Mike O’Connor: Religion is unfashionable and under attack in Australia

Religion is unfashionable and is under attack in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago, writes Mike O’Connor.

Queenslanders attending a service at Cathedral of St Stephen. Picture: Liam Kidston.

In the shadow of Easter, religion came up in conversation which caused someone to ask me if I believed “in all of that”.

“I do,” I replied, “in my own quiet way”, a response which caused them to shake their head in genuine disbelief and say “I thought you were smarter than that”.

I let it go and turned the other cheek. There are some arguments you know you can never win but it’s an attitude that is now becoming pervasive. If you profess a Christian faith then you must be intellectually challenged. Religion is unfashionable and is under attack in a way that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.

Once upon a time my mother would hand me an envelope and in her sternest tone tell me to hand it over to “sister” as soon as I got to school.

“Sister” was one of the nuns who taught at St Joachim’s Catholic Primary School at Holland Park and the envelope, which jingled with the heavy clink of coins way back in those pre-decimal days, contained what was known as “the school money,” carefully saved by my mother so that I could be educated in a Christian environment.

Easter service in Brisbane. Picture: John Gass

Faith-based schools, however, are now being targeted. Last week 41 religious educators representing Catholic, Anglican and Greek Orthodox churches, the United Shia Islamic Foundation, the Australian Jewish Foundation and the Hindu Council wrote to Prime Minister Albanese urging him to honour an election commitment to maintain the right of religious schools to preference people of their own faith and not do a backroom deal with the Greens to secure passage of changes to sexual discrimination laws.

These proposed changes follow recommendations by the Australian Law Reform Commission working within terms of reference drawn up by the Albanese government.

The Greens are no friends of religious schools and want to deny funding to non-government schools which preference students or staff on the basis of religion and replace school chaplaincy programs with the controversial Safe Schools program. They also want to make government federal funding to hospitals including those operated by religious organisations dependent upon them providing abortion.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

In the light of this the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, has issued a stark warning to the nation saying that the ability of people to “gather, speak freely, pray together and undertake works of service for others” is being reduced “slice by slice”.

He says religious Australians risk being sacked for expressing the traditional Christian beliefs of religious institutions and that schools and hospitals are being undermined as ideologues seek to force a “radical curriculum and policies on all schools in the area of sexuality and gender”.

The Australian Capital Territory’s highhanded, forced takeover of Canberra’s Catholic-run Calvary Hospital last year is seen as one example of the rising threat to religious freedom.

LGBTQI+ groups have urged the government to implement the ALRC’s recommendations which Archbishop Fisher says fail to give any weight to the benefit that Catholic and other faith-based school have made to “millions of Australian families for more than 200 years”, talk down the contributions made by believers and their institutions to our social capital and send a signal that people of faith and their activities are not welcome in our community.

According to the National Catholic Education Commission the proposed changes would severely limit the ability of faith-based schools to operate and teach according to their ethos.

Thirty-six per cent of Australian students attend non-government schools and 90 per cent of these schools have a religious affiliation. Catholic schools account for the majority of these with 805,000 students attending 1756 schools.

Queenslanders attend a service at Cathedral of St Stephen in Brisbane. Picture: Liam Kidston.

Given these numbers, you could presume that the parents of these students are happy with the education that their children are receiving under current sexual discrimination legislation.

Albanese might find favour with the Greens but in restricting the rights of religious schools will alienate a large slice of the electorate which see the moves as an attempt to reduce religious freedom and restrict parental choice.

My mother counted the pennies and shillings and put them aside in an envelope so that she could see her son educated in a Christian environment which mirrored that of our home.

Rather than joining the fashionable push against religion, the Prime Minister would be better advised to direct his energies to resolving the multitude of other problems besetting the nation and leaving people of faith to get on with the lives.