The Address delivered at the Interfaith Roundtable of the Australian Multicultural Council within the Multicultural Policy Section of the Commonwealth Department of Social Sciences, May 22nd, 2014, Melbourne, by Prof. Desmond Cahill, Chair, Religions for Peace Australia.
Introduction
According to the psychologists, religion is about the 4B’s of (i) believing (ii) behaving, bonding and bridging (Saroglou & Cohen 2011). Authentic religion, whilst concerned about self-love and self-care, is primarily concerned with the other, the other of the transcendent, the other of family, the other of neighbour, the other of enemy and the other of creation.
As was found in an Australian research study for the immigration department ten years ago (Cahill, Bouma, Dellal & Leahy 2004), religion, despite its faults and many failures, adds to Australia’s social capital and its social cohesion. It does this, firstly, through its teachings in pulpit, classroom and public statements of such spiritual and moral values as love, truth, honesty, integrity, compassion, mercy, beauty and hope and against hatred, materialism, narcissism, corruption and crass commercialism. Australia has a need for multifaith spiritualities of individual holiness and social wholeness. Secondly, religion adds to social capital with its schools, universities, hospitals, aged care facilities and its welfare programs for the poor, the homeless, the imprisoned and the ill. With the decline of the welfare state and the age of entitlement, there is now a greater social and economic intersection between religion and state with the funding of these initiatives.
Freedom of Religion vs Freedom of Expression
As Cardinal George Pell has reminded us, freedom of religion, like freedom of expression and freedom of the press, is a limited, not an absolute, right circumscribed by limitations as expressed on Article 18 (3) of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights which states Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
It is a blight on Australia’s religious freedom and its social cohesion that bigoted, secularist groups have misused planning laws to obstruct the building of places of worship by Australia’s non-Christian traditions. Silly also has been the attempt to modify Article 18 (c) of the Racial Discrimination Act and the even sillier comment that “one has the right to be bigoted”. One has the freedom to be bigoted but not the right. Rights are never about doing wrong.
Australia’s Changing Religious Profile
Australia’s religious profile is changing quickly and dramatically. Journalists have got it half-right in their focus on Australia’s increasing secularist humanism which since 1996 until 2011 has increased by 62.95 per cent. In the same period Catholicism has increased by 13.35 per cent whilst Anglicanism has declined by 5.72%. However, the other side of the story is that the number of Buddhists has increased by 164.71 per cent, Muslims by 137.09 per cent and Hindus by 309.97 per cent while the number of Sikhs has more than quadrupled. In this increasing polarization, this is leading to difficult, three-cornered tensions between Christians who think that Australia has always been, is and ought remain Christian, Enlightenment secular humanists who wish to have religion privatised and, thirdly, the advocates for a moderate multifaith Australia. Australia’s strength has been its support of religious moderation as against the never-ending struggle against religious extremism and the literal, unscholarly interpretation of scriptural texts (see Saeed 2014).
Australia’s Interfaith Movement
In Australia, the interfaith movement had its origins in the early 1970s and has subsequently operated alongside the ecumenical and multicultural movements, if perhaps less visibly so. Since 9/11 it has blossomed as a grassroots movement in the pursuit of interreligious harmony and social cohesion with many community initiatives. Here in Victoria, there are 31 local government interfaith networks including seven in regional Victoria, namely, Ballarat, Geelong, Gippsland, Loddon Campaspe, the Mornington Peninsula, Shepparton, and Whittlesea. However, the interfaith movement is not a strong movement and lacks a strong cohesive centre. APRO (Australian Partnership of Religious Organizations), as the umbrella body, receives no funding from anybody – so what can it achieve? There needs to be established a broadening of the Australian Multicultural Council to become the Australian Multicultural and Interfaith Council and to establish an interfaith secretariat within the Commonwealth Department of Social Services.
This presentation is based on my reflections from discussions that were held last weekend by Victoria’s interfaith leaders here in Melbourne and from an interfaith forum held two weeks ago in Sydney at the NSW Parliament House sponsored by APRO. Accordingly, in the short time available to me I want to quickly raise four challenges:
1. Quality Religious Leadership and the Place of Religious Law in the Context of Social Cohesion
In the 2011 Australian Human Rights Commission report Freedom of Religion and Belief in 21st Century Australia (Bouma, Cahill, Dellal and Zwartz 2011), it was found that religious leaders had a poor understanding of the role of government in the governance and management of religion. In the pursuit of interreligious harmony and social cohesion, we need quality religious leaders who firstly know English, and know how to give community leadership in a religiously pluralist Australia and how to interact with other religious bodies. We need quality religious leaders who understand that religious law, whether it is Catholic canon law or Anglican church law or Muslim Shari’a law or Jewish religious law, is always subservient to the civil and criminal law in a democratic society although accommodation can be made as happens with regard to burial laws, offensive weapons law, equal opportunity law etc. but never when fundamental human rights or Australia’s fundamental norms an practices are at stake. This is not assimilationist Australia or the Judaeo-Christian tradition imposing their wills on civil society, but highlights the limitations of religious law.
Two current examples illustrate the point. Clerical and monastic sexual abuse of children and teenagers unfortunately exists in all religious traditions, though the recent focus has rightfully been on the Catholic Church. Evidence before the Royal Commission and the Victorian and NSW parliamentary inquiries very clearly shows that Catholic leaders responded in terms of canon law, not criminal law. They very misguidedly saw the priest perpetrators as committing a sin, but not a crime. The second example concerns the increasing practice in certain traditions, according to much anecdotal evidence, of private, unregistered religious marriages, both in Australia and overseas. The danger is of the marriage of under-age girls, of formal polygamous relationships and forced marriages. There is a centuries-long tradition in British common law that all religious marriages are also celebrated in accord with civil law, coming about as the result of the blight of clandestine marriages in centuries past. Marriage is not just an individual nor dual family affair but a public affair because the State has a stake in good marriages and strong families.
Hence, religious law can never predominate over civil and criminal law and ultimately matters must be decided on the floor of parliament. Connected to this are the issues of forced marriages, domestic violence, interfaith marriages, inheritance laws and
the provision of pre-marriage education programs within non-Christian communities. To achieve this, it would seem necessary that a registration system be introduced for religious personnel and spiritual directors that goes beyond the present religious celebrant list held by the attorney-general’s department. As well, there needs to be introduced induction courses for newly arrived religious personnel – a successful pilot program was conducted by Monash University in 2004 but it was never followed up by government action.
2. Multifaith Intersection with Secular Humanist Australia and the Global Civil Society
Australia is often described as ‘a secular society’ and the mantra “free, secular and compulsory” is often applied to government schools. We have a major problem with the word ‘secular’ because it is understood very differently by different sections of our society from a benign separation of religion and state to an aggressive, atheistic stance that denigrates all religion as superstitious nonsense. I prefer to speak of Australia as ‘a civil society’. But there is a deeper issue here. Australia is built on the twin pillars of Enlightenment humanism and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. But this is now being expanded, and must be expanded, to include the insights of Confucian humanism as well as the Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu traditions as these communities grow. All traditions, whether religious or secular humanist, are belief systems or world views that contribute to the richness and diversity of 21st century Australia. In the religious information element to be incorporated into the new ACARA national curriculum, the humanist tradition with its moral code needs to be included as a legitimate world view. Another reason for this inclusion is our increasing interface with Asia and global civil society. In order to be Asia-literate and globally literate, young Australia need to be well-informed about the world’s major religious traditions for their future interaction with Indonesian Muslin business people or with South Korean Won Buddhist parliamentarians.
3. Signs, Symbols and the “Our Father” in Multifaith Australia
A third issue for the interfaith movement concerns Australia’s national signs and symbols together with multifaith ceremonies at times of national celebration and tragedy. It will be interesting to see whether there are interfaith ceremonies, drawing together the Christian and Muslim communities, in next year’s ANZAC celebrations. There is also the matter of the ‘Our Father’ recited at the start of each parliamentary session. Here, it is to be noted that the emergence of multifaith Australia is not to be seen as replacing the Judaeo-Christian tradition but as adding and expanding the diverse richness of Australia’s religious heritage. The proposal, now ten years old, is that the ‘Our Father’ be replaced by a rotational system of prayers and reading by Australia’s sixteen largest belief system groups, including, equally importantly, a reflection or reading chosen by the secular humanist group.
4. The Role of Chaplains in Multifaith Australia
There are now hundreds of chaplains across Australia, in the defence forces, in prisons, in schools, in universities, in hospitals, in factories and at times of emergencies. With their pastoral care, they give witness to the spiritual and transcend in life. As human beings, we are conceived in mystery and we die in mystery, whether in a hospital bed or on the battlefield or wherever. No one, not even the fervent atheist, can be certain about what happens after death. There is more to life than the purely social or the purely psychological. Increasingly, these chaplains, whilst giving witness to their own spiritual tradition(although it is to be noted there are 40+ interfaith chaplains), operate in multifaith contexts. Chaplaincy in Australia needs to be further professionalized, not least in schools, as the school chaplaincy program was not well introduced almost a decade ago. Non-Christian groups have been almost neglected in the soon-to-be-expanded program.
As part of this professionalization, chaplains would be part of the registration of all religious personnel as suggested earlier. Competency standards need to be set for the different area of chaplaincy with the provision of university and TAFE programs. A start, especially in the hospital area, has been made but a concerted government effort needs to be made to place chaplaincy on a more professional footing in a multifaith context. Also to be addressed are quality chaplaincy outcomes and the needs of volunteer chaplain assistants.
In conclusion, there are other issues raised in the discussions including (a) the addressing of religious extremism (b) the mitigating of the impact of overseas events (c) the incorporation of Aboriginal spiritualities into Australian social and religious life and (d) interfaith and access to the media, including the increasing religious illiteracy of journalists. In today’s religious and secular world, increasingly and inexorably to be religious is also to be interreligious.
List of References
Bouma, G., Cahill, D., Della, H. & Zwartz, A. (2011) Freedom of Religion and Belief in 21st Century Australia (Australian Human Rights Commission, Sydney). Available on the websites of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Australian Multicultural Foundation and Religions for Peace Australia.
Cahill, D., Bouma, G., Dellal, H. & Leahy, M. (2004) Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs and the Australian Multicultural Foundation, Canberra) also available on the Religions for Peace Website under the Projects heading.
Saeed, A. (2014) Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-First Century: a Contextualist Approach (Routledge, Oxford)
Saroglou, V. (2011) Believing, Bonding, Behaving and Belonging: The Big Four Religious Dimensions and Cultural Variation. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 42, 8, 1320 – 1340
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Professor Desmond Cahill, OAM.
Desmond Cahill, Professor of Intercultural Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne, has been teaching about and researching cross-cultural issues and multicultural societies for the past 35 years based on his training in theological and social psychological studies. His recent focus has been on religion, globalization and interfaith issues. In 2004, he published with his colleagues, Gary Bouma and Hass Dellal, for the Australian immigration department, Religion, Cultural Diversity and Safeguarding Australia in the aftermath of 9/11 and in 2011 for the Australian Human Rights Commission, Freedom of Religion and Belief in 21st Century Australia. Since 2000, he has chaired Religions for Peace Australia and in 2008 was elected co-president and deputy moderator of Religions for Peace Asia. He led the City of Melbourne’s bid to stage the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions, the world’s largest interfaith gathering and was subsequently its honorary Melbourne Program Director. In 2010, he was awarded the Order of the Medal of Australia for “his services to intercultural education and to the interfaith movement”.
Source: © Desmond P. Cahill
Table One: Birthplace Profile of Australia: Census 1996 and 2006
|
1996 Census |
2006 Census |
||||||
|
Country of Birth |
Number |
% of OSB |
Country of Birth |
Number |
% of OSB |
1996-2006 % differ |
|
|
U.K. |
1,072,514 |
27.44 |
U.K. |
1,038,156 |
23.51 |
-3.21 |
|
|
New Zealand |
291,388 |
7.46 |
New Zealand |
389,464 |
8.82 |
+33.68 |
|
|
Italy |
238,388 |
6.10 |
China(inc. HK) |
278,383 |
6.30 |
+64.30 |
|
|
China (inc. HK) |
169,439 |
4.34 |
Italy |
199,132 |
4.51 |
-16.47 |
|
|
Viet Nam |
151,053 |
3.87 |
Viet Nam |
159,854 |
3.62 |
+5.83 |
|
|
Greece |
126,520 |
3.24 |
India |
147,101 |
3.33 |
+89.76 |
|
|
Germany |
110,331 |
2.82 |
Philippines |
120,533 |
2.73 |
+29.68 |
|
|
Philippines |
92,949 |
2.38 |
Greece |
109,988 |
2.49 |
-13.07 |
|
|
Netherlands |
87,898 |
2.25 |
Germany |
106,515 |
2.41 |
-3.46 |
|
|
India |
77,521 |
1.98 |
South Africa |
104,120 |
2.36 |
+86.75 |
|
|
Malaysia |
76,255 |
1.95 |
Malaysia |
92,347 |
2.09 |
+21.10 |
|
|
Lebanon |
70,224 |
1.80 |
Netherlands |
78,931 |
1.79 |
-10.20 |
|
|
Poland |
65,113 |
1.67 |
Lebanon |
74,858 |
1.70 |
+6.60 |
|
|
South Africa |
55,755 |
1.43 |
Sri Lanka |
62,252 |
1.41 |
+32.50 |
|
|
Ireland |
51,469 |
1.32 |
U.S.A. |
61,715 |
1.40 |
+24.61 |
|
|
Malta |
50,879 |
1.30 |
Korea(Sth) |
52,763 |
1.19 |
+75.34 |
|
|
U.S.A. |
49,528 |
1.27 |
Poland |
52,256 |
1.18 |
-19.75 |
|
|
Sri Lanka |
46,984 |
1.20 |
Croatia |
50,991 |
1.15 |
+8.54 |
|
|
Croatia |
46,981 |
1.20 |
Indonesia |
50,974 |
1.15 |
+15.39 |
|
|
Indonesia |
44,175 |
1.13 |
Ireland |
50,259 |
1.14 |
-2.35 |
|
OSB = Overseas-born persons
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1996 and 2006
Table Two: Language Profile of Australia: 1996 and 2006 Census
|
1996 Census |
2006 Census |
||||||
|
Language |
Number |
% of LOTES |
Language |
Number |
% of LOTES |
1996-2006 % difference |
|
|
Italian |
375,718 |
11.79 |
Chinese |
500,466 |
15.91 |
+45.83 |
|
|
Chinese |
343,193 |
10.76 |
Italian |
316,893 |
10.07 |
-15.66 |
|
|
Greek |
269,770 |
8.46 |
Greek |
252,222 |
8.02 |
-6.50 |
|
|
Arabic |
177,598 |
5.57 |
Arabic |
243,662 |
7.74 |
+37.20 |
|
|
Vietnamese |
146,264 |
4.59 |
Vietnamese |
194,858 |
6.19 |
+33.22 |
|
|
German |
98,814 |
3.10 |
Spanish |
97,998 |
3.11 |
+7.38 |
|
|
Spanish |
91,265 |
2.86 |
Tagalog |
92,330 |
2.93 |
+31.07 |
|
|
Macedonian |
71,352 |
2.24 |
German |
75,634 |
2.40 |
-23.46 |
|
|
Tagalog |
70,441 |
2.21 |
Hindi |
70,013 |
2.23 |
+106.02 |
|
|
Croatian |
69,173 |
2.17 |
Macedonian |
67,831 |
2.16 |
-4.93 |
|
|
Polish |
62,798 |
1.97 |
Croatian |
63,615 |
2.02 |
-8.03 |
|
|
Turkish |
46,204 |
1.45 |
ATSI |
55,698 |
1.77 |
+26.04 |
|
|
Maltese |
45,223 |
1.42 |
Korean |
54,619 |
1.74 |
+82.50 |
|
|
ATSI |
44,192 |
1.39 |
Turkish |
53,858 |
1.71 |
+16.57 |
|
|
Dutch |
40,782 |
1.28 |
Polish |
53,390 |
1.70 |
-14.98 |
|
|
French |
39,940 |
1.25 |
Serbian |
52,534 |
1.67 |
+41.21 |
|
|
Serbian |
37,204 |
1.17 |
French |
43,219 |
1.37 |
+8.21 |
|
|
Hindi |
33,983 |
1.07 |
Indonesian |
42,038 |
1.34 |
+54.58 |
|
|
Russian |
30,999 |
0.97 |
Persian |
37,155 |
1.18 |
+95.21 |
|
|
Korean |
29,929 |
0.94 |
Maltese |
36,517 |
1.16 |
-19.25 |
|
Language = language spoken at home by those aged over five years
LOTE = percentage of total no. of speakers of languages other than English
Table Three: Religious Profile for Australia: 1996 and 2006 Census
|
1996 Census |
2006 Census |
|||||
|
Religion |
Number |
% |
Religion |
Number |
% |
1996-2006 % differ |
|
Catholic |
4,797,365 |
26.92 |
Catholic |
5,126,252 |
25.81 |
+6.86 |
|
Anglican |
3,903,323 |
21.99 |
Anglican |
3,718,252 |
18.72 |
-4.74 |
|
No religion |
2,927,134 |
16.49 |
No Religion |
3,706,555 |
18.67 |
+26.63 |
|
Not stated |
1,550,980 |
8.73 |
Not stated |
2,223,957 |
11.18 |
+43.39 |
|
Uniting Church |
1,334,915 |
7.52 |
Uniting Church |
1,135,427 |
5.72 |
-14.94 |
|
Presbyterian & Reformed |
672,660 |
3.79 |
Presbyterian & Reformed |
596,671 |
3.01 |
-11.30 |
|
Eastern Orthodox |
492,304 |
2.78 |
Eastern Orthodox |
544,160 |
2.74 |
+10.53 |
|
Baptist |
295,176 |
1.66 |
Buddhism |
418,756 |
2.11 |
+109.56 |
|
Lutheran |
249,996 |
1.41 |
Islam |
340,392 |
1.71 |
+69.45 |
|
Islam |
200,886 |
1.13 |
Baptist |
316,738 |
1.60 |
+7.30 |
|
Buddhism |
199,830 |
1.13 |
Christian |
313,190 |
1.57 |
+72.18 |
|
Christian |
181,897 |
1.02 |
Lutheran |
251,107 |
1.26 |
+0.44 |
|
Pentecostal |
164,048 |
0.92 |
Pentecostal |
219,689 |
1.11 |
+33.92 |
|
Jeh. Witnesses |
83,411 |
0.47 |
Hinduism |
148,119 |
0.75 |
+120.39 |
|
Judaism |
79,800 |
0.45 |
Judaism |
88,831 |
0.45 |
+11.31 |
|
Salvation Army |
74,136 |
0.42 |
Jehovah’s Witnesses |
80,919 |
0.41 |
-2.99 |
|
Churches of Christ |
71,308 |
0.40 |
Salvation Army |
64,200 |
0.32 |
-13.40 |
|
Hinduism |
67,209 |
0.38 |
Other Protestant |
56,106 |
0.28 |
+221.73 |
|
Seventh Day Adventist |
52,618 |
0.30 |
Seventh Day Adventist |
55,251 |
0.28 |
+5.00 |
|
Church of LDS |
42,168 |
0.24 |
Churches of Christ |
54,822 |
0.28 |
-23.12 |
Source: © Desmond P. Cahill
