Culture war over religious freedom normalises fascist politics

Nov 23, 2021
church cross
(Image: Unsplash)

Australian conservatives’ obsession with religious freedom is just another US import, and part of a worldwide surge in fascist identity politics.

It might seem bizarre that in a nation facing challenges regarding our recovery from the pandemic and the climate crisis that the Coalition government is wasting energy on a religious discrimination bill.

The bill, however, must be understood as another front in the culture war creation of aย national identityย that isย Western chauvinistย at heart. Theย businessย of government is handed to theย fossil fuelย lobby for whom we serve as aย vassal state. Meanwhile the Coalition continues massing the forces of this โ€œconservativeโ€ identity against the feared might of โ€œprogressโ€.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has beenย arguingย for 20 years that Australia needs religious protections, best dealt with in a charter of human rights more broadly. This vision, however, is of a tool that protects peopleย fromย discrimination on the basis of their religion (or lack thereof); the Coalitionโ€™s focus is on a bill that entitles religious groupsย toย discriminate.

The number of Australians whoย identified as Christian sank to 52 per cent in the 2016 census. Other religions made up another 8 per cent. The ABC found in 2019 that 60 per cent of Australians would prefer that people kept their religion to themselves. Of all our identifying features, the ABC’s respondents placed their religious identity as their least significant feature. Australia is not a nation with a strong civic religion.

This stands in contrast with theย Coalitionโ€™s role models in the Republican Party in America where civic religion has become a rallying cry, the heart of the partyโ€™s rhetoric.

As the Coalition parties move farther to the right, their memberships are also changing. John Sandeman hasย pointed out that the average age of Liberal and National member is 72 years (with the Labor Party averaging 65). This is making the partiesโ€™ branches vulnerable to takeover, and Christians keen to forge a nation shaped by their faith are recruiting and stacking the conservative side of politics.

The success of the Marriage Equality postal vote and the required amendment to the Marriage Act in 2017 was clearly a miserable time for the many conservative politicians who placed a traditional religious worldview at the forefront of their political identity. The religious freedom bill was intended to console them. It would protect โ€œChristian bakersโ€ from the need to provide a cake for a LGBTQI wedding.

Christian bakers are not an Australian concern, though. Theย tropeย was introduced to our debate by Americanย think tank-trained Cory Bernardi from the Republicans’ repertoire. Religious discrimination here is far more likely to be experienced by someone with aย Muslimย orย Jewishย name than by aย Christianย forced to do business with a secular client.

Think tanks’ call for ‘freedom’ really promises authoritarianism

Bernardiโ€™s import of theย Christian Libertarianย position that people should be free to discriminate is based on decades of surging reactionary religious identity politics. In America, it is forged out of aย long traditionย built particularly in the Evangelical (Pentecostal) churches where success in business was placed as a key virtue alongside moral purity and freedom from government. Aย strong masculineย role (in business as in the home) was valorised as a counter to the prissy traditional denominationsโ€™ version of Christianity.

From being a fringe force in the Civil Rights era, it has become central to the Republican identity now, fighting back against the ungodly progress of civil rights successes.

This movement was forged in the Cold War. In the 1990s, โ€œfamily valuesโ€ lobby groups from the USย unitedย with the reborn churches of the former Soviet Union to battle the threat of the secular, interventionist state. They shared a loathing of totalitarian government. They also shared a sense of panicked pride in a white Christian Western heritage under attack from feminists, the LGBTQI rights movement and the non-white world.

Having fought back their own godless totalitarian regime, nationalist Orthodox Christians tellย their fellow โ€œfamily valuesโ€ activists that the Russians have the ability to help the Westerners defeat the new liberal totalitarianism.

When Masha Gessen covered one of these conferences in Georgia, she interviewedย the American about to become the head of the World Congress of Families. She proposed to him that she could give up some of the new rights that marked her โ€œrainbow familyโ€ as equal. In that world, could her family and his live in amity. His response: โ€œNo.โ€

This illustrates the crisis addressed by Australiaโ€™s religious freedom bill. It is not that flagrant drag queens are marching into cake shops and harassing Christian bakers until the poor maligned confectioner is forced to produce a cake. The problem is that a civic identity for LGBTQI people is in itself considered an oppression.

Australiaโ€™s more laissez-faire attitude to the lives of others is coming into conflict with a โ€œconservativeโ€ politics that believes strongly that it has the right to tell the rest of the population how to live.

Part of the crisis emerges from the theocratic evangelicals so powerful in the Republican Party now. Dominionism has been described as the โ€œcentral unifying ideologyโ€ for the Christian right. This preaches that Jesus โ€” or his representatives โ€” have the right to control all earthly institutions. For Jesus to return for his millennial kingdom, the world must embrace the morality stipulated by these creeds. For those who believe Christ will only return once the world is pure, there is a critical urgency in the suppressing of anyone who doesnโ€™t live according to their purity mandates. Your sinful lifestyle prevents their reunion with Christ.

The broader problem is that this theocratic project which has colonised the Republican Party, entwined with a cynical belief that the opposition has no right to hold power, is part of a worldwide surge in fascist identity politics.

Speak without fear, as long as you’re a white, male, Christian conservative

This creation of a national identity firmly allied to a religious tradition is not reserved for Christianity. India with itsย Hindutvaย movement, embodied inย Modi, is seeing steps towards ethnic cleansing. Inย Sri Lankaย andย Myanmar, theย Buddhistย faith is tied to the national identity. Israel isย forgingย aย two-tieredย society that gives extra rights toย Jewishย citizens. China proves that the prized national identity can exclude aย religion, while not building that self on the presence of one.

The fact that all these states are building their identity primarily (but not solely) against Muslims is one of the features that unites such regimes with those embracing a Christian-identity authoritarianism.ย Hungary,ย Polandย andย Brazilย are the most overt examples. Serbian nationalists areย once againย forging their identity against their Muslim neighbours.ย Christian Orthodoxย identity is at the core of Putinโ€™s vision for Russia.

Putin is aย heroย to many in the rising Christian authoritarian movements. Trumpโ€™s sometime ally, Steve Bannon is at theย coreย of a schismatic group of powerful Catholics who despise Pope Francis as a socialist and, indeed, betrayer of the church. Bannonโ€™s faction see Putinโ€™s Moscow as theย Third Romeย and a bulwark against secular modernism.

Pat Buchananย speculatedย that Putin might give the keynote speech at theย World Congress of Families a few years back. His stalwart fight for the โ€œfamily valuesโ€ campaign contrasted shamefully with an America that had capitulated to “a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide โ€” the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood valuesโ€.

Australians should be aware that it is not only LGBTQI citizens and Muslims who are outcast in this formulation of a Western chauvinist identity merged with Christianity. Control of womenโ€™s bodies will follow. Already the Assistant Minister for Women Amanda Stokerย is speaking at anti-choice rallies andย George Christensenย has introduced an anti-abortion bill.

Christianย motifs are combined with misogyny, and bigotry in a twisted nostalgic conception of Western civilisation by white supremacists. Anti-semitism is just as present as Islamophobia. The crusadesย and theย Protocolsย are part of the iconography in their mass murderersโ€™ย manifestos.

It is not surprising that the Christian right is sometimes namedย the โ€œChristian Talibanโ€. The fear and loathing of non-straight gender and sexuality is shared. The desire for absolute control over women, but most particularly womenโ€™s sexuality is indistinguishable. Indeed, a number ofย Republicansย at the time of the Westโ€™s retreat from Kabul were asking whether America hadnโ€™t been supporting the wrong side.

Islamofascism is a recognised feature of Islamist states, with harsh fates for rejected categories of people. It is easy for the rest of us to ignore the Christofascism that is coming to mark our own nations.

Persecution of marginalised groups is enshrined in the religious freedom bill, and we must reject that alongside all normalising of fascist politics.

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