewing our commitment to liberty, tolerance and the rule of law, and working hard to ensure newcomers to a country are integrated into the wider society. “It also means encouraging open discussion about religious ideas—including criticism of religion—without fear of attack or legal action under the guise of stamping out ‘Islamophobia’.”

Chapter Eight examines the anti-Semitic attitudes of the contemporary Left. Kurti explains that the constant display of anti-Semitism found in the Labour Party in Britain and the Democratic Party in the United States are not isolated instances overseas. Voices which are highly critical of Israel and suspicious of Jewish influence in business, politics and the media are becoming increasingly influential in the Australian Left. According to him, the rise of anti-Semitism in Australia can be explained, for instance, by the political context of Labor-held seats which now contain large Muslim populations that are hostile to the existence of Israel.

Such factors help to explain why Labor has pulled further away from its historically pro-Zionist position to utter denunciations of not just the Israeli government but the State of Israel itself. A critical feature of postmodern Left anti-Semitism is the revival of anti-Zionist rhetoric fuelled by its antagonism to the existence of Israel, a prosperous democracy … that is nearing the threshold of being the home to the majority of the world’s Jews. 

Sacred & Profane is an important reminder that our individual rights and freedoms rest upon the foundations of classical liberal values and principles that were exemplified, formulated and wrought into the texture of Western societies by Christianity. It is not safe to assume that the liberal ethos of Western democracies will persist while the faith that gave it birth is being deliberately abandoned. The logic of thought, the evidence of history and the testimony of current events are all opposed to that assumption. Peter Kurti’s book is a significant contribution not only to the debate about the role of religion in a secular society but also to discussions concerning the future of individual freedom and the rule of law in Australia. 

Sacred & Profane: Faith and Belief in a Secular Society
by Peter Kurti
Connor Court, 2020, 210 pages, $32.95

Augusto Zimmermann is Professor and Head of Law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Perth, Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus, and President of the Western Australian Legal Theory Association.