(Image: Private Media)

Coming suddenly out of summer, an increasingly secular Australia has stumbled deep into debate over the religious discrimination bill without talking much about either religion or the discrimination it apparently faces.

Partly it reflects the political origins of the bill as a consolation prize for the losers in the marriage equality wars. And partly it reflects the application of the Fawlty Towers principle of Australian media: don’t mention religion.

With the religious discrimination bill the reporting (with some notable exceptions, including Crikey) is all shallow politics: who’s wedging whom? Who’s pandering? What does it mean for those religiously conservative seats that voted “no” on the marriage equality plebiscite?

Yet the impetus for the legislation cannot be understood without understanding what different religious groupings — and different religious believers — think about their place in the world. 

Traditional — more socially secure — Christian groups have been, at best, ambivalent about the legislation. Other significant voices reflect a sense of being under siege in an increasingly secular Australia. As US religious historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez writes in her New York Times bestseller Jesus and John Wayne, “militant white evangelicalism thrives on a sense of embattlement”.

Most journalists are themselves non-religious. It’s part demographics: journalists tend to check all the non-religious boxes — university educated, living in non-religious communities like Melbourne’s North Fitzroy or Sydney’s Newtown. And it’s part caution: what good could possibly come of poking the sleeping religious bear?

That caution renders the modern journalist deliberately incurious about the interaction between religion in society and deep politics. Religious politicians are happy to return the favour, eager to avoid being tagged as God-botherers, dismissed as outside the mainstream. The only recent leader who sought to engage the community (and journalists) to explain his beliefs was Kevin Rudd in his 2006 essay “Faith in politics” in The Monthly.

The minority of religious believers working in journalism tend to follow the politicians’ lead and keep their heads down on religious issues, with a few notable exceptions like Nine’s Chris Uhlmann (who cautioned against anti-discrimination laws back in 2020, saying they “had tyranny in their design”) or The Australian’s Greg Sheridan and Gerard Henderson.

Once, serious media treated religion seriously, as a round that called for understanding the institutions, the social networks built around them, and their interaction with politics.

The last in the Nine mastheads was the deeply thoughtful Barney Zwartz, religious editor from 2002 until 2013. Perhaps religion will fall into the newly created round of “race, culture and identity” crafted for recently returned national correspondent Matthew Knott.

As ever, it’s fallen to the ABC to sustain a continued deep journalistic reporting on religion, such as through Andrew West’s Religion and Ethics Report program.

It’s a weakness that renders media reporting unhistorical, missing the lurch in how the current bill conflicts with freedom of religious speech — of how religious debate should “let truth and falsehood contend”, as John Milton declaimed in 1644 in Areopagitica.

A blurred line

Over centuries, “blasphemy” in democratic societies has been read down and written out of the laws. Although NSW and the ACT retain blasphemy (”scoffing or reviling” Christianity) as a statutory offence, it hasn’t been litigated since 1871. A failed attempt by then archbishop of Melbourne George Pell in 1997 to block the display of Piss Christ at the National Gallery of Victoria resulted in a recognition that the common law offence had lapsed in Australia.

Recently, elements of the centre-left have pushed back, seeking to address Islamophobia with laws that would extend “vilification” type offences to religious discrimination. Federal Labor was unsuccessful in adding these offences to the bill overnight.

In 2002, a Victorian Labor government made an offence out of “behaviour that incites or encourages hatred, serious contempt, revulsion or severe ridicule” against someone on the basis of their religion. In 2006, British Labour prime minister Tony Blair suffered a rare defeat when much of his backbench crossed the floor to defeat the racial and religious hatred bill which would have extended racial hate laws to religious beliefs. In 2017, Labor’s Anne Aly called for national religious vilification laws.

Back then the liberals in the Liberal Party (recently rebranded as “modern Liberals”) pushed back against what Morrison back-bencher and former Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson described as “national blasphemy” laws that “would make it ­almost impossible to discuss ­religion”.

This history rhymed last night when the Liberal moderates stuck with their government to vote down Labor’s proposal.