Separation of Religion and State
S. N. Stuart address to the Unitarian Church, East Melbourne, 16 March 2008
In this talk I will try to cover the following topics. The Australian Constitution, despite a contribution from secularism, has failed to demarcate separate spheres-of-action for religions and the state. The government has shifted responsibility for welfare on to the religious charities. Religion has a number of harmful effects on society. Separation would confer benefits to society; and finally I shall suggest steps towards that goal.
You will not be hearing much about quantitative evidence, for and against separation, since very little exists. Nevertheless I hope what I say qualitatively will resonate with your own observations of Australian society. I speak as a Humanist, and do not disguise my distrust of theology. In my estimation christianity and islam have some intrinsic features that are psychologically and socially unwholesome and deceptive – to say the least. But I won’t dwell on them here, nor on the cases of serious abuse of pastoral trust, which, after all, are not intrinsic to the faith.
Let me begin with the idea and movement of secularism in the 19th century. The first avowed secularist was the English social reformer George Jacob Holyoake, who described his philosophy as ‘communistic in social economy, utilitarian in morals, republican in politics and anti-theological in religion.’ He was prominent, along with his brother Henry, in the Chartist Movement. In 1842, at the London Mechanics’ Institute, George claimed that the established Church of England cost the nation £20 million a year and he announced his disbelief in God. That expression being illegal at the time, he was promptly arrested and convicted of blasphemy. In 1846 he coined the term ‘secularism’ and devoted his life to promoting the ideal. He later described it, as that which seeks the development of the physical, moral, and intellectual nature of man to the highest possible point, as the immediate duty of life – which inculcates the practical sufficiency of natural morality apart from Atheism, Theism or the Bible – which selects as its methods of procedure the promotion of human improvement by material means.
Chartists including Henry Holyoake brought their values with them to the Australian goldfields and into the Ballarat Reform League. The League shepherded the miner’s protests at Eureka, and the subsequent trial was marked by a groundswell of public support, leading to the rise of egalitarianism, which in turn resulted in legislative reforms that made the colony the most democratic in the British world.
In the 1870s, secular state education which excluded the teaching of religion was instituted. That was meant as an antidote to the sectarianism which had unfortunately grown from the mixing of Irish and English immigrants. And at Federation it was a secularist, Henry Higgins, who introduced section 116 into the new Australian Constitution. It reads as follows.
116. The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or trust under the Commonwealth.
Now, most Australians think that that says it all: Australia is constitutionally secular, with no established church in the sense of the United Kingdom, where ‘God Save the Queen’ is still the national anthem. It actually says that the government shall not make laws interfering with religion; it leaves open the path of de-facto collaboration between state and church. It doesn’t respect the separation of the spheres-of-action of civic authority (on the one hand) and private conscience (on the other), as that is found in United States constitutional law, for instance. The High Court of Australia, in the Defence of Government Schools case of 1981, decided that section 116 did not mean separation of religion and state, and cleared the way for government to advance religious institutions indiscriminately.
The result today is that government has outsourced more and more of its services to charities and other religious organizations, according to their capacity. This included the restructure of the Commonwealth Employment Service and the organization of pregnancy counsellors and family-law counsellors. The free-market rhetoric, which was used in this retreat from elected responsibility, invoked the customer’s right to choose: freedom of religion was not violated as long as the government treated all religions equally. Religious organizations now run profitable public hospitals, aged care and disability services. The government – as if admitting that the service-providers are doing the government’s job – grants all of them relief from taxation. So the division between the public and the private realm has become blurred, obscuring responsibilities. In several ways religious organizations retain a privileged position over non-religious bodies. Thru their tax exemptions all of us are paying a tithe to the main churches.
You could say, What’s wrong with that? Charities do a good job. Well, they may do a good job, but we need to be sure about it. The Catholic Church and the Uniting Church are the biggest private employers in the country, greatly dependent on the public purse, yet they are regarded as working in the non-profit sector and don’t have to lodge fully detailed, audited accounts. The profit-making businesses and investments of churches now exceed their charitable activities, yet they remain financially unaccountable. In a country where 30% of people declined to identify with any religion (in the last Census), the mutual nexus between christian church and state will increasingly be felt to be uncomfortable, compromising, discriminatory and undemocratic.
What are the ill effects of the interaction of church and state in Australia? The tax exemptions, which I have already mentioned, apply to income, fringe-benefit, payroll and land taxes and property rates, and constitute a steady church-subsidy worth many billions each year. Surely, taxes should be spent for the public good, not the private. Government encouragement of private schools, which are chiefly religious, aggravates social polarization, with the poorer families concentrated in state schools; if enrolments drop, a state school is closed down but a private school is not. Public health is compromised by the Vatican’s opposition to secular policies on sexual and reproductive health. The Minister of Health, a catholic, funded pregnancy counsellors on condition they were not to advise abortion – doesn’t that look a bit like a religious test to qualify for a trust under the Commonwealth (s. 116)? And the catholic former-Senator Harradine made sure that the family-planning guidelines for Australia’s foreign aid disallowed abortion. Cardinal Pell has used his ecclesiastical authority to warn catholic parliamentarians against transgressing in this area. Our democracy is in a bad way if parliamentarians feel beholden to their fellow believers over and above the wider society. The federal government has colluded with the religious lobby and overturned territorial laws that permitted voluntary euthanasia and homosexual marriage; it has quashed modernization of the Queensland Education Act, under which the only school subject stipulated is bible-study. Government should be wary when it is lobbied by any sectional interest.
Let me count the ways religions are privileged in Australia. For a start, they are automatically assumed to be charitable. That is an inheritance from the Statute of Queen Elizabeth I, which stated that the advancement of religion was a charitable purpose, in 1601 when English society was still dominated by the church. In modern times it has even become necessary to define religion. In the Scientology case of 1983 the High Court recognized that religion was accorded certain privileges and therefore its adherence had to pass certain tests. Those it determined were two in number: there had to be a belief in a supernatural being, thing or principle, and there had to be accepted canons of conduct that gave effect to that belief. (The decision freed Scientology from its prior status as psychological malpractice and dubbed it a religion. But sophisticated christians who reverence a metaphorical divinity had better keep quiet.)
Religion is privileged beyond its charitable status. Its public influence is seen in public prayers and in church services conducted in parliament. Government supports religious festivals as if they were community festivals. The churches control pastoral care by chaplains in public institutions – the military, schools, hospitals and prisons. A school chaplain may have no secular training, yet is respected as if embodying the authority of the school. Churches have the office to intervene in civil court cases as ‘the friend of the court’. Government gives priority to church organizations when awarding welfare contracts.
But the most important privilege is in the running of church schools. Non-government schools are allowed to select their intake, whereas state schools are obliged to accept all comers. Non-government schools are aided greatly by government funds, yet don’t have to render account for those funds; they can apply for extra government grants for particular needs, which is easier than for a state school to obtain. In addition, the professional standards of non-government schools are not subject to responsible inspection. (Humanists disapprove strongly of religious indoctrination and creation pseudo-science in the curriculum.)
The separation of religion from politics is the stated aim of the Secular Party of Australia. This may be a touch quixotic, or even solomonic, if both religion and politics turn out to be innate propensities of humankind. But there would be benefits in having a generally agreed boundary between religious authority and government authority – between God and Caesar, so to speak. If government authority did not cosy up to the clerics, which comprise an obviously sectional interest, our democracy would be more transparent and there would be better equality before the law; Australia would be freer to proceed from a monarchy to a secular republic. If religion were confined to the private sphere of life, schools would produce clear-thinking, more cosmopolitan individuals, ready to face the real challenges of the day, and debate over public policy would be clearer and sounder. If government stopped collaborating with every religious group, it would be in a stronger position to deal with ethnic conflict, when it arises. A religiously neutral, secular government would actually be the best guarantor of religious freedom.
There are some obstacles to separation, of course. Charity welfare complements government welfare; so if charities were discouraged the government would have to shoulder the cost. Would that cost the taxpayer more? I’m not sure that it would.
But deeper than the vested interests on both sides there is the ancestral pull of group identification. Our variegated society contains within it relics of archaic clan society, with its rights and liabilities apportioned not to individuals but to tribal communities. The deep conviction that the tribe we belong to is good and right tends to drive us to impose on the others. Rising into consciousness, it forms a sense of nostalgia for a simpler past, worth fighting for. And religion offers itself as custodian of the feeling. I see that in the evangelical christian sects of today. They are reacting to the rapid mobility and now globalization of modern life. Perhaps the same can be said of the rise of militant islam. We sense a fear that multiculturalism will swamp the mainstream culture. How can the state prevent honour killings, an important means of tribal justice? What if an organized group were to campaign for schools to offer segregated teaching on demand, say, or for halal certification to be supervised and paid for from the public purse? We shall have to reassess group rights. For it is difficult to accept that, just as a partnership or corporation has no definite right to ‘life’, to continuance, neither does a tradition, a state or a religion.
What steps can be taken towards bringing about a separation of religion and state and its attendant social benefits? Education is obviously needed for this. The more people are aware of the virtually black-market commerce between the two orders of institution, the more they will want it to be regulated. I have here two books which are informative, published by the Australian National Secular Association: Separating Church & State – Keeping God Out of Government, and The Purple Economy. With this awareness, undue religious influence on public policy would be recognized as improper. Charities could be made accountable for spending public funds, say by the setting up of a national Charities Commission, as in New Zealand. All religious schools could be subject to inspection of teaching, and lose their licence if sub-standard. The teaching of comparative religion would enable children to see beyond the traditions of their particular family. Today happens to be Harmony Day, when we are reminded of our duty to get to know the other – that helps.
At a higher level of reform, the very definition of charity could be modernized. Organizations working for public health, welfare and the environment could be recognized as charitable. If the old ‘advancement of religion’ were struck out, as suggested by Max Wallace, the business arms of churches and charities with deductible gift recipient status would become accountable. Wallace considers separation so important that it ought to be entrenched in the Constitution. That is what the French Republic did in 1905: its Constitution forbade the government from giving any subsidy to religion. This question would arise in Australia when the republic debate is rekindled. But, whether we go that far or not, it is clear that Australia can do a lot better than it has done to date.
So, to recapitulate, I have considered in turn the contribution of secularism to Australia’s heritage; the failure of the Constitution to separate the spheres-of-action of religions and the state; the government’s responsibility for its citizens’ welfare divested to the charities; the financial unaccountability of the charities; harmful effects of religion on society (including tax exemption, social division, interference with health policy and other legislation); privileges accorded to religion; benefits to society of separation (including improved equity, democracy, education and community relations, preparation for republic); some obstacles to separation, and steps towards the goal (including education, and reform of regulation and the law).
Thank you for your attention.