Ye of little faith, how well do you know your country?

How well do you know your country?

The last federal election killed, perhaps for all time, the idea that we want to be led by someone who poses as a bloke, and who talks down to the most important workers in the economy today – women in the professions and in the caring sector.

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

But the footy codes keep holding up a mirror to our bigotry, in the row over religion at the Essendon Bombers this week and in the Sydney soccer fans who booed the welcome to country – and the minority within that group who gave the fascist salute – at last Saturday night’s Australia Cup final.

We’ve taken one step forward on gender, but two steps back on religion and race.

There was a certain Melburnian inevitability that the city’s most prominent Essendon supporters would find themselves on opposite sides of the fault lines of religion and identity.

And an irony. The argument between the Victorian Premier, and devout Catholic, Daniel Andrews and the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Peter Comensoli, over the treatment of the club’s CEO Andrew Thorburn would have been inconceivable in the days of the Victorian Football League. Andrews and Comensoli would simply not have been welcome at Windy Hill.

Thorburn, on the other hand, would have kept his high-flying appointment at the club. He would not have been asked to choose between running the Bombers and his volunteer position as chair of the City on a Hill Anglican church because, back then, his faith and that of the club were aligned.

Every Aussie Rules club in Melbourne has an origin story that is tied to the city’s old divides of class and religion, and Essendon’s was patrician and Protestant. The club was an outlier to the north of the Yarra, where Essendon’s battling neighbour North Melbourne and the competition’s powerhouses Collingwood and Richmond were proudly working class and Catholic.

In any other week, the premier and the archbishop might have swapped a joke about how times have changed. Footy has long since outgrown its sectarian roots; soccer, in contrast, is still trapped by the ethnic past of some of its clubs.

But it is a measure of how contested the political environment is around questions of faith and sexuality at the moment that Essendon couldn’t accommodate the conflicting values of its two high-profile members.

Comensoli told The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald’s Chip Le Grand he was so “appalled” at the message sent to faith communities by Thorburn’s treatment, he is looking for another club to support. “It is quite a bizarre reality we seem to have entered into where people are being judged unworthy to lead because of some of their basic Christian beliefs.”

While Andrews pointed out that he had nothing to do with Thorburn leaving the club on Tuesday, just 30 hours after his appointment it was clear the premier was pleased to see him go. “I’m not here to be having a debate with faith leaders but I will just say this: I am a Catholic. I send my kids to Catholic schools. My faith is important to me. It guides me every day,” Andrews said on Thursday. “It also guides me in my sense of what is right and what is wrong, and if I can just say with utmost respect, calling out homophobia is not the problem. Homophobia is the problem.”

Peter Dutton jumped into the debate with an uncharacteristic bet each way. He joined Andrews in condemning the anti-gay and anti-abortion views of one of the pastors at Thorburn’s church. “They’re an abomination,” the Opposition Leader said. “But the comments and the actions of Andrew Thorburn are completely distanced from that and the fact that an individual can be sacked from a position because of his religious belief doesn’t have any place in our country.”

As a basic matter of work rights, Thorburn’s treatment is problematic. It would have been illegal for Essendon to ask him about his faith or sexual orientation at his job interview. If he were a woman, the club could not ask about children – are you planning to have them? All these loaded questions were routine in old Australia, when white Protestant men vetted their workforces for Catholics, queers and intending mums.

But Essendon asked the question of faith at his exit interview after the views of the pastor were published by the Herald Sun. They didn’t sack Thorburn, as Dutton said, but it was close enough.

However, as a matter of governance, the initial appointment of Thorburn, a former CEO of the National Australia Bank and scalp of the banking royal commission, was also problematic. Footy clubs have too often placed the redemption of industry and sporting leaders above all else.

The existential dilemma between the right to worship without harassment, and the rights of those outside any particular church to be free from the drive-by judgements of religious figures, is beyond the remit of footy. It would be absurd to expect that the Australian Football League can settle this issue when the last parliament could not pass a religious freedom bill, and the current parliament is too wary to resume the debate.

But to the extent that footy does reflect society, it points to a more secular Australia.

Let’s take a step back, and consider what the 2021 census told us about who we are on the question of religion.

It showed that Australia was no longer a majority Christian nation. Christians represented 47.1 per cent of the population, with the largest single faith being Catholics, who were 21.4 per cent of the total. Other religions accounted for 11.1 per cent of the population, with Islam (3.4 per cent) the largest of the non-Christian faiths. Those who answered “no religion” or other “secular” beliefs accounted for 41.8 per cent of the population. Five years earlier, they were just 33.1 per cent of the total.

The threshold to majority secular nation has already been crossed in one capital city – Hobart – and in regional Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. Those with no religion outnumber Christians in Adelaide, Perth and the rest of Victoria.

Sydney and the rest of NSW are the outliers, and you can see what Scott Morrison was trying to do with his pre-election push for a religious freedom bill, and his stubborn defence of controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves. Sydney is almost 10 percentage points more religious than the nation as a whole – 49 per cent of its people are Christian, 18.2 per cent follow other religions, leaving just 32.8 per cent reporting no religion.

Former prime minister Scott Morrison ... but which cap really fits his all-Australian bloke?Credit: Mark Jesser

But the election result tells us the former prime minister was wasting his time because there were no righteous electorates he could swing in his home city to offset the losses to Labor, the teal independents and the Greens across the rest of Sydney, and in the less religious capitals of Melbourne and Brisbane, and especially Perth.

There is an unexpected twist in the rise of secular Australia – it is being driven by men. While 53.6 per cent of all Christians are women, 51.8 per cent of people with no religion are men. Have the culture warriors who are trying to Americanise our politics by asserting the rights of a muscular, uncompromising brand of Christianity misread the “quiet” or “real” Australian bloke? And has the progressive side of politics misread him as well – because the typical Australian bloke might be closer to their world view than they think.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.