Weekend Wrap for 11 May 2025

Sarah Bacaller: “All to Jesus I surrender”: When coercion is taken out of religion, what do we have left?
"The Victorian state government has recently announced an inquiry into coercive control in religious contexts, after the courageous advocacy of survivors and groups such as Stop Religious Coercion Australia. Coercive control can be understood as 'a pattern of controlling behaviour, used by a perpetrator to establish and maintain control over another person' using various means and involving harm or threats of harm. It reinforces an individual’s belief in their inferiority and dependence upon someone perceived as more powerful than themselves. Recently, public discourse and legislation have focused on the role of coercive control in intimate partner violence — a critical and overdue step. But can the construct of 'coercive control' also be relevant to religious groups? I believe so. We all know cults are dangerous and involve frightening levels of control. But the Victorian inquiry will also focus on “high demand” religious groups — which is to say, groups that tend to significantly influence congregants’ choices in relation to 'education, employment and opportunities, relationships, resources and lifestyle'." (6 May 2025)
Read more at ABC Religion & Ethics

Si Gladman: It’s time for the federal parliament to enact broad secular reform
"A federal parliament controlled by a Labor majority, plus progressive independents and minor party representation, has a historic opportunity to pursue long-overdue secular reform for Australia. Despite the fundamental demographic changes that have occurred in recent decades – with increasing religious diversity and the number of non-religious people poised to overtake Christians at next year’s Census – government decision-makers are yet to take note. Religious privilege – mostly, Christian privilege – continues to pervade our nation’s public institutions, relegating non-religious Australians to being treated as second-class citizens." (7 May 2025)
Read more at the Rationalist Society of Australia

Lucy Hamilton: Tackling Christian extremism in Australian politics
"The election campaign was fraught. Reports of violent interactions at booths have circulated in recent polls. Advertising campaigns were aggressive, with more mysterious front groups emerging to push talking points that official actors were not prepared to utter themselves. Perhaps most worrying was the growing activity by religious actors. Australia was lucky that enough of our voters could see the threat posed by the Trumpian chaos of the current Liberal Party; now is the time to tackle these challenges before they do any more damage to our democratic project. The hardest problem to confront in this list is that of coercive Christians activating around the Coalition parties, in addition to their micro parties. Determining the line between beneficial religious commitment and harmful intent is fraught. The Exclusive Brethren cult, presenting in hordes around booths to campaign for the Coalition, although denied the right to vote by their own leaders, was one problem. Another was the Christian Nationalist commitment signed by most Coalition candidates to ensure preference deals with the Australian Christian Lobby’s interlinked Family First Party. The Church and State Conference, this year celebrating America’s greatness based in her Pulpits Aflame, has been touring Australia with the goal of marshalling American-style Christians to act as a political force." (8 May 2025)
Read more at Pearls & Irritations

Paul Gregoire: Liberties Council Has the NSW Public’s Back on the Antisemitism Law-and-Order Smokescreen
"The NSW Council for Civil Liberties has raised its concerns that antisemitism has been and continues to be weaponised by politicians and the media alike, via “the incorrect and harmful conflation of Zionism and Judaism”. Zionism, the NSWCCL confirms, is a “modern political movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Israel”, whilst “Judaism is a religion and an ethnicity”. These concepts are fairly basic, especially when an authority, like the NSW council, outlines them, and it goes on to explain in its recent submission on Antisemitism in NSW that this conflation is being propagated in order to block criticism of Israel, a nation subject to an International Court of Justice inquiry over its plausible commission of genocide, via the claim that it equates to antisemitism." (8 May 2025)
Read more at Sydney Criminal Lawyers

Ali Kadri: If Muslims want our votes to matter, we must move from protest to policy, from emotion to organisation
"Muslim Votes Matter had two main goals. The first was to reduce Labor’s majority so it would need support from pro-Palestinian independents or the Greens. The second was to turn safe Labor seats into marginal ones, thereby forcing local MPs to take the concerns of Muslim voters more seriously. To do this, the campaign urged people to preference Labor last on how-to-vote cards. In some electorates, Labor was placed behind parties that have long opposed multiculturalism and even Muslim communities themselves. The idea was to punish Labor for its perceived inaction. But the outcome was the opposite of what the campaign had hoped. Labor retained a strong majority. In most of the seats that were targeted, Labor’s position actually improved — including in Western Sydney and Melbourne. Nothing, it would seem, shifted in the way Muslim Votes Matter had predicted." (8 May 2025)
Read more at ABC Religion & Ethics