Our Father Who Art in Coventry

As demonstrated by the vandalism that brought down Captain Cook’s statue in Melbourne, the campaign to cancel Australia Day, along with the broader push to condemn and reject Western civilisation as racist and oppressive, there’s no doubt society is under attack.  Christianity is especially threatened. Instead of seeing anything beneficial or worthwhile about Christianity, ALP and Greens MPs across the nation, from local councils to Canberra, want to banish the Lord’s Prayer as it’s no longer considered relevant to our multi-ethnic, multicultural society.

Worse, while seeking to banish the Lord’s Prayer, activists want to make Welcomes to Country mandatory.  While one ritual is condemned as divisive and obsolete the other is to be endorsed and made compulsory.

No amount of fake history pushing indigenous culture can escape the fact Christianity is Australia’s largest religion and our institutions, culture and way of life are underpinned and imbued with Christian beliefs and virtues. The various bids to banish the Lord’s Prayer demonstrates an appalling ignorance of the political and legal systems inherited from the United Kingdom.  Ensuring parliament is superior to the monarch or the prime minister is driven by the belief all us, even purple-haired agitators, are made in God’s image and deserve justice, freedom and equality.

Magna Carta … the Glorious Revolution … concepts such as popular sovereignty and one person/one vote only came to be because those responsible believed “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. As argued by the Perth-based academic and Quadrant contributor Augusto Zimmermann, Christianity is also central to our common law system.   Zimmermann argues, “Indeed, there is little doubt that Christian philosophy influenced the origins and development of the English law”. As he notes, “England’s most celebrated jurists – including the likes of Blackstone, Coke and Fortescue – often drew heavily from their Christian faith when expounding and developing what are now well established doctrines of the common law.”

When Victoria’s premier, Jacinta Allan, argues the Lord’s Prayer is obsolete because society has embraced and is characterised by “cultural diversity”, that also fails the intelligence test.  History tells us societies only hold together when there is a common bond represented by an agreed set of morals, values and beliefs endorsed by all. In the United Kingdom and Europe, where governments extol multiculturalism as the manifestation of all cultures being equal, urban ghettos, ethnic violence and society have become tribalized. Trashing patriotism, refusing to praise Australia as a successful Western liberal democracy and deeming the overwhelming majority of Australians strangers to their own land leads to the balkanisation of society.  Division reigns when and where there is no commitment to the common good. Closer to home, ALP and Green MPs, plus ‘blaktivists’ such as Senator Lidia Thorpe, advance the bleak and nihilistic ideology of neo-Marxist-inspired critical race theory which insists Western society must always be condemned as structurally racist.

Religion, as argued by TS Eliot, represents an essential bond between citizens giving moral direction, community cohesion and the belief there is a higher spiritual good all are called on to respect and defend.  Such is religion’s power the Marxist Antonio Gramsci argued Christianity must be replaced by socialism to ensure the revolution’s success. Eliot also argues, while all cultures have their own religion, what makes Western culture unique is its on-going debt to Christianity.  He writes “The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity we trace our descent”.

No amount of welcomes to country, no amount of virtue signalling by companies such as Woolworths and Qantas, and no matter how many students are indoctrinated with fabricated black history, we are a Western, liberal democracy imbued with Christianity. Whether the French Revolution, the rise of communist Russia and China or Pol Pot’s Year Zero, history tells us once societies jettison religion they inevitably succumb to terror, imprisonment and, inevitably, the deaths of millions. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said it all in a few words: “The failings of the human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century”. For those pushing cultural-Marxism and denouncing Western, liberal democracies Solzhenitsyn also argues “the world had never before known as godlessness, as organized, militarised, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism” where “hatred of God is the principle driving force”.

Not all is lost. Proven by the 60/40 vote against the indigenous Voice to parliament and the fact more and more parents and teachers around Australia are establishing schools committed to a classical, liberal/arts education dedicated to teaching virtues. There is still hope.

Kevin Donnelly is a senior research fellow at the ACU’s PM Glynn Institute