In “Thinking about Australian Religious History” (1989) 15(3) Journal of Religious History 330 Bruce Mansfield argued for a particular understanding of the religious history of Australia. In particular, he argued that the religious history of European Australia began at the end of the desacralisation of the European world, so that Christianity in Australia had a “strongly intellectualised and institutional character”, that it was by and large a success story, and that there was, until very recent times, “the ambition of Christianising Australia”. As someone interested in religion and law, it’s the first and third parts of his argument that interest me.
Mansfield argues that we need to recognise that the Christianity that was taken to Australia was one where the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment had already happened. The resulting Christianity was “doctrinal, scriptural, individual, institutional”, and so perhaps particularly ill-equipped to engage with Aboriginal religion. It was also one where the denomination was a fact of religious, and public, life. This was the case even for the Anglican Church, which by the mid 1860s had emerged as a voluntary religious society and, to quote Cable, “a state or national church no longer”. So although Mansfield makes the case for a “Christian Australia” being key, it is a Christian Australia made up of Christian denominations.
This emphasis on the denomination is thought provoking. Are we seeing (or have we seen?) an “Australianisation” of church/state in the UK? How far are arguments around religion and law constructing the Church of England as a voluntary religious society, rather than a special state church, albeit in a state with a very high degree of toleration of other religious groups? Thinking about the development of same-sex marriage in the UK, the special position of the Church of England was framed as a technical problem about the status of Church law, with the rights of “the community” to decide where it stood on the issue taken for granted.
The focus on a particular type of religious experience is also interesting. I have a fairly longstanding concern that the legal understanding of “the religious” in UK and European law tends to be too neatly congruous with socially and demographically dominant paradigms. Mansfield doesn’t explore the implications of his point about the texture of Australian Christanity very far in this article, being more concerned to defend it from critics who may not recognise his description. He describes settlement during the time of traditional Christianity as “against historical sense”. But it’s an intriguing counterfactual. If the Christianity of the European settlers had been closer to what he sees as traditional, folk, Christianity tied to place and community, what would their relationship with Aboriginal religions have looked like?
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