Weekend Wrap for 15 June 2025

Barney Zwartz: Albanese need not shy away from his Catholic roots
"Many people believe that for a politician to express faith is to betray the separation of church and state. Former PM Tony Abbott particularly suffered this because of his strong public Catholic identity, with one commentator calling him “Pell’s puppet” (a reference to the late Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney at the time). This is a terrible misunderstanding. Politicians who are believers cannot help but bring their faith to their work because it shapes their values and convictions. They should and they must. This doesn’t mean seeking to advance the cause of religion, but that denying their core convictions would be hypocritical and inauthentic. Further, importantly, this is true not only of Christian politicians. Atheists, agnostics and people of other faiths are equally shaped by their values and convictions, and they owe it to their conscience and constituents to honour these. Those who don’t risk becoming venal or corrupt." (8 Jun 2025)
Read more at The Age

Tim Pocock: ‘A living hell’: X-Men star on growing up gay in Opus Dei
"When it came to other subjects, we were often simply not taught certain things. On a number of occasions, certain parts of the textbooks had been removed or blacked out. The school would not only refuse to teach the content, but also didn’t want us to be reading it in our free time; subject matter like evolution and reproduction, for example. The school leaders, as well as my family and anyone I knew, believed in intelligent design and, therefore, it would be a waste of time to fill our heads with the nonsense of evolution. God created us exactly as we are, and so the notion of evolution was preposterous and degrading to humanity. And when it came to reproduction, sex education was simply never taught. Sex was seen as the ultimate temptation for a person and was to be avoided at all costs. Its purpose was solely to create a deeper union between the couple through sanctified Catholic marriage and to conceive more children of God. The less us kids knew about it, the better." (11 Jun 2025)
Read more at The Age

Hugh Harris: The arguments for scripture are a good advertisement for General Religious Education
"If you ever sought an illustration of how a narrow phalanx of special interests can elbow aside popular opinion, then look no further than the continued presence of scripture classes in Australian public schools. Yes, in taxpayer-funded institutions founded as free, secular and compulsory we still witness the weekly incursion of untrained, ecclesiastical volunteers delivering lessons indistinguishable from Sunday School. ... Fortunately, we need not burn down the chapel to rebuild the school house. Secularists need to get behind the alternative – General Religious Education (GRE). Offering lessons in the types of religious thought and expression in Australia and the world, aimed at nurturing understanding and tolerance, GRE offers the chance for children to learn about faith without being forced to swallow it whole. GRE is not about making converts or promoting one faith to the exclusion of others." (13 Jun 2025)
Read more at Rationale Magazine

Katherine Kelaidis: Donald Trump is building a strange, new religious movement
"For over six decades, the “religious right” in America was boomer “Christian nationalism,” straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale. It was about “keeping God in the schools” and the National Prayer Breakfast. It was traditionalist, mindful of theology, and, well, theocratic, which is to say it wanted to take the standards of a religious tradition and apply them to the secular law. They wanted the books of Scripture to replace the statute books. But President Donald Trump is trying to create a new religious right, one that is not just illiberal but fundamentally different and opposed to traditional religion as we’ve known it. The faith of the MAGA movement is not one in which the state conforms to the church, but one in which the church is bent to the will of the strange beast that is American nationalism — the belief that the American project is an exercise in freedom and prosperity like the world has never known, but also the sole possession of those who are white, heterosexual, and unquestioningly loyal to the nation. It’s a model of church-state relations that has less in common with post-revolutionary Iran, where an Islamic cleric known as the supreme leader and his council of religious jurists preside over government, and more in common with Soviet (and arguably contemporary) Russia, where the Russian Orthodox Church is subject to the whims of the Kremlin, acting as everything from propaganda tool to spy center." (13 Jun 2025)
Read more at Vox
(Editorial note: This new rise of Christian Nationalism in the US is having an emboldening effect on those with similar agendas here in Australia.)

Max Wallace: Michael Kirby and British Secularism
"So, what did Mr Kirby mean by the term ‘British secularism’, and why does he support the anti-republican Australians for Constitutional Monarchy who state on their website that their Charter was written by Kirby in 1992? ... I believe his approach to secularism is mostly limited to aspects of education and aspects of sexuality. Nothing about the British situation discussed above, nothing about the opportunity cost of the monarchy for the British and, to a lesser extent, citizens of Commonwealth countries; nothing about the matters to be discussed below. ... Our experience with Legal Opinions and the way the Williams case was run proves that is correct. But the only way Australia can achieve ‘effective secularism’, I suggest, is if sometime in the future there is a Referendum on the question of Australia becoming a republic with a separation of government and religion as part of the constitution." (15 Jun 2025)
Read more at the Secular Association of NSW