Why religious freedom matters

Andrew Thorburn, who stepped down from the CEO position at Essendon Football Club after one day because of his faith.

The Essendon FC incident shows that it is high time for all Australians to rediscover their instinct for religious freedom. By David Furse-Roberts.

Appearing at a Perth citizenship ceremony in 1961, Robert Menzies declared to his audience of new citizens that ‘whatever religion they may profess’, they had come to a country where people were ‘free to pray as we want to pray, to speak as we want to speak, and to assemble as we want to assemble’. From the text of our Commonwealth Constitution guaranteeing no prohibitions ‘on the free exercise of any religion’ (s 116), to the assurances of Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, religious freedom has been a mainstay of our liberal democracy.

Indeed, ever since the reformist Whig governor of colonial NSW, Richard Bourke, introduced the Church Act of 1836, Australia has allowed all Christian churches to flourish on an equal footing despite periodic incidences of sectarian rancour. With successive waves of immigrants from other faiths joining our national fold, Australia has proved capable of allowing people of differing religious beliefs, or indeed no religion, to amicably co-exist as fellow citizens with equal rights before the law.

For these very reasons, the forced resignation of Andrew Thorburn as the freshly-minted CEO of Essendon Football Club has caused alarm bells to ring for those who prize our country’s long-held devotion to religious freedom. On account of his affiliation with a Melbourne evangelical church, City on a Hill, Thorburn was effectively forced to relinquish his position as CEO merely because his church taught orthodox Christian views on human life, sexuality and marriage.

To be sure, the particular wording by which such views were articulated in the church’s online content may have appeared confronting and somewhat jarring to the contemporary sensibilities of many who accept sexual diversity and women’s reproductive rights as givens. That said, the principles expressed in the church’s sermons evidently affirmed ethics still common to all three major branches of Christianity and most world religions including Islam, Hinduism and Judaism.

The yawning chasm between the two worldviews is of course a consequence of secularisation and the sexual revolution that swept Australia and the western world from the 1960s. With traditional religious attitudes towards marriage and human life set on a collision course with more secular understandings of these concepts, this has arguably brought new strains to the free exercise of religious beliefs and practices.

The contemporary challenge for any association, club or society such as Essendon FC, therefore, is to find a way where both perspectives can co-exist, just as they have to within the broader Australian body politic. In short, it means recovering the civil art of ‘agreeing to disagree’, or, to channel Voltaire, ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. Most certainly, each party may find the other’s religious and moral convictions to be disagreeable and even offensive, but that is just learning to live with dissent in a free and plural society.

Despite irreconcilable differences between members of a football club such as Essendon, one could reasonably believe that a shared love of AFL would be sufficient to put aside such differences and work together for the common good of the club, its players and its members. Clearly, the board of Essendon had other ideas in their resolve to force Thorburn to resign on the grounds of his church affiliation. By capitulating to the pressures of intolerant secularist voices, the religious sensibilities of not only Thorburn, but those of other faiths who share the same moral outlook were unceremoniously sidelined.

In reality, the various forms of Christianity and myriad faiths that comprise Australia’s religious mosaic are reflected in the broad fanbase of the AFL which rightly prides itself on attracting followers from all walks of life. As such, it would seem only reasonable that Essendon FC afford some modicum of religious toleration to accommodate this diversity. Regrettably, this principle appeared to be lost on the board of the club which evidently viewed tolerance and diversity as a ‘one-way street’, applicable only to some but not to others such as Thorburn.

The Essendon FC incident only makes the case for religious freedom in Australia even more compelling, as if it wasn’t already pressing enough. As the latest example of somebody being hounded out of their job for their religious views or affiliation, it is high time for all Australians to rediscover their instinct for religious freedom.

In so doing, it is timely to reflect on why the historically hard-won gain of religious liberty matters. First, religious faith or spirituality of any kind is intrinsic to human nature. Through centuries of Christian thought from St Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, Western philosophy has held the human person to be a ‘spiritual being’. Hence the attempts by regimes such as the Soviet Union and Maoist China to stamp out religious belief failed spectacularly. As Menzies himself appreciated from the Cold War, ‘You cannot take thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of people who have a faith of their own, and destroy it, merely by order or command’.

Second, religious toleration and freedom is a defining tenet of the British liberal tradition to which Australia is a proud heir. As early as 1689, the Liberal philosopher John Locke penned A Letter Concerning Toleration, which became a touchstone text for religious toleration. In the 18th century, the Whig statesman Edmund Burke fought for the religious freedoms of Catholics and Nonconformist Protestants in England. He was followed by John Stuart Mill in the Victorian era whose 1859 essay On Liberty asserted that an individual’s liberty of conscience and religious belief was essentially unbounded.

Australia’s tradition of religious freedom is borne of a rich spiritual and philosophical legacy we cannot afford to squander. If there is any silver lining from the Essendon Football Club episode, it is the renewed imperative to afford people of faith the necessary freedoms to flourish without the pall of censorship and threat of cancel culture. Essentially, guaranteeing all Australians of their Constitutional right to the free exercise of religion is about tilling the soil of civil society to let a thousand blossoms bloom. Our country will be all the richer for it, given the enormous social capital faith brings to our communities.

The ethical teachings of faiths such as Christianity may grate at times against modern ears, but there is no doubting that faith has been a tremendous force for good. Its core message of love, forgiveness and new life, together with its calling to serve something greater than oneself has inspired millions of men and women to do great works in spite of their human imperfections. From enriching personal character to providing fellowship, and from spawning charities to building schools and hospitals, faith has helped make us a better people and country. Buttressing its freedom will nourish us all.

David Furse-Roberts is the author of God & Menzies: The faith that shaped a prime minister and his nation. You can purchase the book here