New brand of secularism a shortcut to bad ideas

NSW Teachers Federation head Angelo Gavrielatos addresses the teachers out front of Parliament House in Sydney.

The NSW Teachers Federation is sponsoring the first Secularism Australia Conference early next month, featuring “inspirational pro-secular speakers” who will “share their vision for secularism in Australia”.

Though December is a busy month, I am willing to put up my hand to offer my vision for secularism in Australia. I suspect it will be different from the vision of the scheduled speakers.

I can offer a reality check about how secularism – a noble idea to forge tolerance that emerged in the aftermath of the religious wars – has morphed into its own version of ideological zealotry that mirrors the worst parts of some religions.

The one issue that should be on the agenda is how to return to the best of secularism, rather than stay on the current path where some tenets of this modern secularism are even more doctrinaire than established religions.

I might raise another point with the audience, too. Why on earth is the NSW Teachers Federation – a union with the stated purpose to “protect and improve teachers’ working conditions and salaries, within the public education system” – throwing in its lot with a line-up of speakers whose politics are, let’s just say, hardly centrist?

If a teachers union hosted a conference that featured Pauline Hanson as a speaker, there would be an uproar about the politicisation of the union. It’s no different when you host speakers who include Fiona Patten, Jane Caro and Van Badham.

But the critical issue remains the blind spot many secularists have when it comes to defending modern secularism, in large part because they are the problem. These people would benefit greatly from a few words about how secularism has strayed far from its original purpose.

British social reformer and newspaper editor George Holyoake, who coined the phrase in the mid-19th century after rejecting Christianity and being imprisoned for blasphemy, believed reason and science, not faith and commandments, were a better guide to the physical, moral and intellectual development of man.

Similarly, modern secularism has lost touch with the ideas of French scholar Jean Bauberot, whose model of secularism revered freedom of thought, conscience and religion, opposing discrimination against people on the basis of their religious or non-religious views.

Modern secularism has become untethered from its historical moorings. The separation of church and state is proving harder to abide by when the new secular religion is infused in everything the state does.

Van Badham

Jane Caro

Likewise, the fine idea that there should be no religious tests applied to people wanting to hold public office has been turned on its head.

These days you could be squeezed out of a job for holding religious views. It happened to former Essendon chief executive Andrew Thorburn. You could be booted out for not agreeing with trans orthodoxy, for challenging the idea that the “science is settled” about gender transitioning. That happened to former Age columnist Julie Szego.

As American writer Ross Dou­that said a few years ago, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Modern secularists who loathe traditional religion have taken their quasi-religious model to new heights with a list of ever-expanding commandments.

Though the latest census shows almost 10 million Australians, or 39 per cent, have no religion – up from 8 per cent in 1971 – people still hanker for a moral code to live by.

As formal religious commitment falls away, the vacuum is being filled with a new quasi-religious rule book, largely political and secular but couched always in moral terms.

And it’s hard to escape this new religion. While you can’t be forced to go to a church, a synagogue or a mosque, you will find a new class of proselytisers busy imposing their commandments in workplaces, schools, universities, sporting clubs and local councils, and most other institutions. There are new moral rules about diversity and inclusion (which normally mean excluding certain categories of people); about accepting climate “science” (where we are told the science is settled); about gender transitioning; on preferred pronouns; on the definition of a woman; on acceptable forms of humour; on welcomes to country; and so on.

There is nothing wrong with a secular-based moral code. The real question is how it is enforced, how doctrinaire it becomes and how dissenters are dealt with.

We are increasingly told a matter is settled, that certain things must be done and said. If you have a different view, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. In which case you risk being treated as a blasphemer. These secular clergymen and women will describe words and ideas they don’t like as a form of violence to justify new forms of censorship. If you offend a commandment, you will be hounded for an apology, only to discover that the sanctimonious secularists among us don’t believe in redemption.

In Victoria, you risk five or 10 years’ jail for saying a prayer for someone that falls foul of the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act. JK Rowling is not alone in being lynched by online mobs for believing only biological women are women. Comedians are routinely censored for cracking a joke that offends some secular god of wokeness. This year, employees were forced to shut up if they opposed the Indigenous voice.

JK Rowling

Public teachers unions are full of these secular activists. They rail against formal religious instruction in public schools while they fully support teachers proselytising their new secular religion in the classroom. It means the core purpose of the teachers union – to advocate for teachers’ pay and conditions – is often sidelined by political zealotry.

This overt politicking doesn’t improve our public education system either.

When the union is overrun by leaders indulging in personal political and cultural agendas, why would we be surprised when teachers condone or even encourage students to go on protest marches instead of learning more English or maths? How can a dead white male such as Shakespeare possibly offer a kid anything when there is a direct line between teachers evangelising in the classroom and students bludging school to join a climate “emergency” march?

The vast gulf between the goals and values of teacher activists and mainstream Australia is on display almost every day. We saw it in the voice referendum when activist teachers urged students to adopt a position resoundingly rejected by Australia at large. At some schools teachers handed out Yes badges and only Yes speakers were invited to address students.

This is politics dressed up as morality, pure and simple.

Last week, in a statement about the Israel-Gaza war, the NSW Teachers Federation said “the actions of the Israeli government cannot be justified in any way”. It’s bad enough that this terrible conflict is tearing Australia apart without teachers making it worse by inflaming immature school students who have taken to the streets screaming for a free Palestine without any understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I’m guessing no one in the NSW Teachers Federation is inclined to point out that, as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, Israel is the only state in this unhappy region that guarantees freedom of religion, abortion rights, same-sex marriage and a host of other rights that the teachers union rightly regards as fundamental. Or to point out that Hamas, a terrorist organisation that beheaded babies, raped young women, and murdered and kidnapped other civilians, didn’t come from nowhere. Hamas defeated its rival political party, Fatah, in the 2006 elections.

So, let’s not kid ourselves. A serious conference about secularism ought to explore the darker side to modern secularism where inconsistencies run rife and ideology is often more doctrinaire than any formal religion.

If the NSW Teachers Federation would like to make room for some intellectual diversity, I might be free to discuss these issues, along with the hypocrisy of modern secularists banging on about the evils of any form of religious instruction in public schools while using the public classroom as their own secular pulpit.