Peta Credlin: If Morrison won’t defend Australia’s fading Christian values, who will?

Not only are we losing our grasp of history, but the ignorance and the misunderstanding of religion is also getting worse. Now more than ever, we need the Prime Minister to lead, writes Peta Credlin.

Back in 1949, when George Orwell’s political masterpiece, 1984, was first published, many read it as an expose of the dystopian world behind the then Iron Curtain.

But having read it again recently, it’s got as much application to the West today as it does, to a totalitarian regime.

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” wrote Orwell.

Prophetically, given recent weeks where even the blanket news coverage of COVID-19 has been pushed aside by ‘Black Lives Matter’ demonstrations descending into monument vandalism, this next passage hits home; “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.”

And now here we are today, as Orwell wrote, where “the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”

On Friday, NSW Police stood guard at the statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park to protect it from vandalism. Picture: Saeed Khan/AFP

So how did we get here where a mere novel now looks like a self-fulfilling prophesy?

Probably the most significant social change of the last century has been the decline of religion, and in particular of Christianity – and it’s massively accelerated in just the past few years. This matters because the Judaeo-Christian tradition underpins the classic liberal view that all people should be treated equally, regardless of their skin colour. After all, it was not Martin Luther King (himself a Christian pastor) but St Paul who first wrote, in his Letter to the Galatians, “there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free; there is no longer male or female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”.

Back at the 1911 census, fully 96 per cent of Australians reported themselves to be Christian. By 2016, this was just 52 per cent. Back in 1911, almost no one reported having ‘no religion’. By 2016, around a third of us reported ‘no religion’ in the census. Back in 1960, 90 per cent of Australians had a bible at home and 60 per cent read it at least once a year. Forty years later, less than 30 per cent read the Bible even once a year. By 2010, more than 70 per cent of Australian secondary students had never read the Bible, even though the New Testament is the foundational document of our Western culture.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he is “not interested in the debate about what people want to tear down.” Picture: AAP Image/Mick Tsikas

How do you think the teaching profession would react if 70 per cent of students had no appreciation of indigenous cultures; or had never been taught about climate change? Yet Christianity, something vastly more important to an understanding of our society than these issues now mandated in national school curriculum, is hardly mentioned. I accept that religious faith is deeply personal, but religious knowledge should not be an optional extra for any Australian, given its central place in the world around us. Never is this understanding more necessary as Christianity wanes in the West, and its belief that we share a common humanity is supplanted by identity politics that divides us into tribes.

No one can or should defend the brutal murder of George Floyd. But how many of the hundreds of thousands protesting against claims of institutionalised racism checked their prejudices long enough to notice that the police squad that stood by while Floyd was choked to death was multiracial? How many of the protesters who daubed “racist” under the statue of Winston Churchill in London knew that he’d led the fight again Nazism? Of the protesters similarly defacing the statue of Gandhi in Washington, how many knew that he’d led the fight to free India? It’s not just the ignorance and the misunderstanding of religion that’s getting worse but any real grasp of history that’s rapidly being lost too.

An Australia Institute survey three years ago showed that less than half of all Australians knew that Australia Day commemorated the arrival from Britain of the First Fleet. Hardly surprising, given even the Deputy Chief Health Officer of Victoria mixed up Captain Cook with Governor Phillip in a tweet saying what a racist country we are. A Centre for independent Studies survey two years ago showed that, of Australians aged between 25 and 40, 58 per cent had a favourable view of socialism and 59 per cent believed that capitalism had failed – again, hardly surprising given that 51 per cent couldn’t identify Mao and 42 per cent couldn’t identify Lenin.

A statue of British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill has been boarded up amid fears of clashes between anti-racism protesters and far-right groups. Picture: Tolga Akmen/AFP

When asked about this ‘cancel culture’ on Friday, specifically in reference to the removal of the film ‘Gone with the Wind’ on the basis of ‘racist depictions’, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said, “I’m not interested in what they’re showing on streaming services.” He said, “I’m not interested in the debate about what people want to tear down.”

I understand where he’s coming from given the economic crisis consuming so much of his focus, but if not the leader of our country defending our values – then who? Statues toppled by mobs, films banned, police defunded and disbanded – what’s next, a torch to our libraries? And if a Christian leader from the centre-right doesn’t fight too, then is it already over?

Those defacing Winston Churchill’s statue in London this week, ignorant of history as they proved themselves to be as well as vandals, just reminded us all of the calibre of politician now lost to us.

And for me, this was the saddest lesson in history of all.

Originally published as Peta Credlin: If Morrison won’t defend Australia’s fading Christian values, who will?