Lord save us from the curse of post-religious preachers

As Christianity declines, we are forced to listen to the mindless moralising of mission creepers.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and wife Jenny sing during an Easter Sunday service at his Horizon Church at Sutherland in Sydney in 2019.

There is a fleeting character in one of the middle seasons of The West Wing who is accused of being the devil when she says something sassy in the anteroom to the Oval Office. “Ha! I worry about the ones who sound like angels,” she tells Charlie, the president’s loyal staffer.

I worry about those too. Even more so today because it was better when the do-gooders went to church on Sunday. Back then, barely a few decades ago, they went to bed knowing they had done good by God. Even better if they volunteered in a soup kitchen too, or helped raised money for fine causes in their own time. When traditional religion became demode – too pushy and judgmental, too many commandments from self-righteous preachers talking about sin and saviours to the congregation below – people searched for meaning elsewhere. We humans are a tribal lot. And even if we don’t think our lives on this mortal coil will provide tickets into Heaven or send us to the ­hotter place, many of us need to believe in something bigger than ourselves.

And aren’t the pickings rich? The neo do-gooders got woke. And they went full-time, moving into strategic positions in universities, bureaucracies, politics, companies, unions, law societies and so on. Pick any institution and there are secular priests searching for a congregation, dictating their ­version of morality regardless of how relevant it is to their group’s purpose.

Boring little groups that were meant to look out for the boring but important interests of their members have swapped their mission for more grandiose plans to make the world a better place.

It’s a fine ambition, but who gets to decide on the finer details of what’s moral and good? Just how judgy do we get? And what are we to do with people within the group who might disagree? Is there room for difference? Should we allow sinners a path to redemption, as the traditional religions do?

Yeah, no thanks.

Their best chance of doing actual, tangible good would be by sticking to their core mission. But data helps explain their mission creep. The last time we filled out a census, in 2016, just over half of all Australians said they identified with a Christian faith. That was about 10 per cent less than the ­previous time the government checked on us.

While there was an uptick in Australians following other religions, the marked change was among those who are, as they say, losing their religion. Five years ago, just over 30 per cent of Australians ticked “no religion” on the census. Five years earlier, 22 per cent of the population were nonbelievers. In 2006, it was a tad below 19 per cent.

When you lose your religion, you need to find something else to make meaning of life. Many landed on politics. It’s no coincidence that people with different political views are increasingly viewed as not just wrong, but evil. Evil ­provides the moral imprimatur to shut people down, cancel and shame them.

But ask yourself this: when it comes to religious zeal bursting from the private into the public sphere, what’s more objectionable? Scott Morrison’s Pentecostal faith? Or the pervasive, dictatorial mission creep of organisations that imagine they reflect a new ­irrefutable morality?

Remember the critics who railed against Morrison’s speech to a national conference of Christian churches, where he said he ­believed he was called upon to do God’s work? Remember their self-righteous disdain when Australia’s first Pentecostal PM said he had practised the evangelical tradition of the “laying-on of hands” while prime minister?

Glass houses, stones and all that jazz. Many of these same critics, many journalists at the ABC, use their roles in the same way. Their gods are different, and they don’t literally lay their hands on people. But, holy smokes, these are heady days for these self-appointed morality clerics.

The ABC’s Radio National has become a training ground for these secular preachers. With far more reach than a once-weekly church service, arrogance has gone to their heads; they are very, very preachy when delivering their pet morality lessons. For example, right now those who disagree with a constitutional “voice” for Indigenous people are treated as sinful, so we barely hear from them. Instead, it’s a daily dish of yes, yes, yes to the voice.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has a position statement on climate change, directing the nations GPs to educate “patients and the wider the wider community about climate change and its impact on individual and population health”. What about sticking to advocating for better access to healthcare for Australians who are forced to go to emergency departments because they can’t access a GP? How ­humdrum compared to a climate “emergency”.

The Lancet, long one of the world’s leading biomedical journals, has asked its readers, via a ­review of a play called Lungs, to consider whether it is acceptable to have a child. According to this play, a child will have a lifetime carbon footprint of 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. A character in the play points out: “That’s the weight of the Eiffel Tower. I’d be giving birth to the Eiffel Tower.”

What business does a medical journal have using a theatre review to suggest that having children is sinful until we deal with climate change?

In Australia, Herald Sun cartoonist Mark Knight has quit the journalists union, the Media Entertainment Arts Alliance, because he says a group set up to look out for its members has ditched that core function for political activism. The union didn’t say a word to support Knight when he became the victim of a hysterical ­social media pile-on. The MEAA was more upset about the Press Council not clamping down on cartoons like his famous Serena-throws-a-tantrum cartoon than defending the right of members to draw a cartoon.

“Now, there is a political divide,” Knight told The Weekend Australian “Obviously I’m not the right fit for the union any more.”

The increased polarisation of politics and mission creep in myriad organisations is no fluke. A new form of secular sectarianism has taken hold, and sinners are slowly ousted from modern creeds. And when organisations swallow the schtick without working out its purpose, things can go awry.

Take Moriah College, a Jewish school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, in the news earlier this month for a couple of reasons. First, some rich and richer types are trying to get on the school board. Second, it has a few problems: poor HSC results, a $7.3 million fraud and questions about the $81 million needed for redevelopment. The usual stuff that might upset parents who are forking out $36k in fees each year. The news report mentioned a skills matrix sent to voters by the school board. It listed, in order, skills it regards as most valuable: being an honorary secretary, ­gender diversity and building and infrastructure. What about education and finance? It is any wonder some think the school is in trouble?

As The New York Times’s David Brooks wrote a few years ago, lamenting the blind faith of modern-day elites, “diversity is a midpoint, not an endpoint”. But few organisations bother working out the point of diversity to their organisation. They prefer a slogan to thinking deeply about its relevance to them.

The Law Society of Australia’s latest journal is a case in point. Cover the law? Blah. Too banal. The May edition includes a judge telling law society members to be “climate conscious and not climate blind”. OK, this chap is the Chief Justice of the Land and Environment Court, but still, he is a judge. His core role is to interpret and apply the law. If you want to persuade people about big sexy political issues, maybe stand at the next election?

University of Sydney administrators would rather brag about diversity and inclusion programs than the critical importance of defending free speech and promoting intellectual rigour. The Australian Institute of Company Directors would rather talk about quotas than advocate for reforms that help a company grow, and create more jobs.

Mission creep has become seriously creepy, prompting the question of what’s next? In Britain, the Civil Service’s most recent Competency Framework says that level five deputy directors are expected to “actively promote diversity and equality of opportunity inside and outside the Civil Service, valuing difference and external experience”. Note the “inside and outside” part. It is not enough that you follow the commandments at work, you must do so in your private lives too. Forget any idea of the separation of private and public realms. There is no rendering unto Caesar for secular preachers.

Vivek Ramaswamy, who has a book due out in August called Woke, Inc, tweeted recently that “it’s time to replace ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ with ‘Excellence, Opportunity and Civility’ ”. What a top idea. Sadly, political leaders won’t save us from the new social puritans. That will fall to a broader, deeper revolt, each of us pushing back when we get a chance, challenging the high priests to explain why they think they have a monopoly to determine morality any more than a man in a church does.