Religious discrimination: lessons from Australia

                                                                                                     Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels

 "Religious discrimination is on the rise throughout the world. While many assume that the liberal democracies of the West are the world’s greatest defenders of religious freedom, the evidence simply does not support this claim," says an article by Professor Nicholas Aroney.

He points to a study by Jonathan Fox, the Yehuda Avner Professor of Religion and Politics at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, whose analysis is "based on the most detailed and comprehensive data set on religious discrimination yet compiled".

Fox's findings include the fact that:

Secularist policies are [...] increasingly being adopted by Western governments which place religious believers under mounting restrictions and regulations — including controls on religious dress or restrictions on religious speech.

[Fox argues that] many democratic states with officially neutral religious policies and maintain high levels of separation of religion and state may still be influenced by secular ideologies. And these can motivate the state to be intolerant of religious practices and religious speech.

For these and other reasons, there is more government-based religious discrimination in secular Western democracies than in many of their Asian, African, and Latin American counterparts. Indeed, for many of these countries — like the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — there was no evidence of government based religious discrimination whatsoever. 

On the whole, Fox concludes, democracies engage in less government based religious discrimination than non-democracies. But, contrary to expectations, his data suggests that Western liberal democracies engage in more religious discrimination than non-Western democracies. As Fox points out, while liberal ideology generally supports religious freedom it also supports secularism, and some proponents of secularist beliefs are unwilling to be tolerant of those who do not share their beliefs. 

Aroney underlines Fox's finding that religious discrimination shows up significantly in social media and is expressed socially in harassment, vandalism, and threats of violence. This can be a surprising situation even in what is regarded as one of the most laid-back countries in the world, Australia."Indeed, levels of socially-based discrimination, especially against Jews, are higher in Australia than in Canada, the UK, and many other Western democracies."

Nicholas Aroney is professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Queensland. He was a member of the Expert Panel of the Religious Freedom Review, appointed by former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and chaired by former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. 

He concludes with an overview of the situation in Australia, but, based on Fox's findings, what he says goes for most Western liberal democracies:

Religious discrimination is a reality throughout the world, including in Australia. If there was ever a time when it was possible to be complacent about religious freedom in this country, that is certainly no longer the case. Professor Jonathan Fox’s work warns us that religious discrimination is a reality that is not going away anytime soon.

Clearly, in Western liberal democracies, secularists are emerging as inheritors of the intolerance of the Catholic Church in the Inquisition or the established Protestant church against the Dissenters in England, or against Anabaptists even in Luther's own time*. The historical perspective gained by Catholics and Protestants by bitter experience is lost to those whose puritanical bearing seeks to smother other experiences and approaches to life. Bland secularism is showing its true colours by flattening rather than enriching society.

Another writer, research fellow and author David Furse-Roberts, also addressing the state of religious freedom in Australia, states:

The advance of secularism has brought new challenges to the free exercise of religious beliefs and practices that had hitherto gone largely unchallenged. This has been particularly pronounced in the realm of sexual ethics where traditional attitudes to marriage, typically informed by religious sensibilities, have been on a collision course with the modern, mostly secular outlook affirming of same-sex marriage. With the right for such attitudes to be expressed in the public square becoming increasingly contested, questions of religious freedom have been brought into sharper focus.

...for church schools to practice their faith, and [...] the rights of citizens to think, worship, pray, and assemble according to their own conscience stand decidedly at odds with modern threats to some of these liberties. These include the censorship of more contentious religious views on social media, the “de-platforming” of religious groups from venues and public spaces, instances of employees being fired for their religious beliefs, and calls to strip religious schools of their rights to engage staff in accordance with their faith and values.

Immaturity in the exercise of tolerance, the forgetting that out of religious teaching comes the foundation of our recognition of the dignity inherent in each person, and therefore their rights, the individualism of the modern consumer society supplanting the communitarian spirit of earlier centuries, all are taking their toll on the community's well-being.

Maturity in the exercise of tolerance involves generosity of heart and mind in being committed to the virtues of charity, justice, kindness, patience, temperance, and humility. Without these virtues tolerance is mocked and, in fact, is being suppressed, widely and with passion.

Furse-Roberts, in writing of Australian statesman Robert Menzies (died 1978), makes some relevant comments:  

By “tolerance” Menzies did not imply acceptance of every belief and practice as morally neutral or equivalent, as the word is frequently interpreted to mean in today’s relativist parlance. It was, on the contrary, a recognition that every other honest person “who, hating the same evil, will see a different road by which to come against it.” Elsewhere, Menzies asserted that:

Tolerance does not mean flabbiness. Tolerance of each other does not mean that we condone evil things or that we are not prepared to fight against evil things. Tolerance is mutual understanding, forbearance, a desire to assemble ourselves every time there is a common cause to be served. 

Given the competing claims of different faiths in society, this meant that one’s personal belief was poorly founded and weakly held if it was not able to resist the onset of another person’s critical mind. 

In Menzies’s own words, religious freedom “must mean freedom for my neighbour as well as myself”.

For Menzies, religious freedom, in its truest sense, was not simply about an individual claiming the right to practise his or her own personal faith, but about affording that same freedom to one’s fellow citizen, whatever their faith or creed. The ideal of religious liberty stemmed from the classical Christian notion that faith was a matter of personal choice and individual conscience that could never be oppressed or compelled from the outside. As Robert Wilken wrote in Liberty in the Things of God, “liberty of conscience was born, not of indifference, not of scepticism, not of mere open-mindedness but of faith.” 

Menzies was prime minister in the post-World War II era when immigrants from a diverse range of Western and Eastern European countries flocked to the "Lucky Country", bringing their cultural baggage with them. He saw his role as encouraging the celebration of tolerance, religious or otherwise.

As well, Menzies strove to bed into Australia the proclamations promoting peace in society from the infant United Nations.

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 had made the following provision for religious freedom in Article 18:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

This is why a knowledge of history is important in today's society. Social elites of not so long ago, driven by ideology, mangled their citizens' rights in pursuit of the goal of ridding society of evil, a goal that is beyond any human player. Therefore, Furse-Roberts writes:

Together with the UN and the leaders of the free world, Menzies was dedicated to championing religious liberty in an era when such liberties had been under grievous assault from Nazism and fascism, together with communism. It was the ideal of Western leaders such as Roosevelt and Menzies that religious freedom for all would form one of the great pillars of the new liberal international order.

As seen historically with contending religious beliefs, with fascism and communism, we can know with certainty that passionate secularists will condemn their societies to conflict without resolution unless tolerance rises to prominence among their guiding principles. The common good must take precedence over individual inclinations; respect for other views over the demand for capitulation to those absorbed with self-invention; persuasion over compulsion as to beliefs. 

* "By 1529 [Luther] believed that those who spoke out peacefully against infant baptism should be exiled. By 1530 he had become convinced that the Anabaptist preaching against infant baptism inevitably led to sedition, and he saw their teaching as blashemy against the Word of God. Athough it was cruel to punish them with the sword, he said, it was more cruel to let them condemn the ministry of the Word and suppress sound doctrine and destroy the political order."

Martin Luther, by Richard Marius, 1999, Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London.

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