How They Wrote Religion Out of Australian History

I was in the staff club with the late Geoffrey Bolton when out of the blue he said: “I find the intensity of opposition to you in the department surprising.” I explained that I was an outspoken Tory among militant radicals, and my politics offended them. “No,” explained Bolton, “it’s your ordination.” This astounded me. It was the early 1990s.

I had originally graduated from a theological college (more a boot-camp than a treasury of learning) and then attended university to equip myself for a school chaplaincy. The expanding university system of the 1960s and 1970s opened the way to a career in tertiary education rather than secondary. Both the ANU and the University of Queensland were welcoming. Neither had a problem with my ordination. Both appreciated my scholarship and were aware of my conservative Anglicanism.

During this period, from the 1970s onwards, universities introduced religion into the curriculum as an independent discipline. This terminated the century-old secularist embargo on the study of religion in publicly-funded Australian universities. The scene was set for Australian tertiary education to embrace the full riches of European scholarship.

This upset the traditional secularists, who promptly counter-attacked to limit this move until they could subvert it. First, they agitated to have subjects with a substantial religious content quarantined to the new religious studies departments. The religious novel must not be studied in English departments and Australian religious history should not be taught in history departments.

Second, they multiplied courses which enabled them to reiterate their secular socialist idealism from multiple angles. They inserted into the history curriculum a range of “oppression studies”: settler studies and gender studies in particular. The former opened up Aboriginal victimisation, and the latter focused on the victimisation of women and homosexuals. Oppression studies all emphasised the poisonous villainy of European behaviour and culture, and its Judeo-Christian roots. History edged towards studies in blame and culpability in the making of modern mercantile capitalism. This allowed for religion to be freely lectured against in any of the traditional disciplines, but not for.

The vigour of this fifth-column counter-attack has stayed its course for the last thirty years and the Cambridge History of Australia (two volumes, 2013) records its success.

My destiny to collide with colleagues in the 1980s and 1990s (to which Bolton referred in the staff club) had its origins in the 1960s, when Manning Clark pointed me to W.G. Broughton, the first Anglican bishop in Australia, as a research topic. When I consulted the Australian Dictionary of Biography I decided I had a conundrum to research. Why did the English bury inside Canterbury Cathedral a man Australians cared only to mock or forget?

What I uncovered began my drift into Australian history, and I needed to communicate my insights. I set out to show how differently Australia’s colonial past could be made to appear if the influence of Judeo-Christian institutions, and their intellectual traditions, were written back into its narrative. They had faded from the history narrative in the 1930s, except for Catholic history, where they could be disguised as Irish or labour history. When, in 1970, Gordon Greenwood invited me to join the University of Queensland’s history department he gave me space to unload my vision.

At first, there was no evidence of an undertow of resistance. This emerged in the 1980s, and I became fully conscious of it at an Armidale conference on Manning Clark. During a discussion of “likely formative early influences” on Manning Clark, his contemporary Russel Ward testified proudly that his own youthful vision of an ideal communist future had shaped his mind so powerfully that it influenced all he thought and wrote. He had had a transforming experience as a young man and must talk of it. And talk he did. Whether he turned his mind to literature (The Australian Legend, 1958) or to history, his utopian socialist vision imbued his scholarship. No one denied him that right.

When the turn came for another participant at the same conference to read a paper exploring Manning Clark’s religious assumptions, Ward quit the room. For that particular secularist Australian visionary, historical scholarship should never become a two-way discourse.

For many decades Australian secularism had fed into Australian literature the idea that the custodian of a secular socialist future was a noble foundation community of convict-victims, bushmen and diggers. They nurtured the twin values of “egalitarianism” and “mateship” and gave each its matchless Australian twist. After the Second World War, Australia’s literary leadership set about recruiting an intellectual community to secure this visionary secular socialist future.

This took Australian literature in a different direction from contemporary European literature generally. Abroad, writers were exploring the forebodings of change among people who had endured two world wars and remained in unstable times. Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell stand out. Each links change to loss and fear.

In Australia, change also figured prominently in literature of the same period, but with a difference. Here the authorial focus was on the opportunity which wartime dislocation and change afforded utopian rather than anarchical outcomes. Economic equity and shared prosperity, not decay and disorder, was its dynamic. To prosper this optimism, an influential school of Australian writers fostered the idea that post-war was the appropriate time for the values of Australia’s noble foundation community of convict-victims, bushmen and diggers to capture the Australian imagination. Historians made a crusade out of the theme. Their primary task was to show that in colonial times, well before Federation, the vitality of this noble founding community had empowered Australians to outgrow many transplanted British prejudices and traditions, such as landed privilege, titled service to the Crown, and above all else the Judeo-Christian religious institutions. Post-Federation history became a narrative of progress towards a secular socialist Australia and the impediments it had to overcome.

Who crafted this agenda, and the means by which it arrived at its current eminence, is still historiographically obscure, but certain names recur: Brian Fitzpatrick, H.V. Evatt, Russel Ward, Manning Clark, Ian Turner, Ken Inglis and Stuart Macintyre. None of these could be said to have created the agenda alone. But around the 1960s Ken Inglis emerged as one of its brightest apostles. His ethical tone, and judicious exposition of a series of unique Australian experiences into transformative nation-making moments, attracted a discipleship. To attribute force to these transformative experiences, other potentially rival events had to be marginalised.

To achieve this aim the historian crusaders re-crafted the rules of historical methodology. They shamelessly varied the rules of historical evidence to permit the marginalisation of data deemed inconsequential for the making of a secular and unalloyed socialist future. Religion was for antiquarians. They attributed no dynamic role to it in reshaping Australia after Federation and only a dwindling role before it. The case for marginalising religious data was never argued. Often it was simply excised from the record (Ken Inglis). Others disempowered it through mockery (Manning Clark). Some with Marxist leanings banned it from their conversation as a poisonous opiate (Russel Ward, Stuart Macintyre). A censorship of silence was introduced.

This suppression of data undoubtedly simplified the argument in support of an impending secular socialist Australia. However, the outcome was, and remains, a Walter Mitty narrative of a country foreign to many Australians born here. The secular narrative simply does not explain the Australia of their birth and formation. And this is its menacing intention: if people are not reminded of their full past that past will cease to be of consequence for the future. Only the remembered (that is, the recorded historical) past will shape the future.

It is not possible for a judicious history of Australia, written after the 1970s, to cast Australia as a religious-leaning community. But the secularists overstate the eminence and extent of their reforms. This has inhibited a scholarly history-based analysis of contemporary Australia. The secular renovation of Australian society, unleashed by the First World War, has undeniably progressed but its battle with Australia’s nineteenth-century Judeo-Christian heritage is far from settled. Despite secular triumphalism, no side is dominant.

The two-volume Cambridge History of Australia is exclusively a celebration of Australia’s secular dynamics. Religion is disposed of in two chapters totalling 4 per cent of the 1164 pages. The editors approached their task already satisfied that religion had exerted little creative energy on the past and had none in store for the future. They recruited authors for the two chapters on religion to make that point. Each did.

In Volume I, colonial religion moves from an inconsequential presence in the convict era to a period of denominational expansion with substantial aid from the state. Gold and immigration account for an aggressive mid-century material expansion of cathedrals, churches, secondary and university colleges. Even so, Christianity ended the century battling an intensified materialism and, with a record for having done little for women, less for the poor and almost nothing for the Aborigines, had failed to etch itself into the Australian psyche to assure its future.

In Volume II, federated Australia is the setting for another Golgotha: a place and a moment of reckoning where the Christian gospel finally encounters a nemesis—a people, a place and a time fundamentally out of tune with historical Christianity. Twentieth-century census data records a diminishing willingness of Australians to self-assign themselves as Christians, and denominational leaders confirm dwindling worshipping congregations. This points to an “apparently irreversible decline” in Australia’s inherited British Christianity. But, citing Durkheim, a sense of the transcendent will survive, and as Australians embrace their authentic experiences, Judeo-Christianity will be naturally replaced. In that sense religion (but not Judeo-Christianity) in Australia has all before it as it ventures into a new authenticity. History or futurology?

The Cambridge History overlooked the resilient impact of the colonial churches on colonial society. Well before the colonial era ended, the churches had learned to contain their initial denominational rivalries and were working within an agreed political framework to entrench a non-denominational Judeo-Christianity in Australian public life. Nineteenth-century liberalism had prodded the churches in this direction, and the fruit of their compromise carried over into the twentieth century. The First World War revitalised radical reform movements intent on exposing the failures of liberalism. In politics they pursued various socialist agendas and advocated a public culture less indebted to Judeo-Christian traditions. This crusade partly flourished, but the outcome was a stand-off between the secular renovation of Australia and the Judeo-Christian reality still present in Australian public life. That stand-off persists. It has intensified and diversified. That is Australia’s present predicament, but the Cambridge History admits of no such understanding.

To achieve its narrative the Cambridge History starkly dumped the ethical standards advocated by one of its editors, Stuart Macintyre, in The History Wars (2003) and The Historian’s Conscience (2004). Both publications highlight the need for fair dealing in telling the truth. Marilyn Lake’s essay is telling on this point. She frankly admitted that her ethical journey as an historian took her away from History as “advocacy” to History as “explanation”, and involved learning to deal fairly with what she instinctively disliked. Had the historians of her generation followed this path they would have circumvented the damaging vandalism of the History Wars and its careless management of truth and reputation. The Historian’s Conscience reads like an AA meeting pledging reform.

Neither chapter on religion in the Cambridge History passes Macintyre’s own ethical test. Vital data is ignored. Trivial throwaway anecdotes are invoked to summarise the achievements of decades. The first thirty years of missionary work in New South Wales is summed up with a reference to the Native Institution: “some of the girls visited Elizabeth Shelley [its Matron] after they had left. They laughed when she asked them about the catechism.” The churches’ intense work among Aborigines is summed up: “Those who showed interest in Christianity probably did so as a survival tactic.” This level of evaluation is pitiful. Why did Cambridge, eminent for its compendium histories, misfire by publishing such nonsense?

Where to next? Is the secular dynamic in Australian historical scholarship too advanced, and too entrenched in the older universities, for religion to get a fair hearing?

One way forward is to shift the focus away from the ideas and practices of British denominational Christianity. Instead, think in terms of Judeo-Christianity and all it brought into Australia. Judeo-Christianity encompasses all the traditional denominational Christian traditions, Judaism, and a range of spin-offs such as the street-corner prophet, the dissenting congregation and the itinerant gospeller. But it spills over into much more. As it evolved over centuries Judeo-Christianity imbued, even saturated, public ethics, law, medicine, literature, the plastic arts and the notion of education and culture. It grew out of late-antiquity and for centuries was the genius of European civilisation.

But Judeo-Christianity never took one single shape or enjoyed unchallenged dominance. For the last four centuries energetic reformers have sought to reshape its intellectual substance and, in particular, to remove its Semitic influences.

The European settlement of Australia coincided with a nineteenth-century episode of this cleansing process: one focused on the renovation of institutions, the redirection of intellectual debate, the promotion of progressive social customs and political experimentation. Manning Clark at one stage appeared to foreshadow a historical work that would explore this theme when he spoke of Australia as a setting for a clash between Protestantism, Catholicism and the Enlightenment. But he took off in a moralist direction. Alan Atkinson in The Europeans in Australia (three volumes, 1997 to 2014) has explored where Australia fitted into a British episode of reform and resistance, and brought to the surface the mental expansion required of its citizens as the nation enlarged itself. Atkinson repudiates the search for a single representative voice as the embodiment of a nation.

Since the editors of the Cambridge History admit that theirs is a Melbourne-and-Sydney artefact, the renovation of an Australian historical narrative inclusive of religion may need to begin elsewhere. Herein lies a challenge to the Australian Catholic University and those universities which, after the 1970s, amalgamated denominational theological colleges into their religious studies departments.