Sunday, October 07, 2012
Taking on the Australian Christian Taliban, aka the Sydney
Welfare Recipients’ League
A month ago, I wrote a post that assumed there was at least one degree of separation
between the Anglican Church in Sydney
Fundamentalism latching
on to long-established institutions such as the Anglican Church is always an
interesting development. It may seem almost
impossible that a main branch of an overall mainstream organism can grow so
differently from the other main branches in Australia (and also the English
“trunk” and “roots”), but if the branch has sent down a vertical feeder to do
its own thing in the ground, then this makes more sense. So what is so different about what Anglican
Church in Sydney
My hunch is that this
rich fertiliser has to be welfare (i.e. taxpayer dollars) – surely no one is otherwise
capable of being so unaccountably self-righteous without actually spending the
very dollars of the groups they so loudly despise. “Passive” welfare may be the current
buzz-adjective, but active welfare is a much more insidious problem. By this, I mean welfare as a full-time job,
diligently devoted to keeping itself “employed”.
Of course, it would be a
transparent sham to just have an Everlasting and Increasingly More Taxpayer
Dollars For Me/Us campaign as the relevant “work”, so the job at hand needs a
cover-story. Enter the government school
chaplain program. When I first heard of this
John Howard initiative, I shrugged it off as “typical”. Now, after nearly five
years of Labor government, and the school-chaplain program apparently stronger
than ever, I regard it as a cancer on civil society, whose time for surgical
excision is now overdue – ridiculously so, in fact.
As with the Pakistan/Afghan
Taliban, the school-chaplain program explicitly aims to conflate church with
state. By muddying these waters, secular
opponents – or in fact, anyone who hasn’t (yet) been brainwashed, or is
otherwise a financial beneficiary of the fundamentalist agenda – have twin
hurdles to overcome. First, they have to
take the “low” moral ground, and secondly (and less obviously), they have to
stop feeding the monster.
Yes, I know that it is
taxpayers (and other adults) who elect governments, and it is duly elected
governments who have seeded, and then continued to propagate the
school-chaplain program. But even in the
most liberal Western democracy, the electoral process is just not equal to the
task of voting out “I Hate You, But I Get Given Your Dollars Anyway” cashed-up
lobby-groups. Ripping them up, root and branch, is the only
viable way of returning our civil eco-system to health.
* “The good fight” [a
profile of Archbishop Peter Jensen], by Caroline Overington, Australian Weekend
Magazine, 6 October 2012 pp 22 - 25
