Don’t say anything religious at Christmas

For as we approach year’s end, never before have Australians been as divided as we are now when it comes to talking about faith. Even innocuous phrases like ‘Merry Christmas’ have become toxic.

The Grinches represent the ‘woke’ end of the more serious threats to traditions and beliefs identified in the recently-released Ruddock report into religious freedom in Australia.

Ruddock warns that religious discrimination needs to be treated as seriously as racial or sexual discrimination, and that the moral and religious ethos of faith-based organisations must be protected.

Thankfully, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has recognised the warning signs and has now sworn to campaign to protect the religious freedoms of all Australians at the next election.

He has promised to the stare down the kind of panic provoked during the Wentworth by-election about the alleged plight of gay students under threat of being booted from religious schools. Of course, the histrionic expressions of horror ignored that no one has produced an example of such an expulsion ever taking place.

Now the government is proposing a new religious discrimination act to protect believers and faith-based organisations by making it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of a person’s religious beliefs.

That is good news for all Australians — although of course it remains to be seen whether Morrison’s campaign promises can ever be turned into an effective law. Even so, it is a step in the right direction.

Australians are not a godless people … something missed so far by Canberra and the urban elites, who often dismiss religious people as fanatics or bigots — or both.

Nor are the religious a tiny minority. The 2016 Census revealed about 20 different religions and religious groupings grouping in our country. Of course, much has been made of the 30 per cent stating no religious affiliation.

But 60 per cent of Australians do claim a religious affiliation; and wish for nothing more than the freedom to live their lives and order their families and communities in accordance with it.

Yet Aussies with a religious faith have long feared they were going to be silenced whenever they attempted to openly debate, teach, or proclaim their beliefs. They’d be safe only in their own homes.

Religion’s critics say a freedom to believe is a freedom to hate. That’s why Labor now resists protections for religious freedom, saying it only “replaces one form of discrimination with another.”

Despite Labor’s protests to the contrary, a Shorten government would give short shrift to religious freedom and debase it to the status of a second-class human right to be trumped by secular morality.

First, faith-based schools would come under threat, even though they remain a popular education option for parents who want their kids’ education to be grounded in religious values and teaching.

But then the tyranny of secularism would extend to the high street, the mall, and any open civic space where any reference to any religion — however casual and informal — will be eradicated.

Gone will be any reference to the Christmas story and the birth of Jesus. No angel or star. Just frosted trees, sparkling tinsel, and Santa clambering over your roof looking for the chimney — in vain, once coal is banned, with wood likely next in the firing line.

Merry Christmas will become Happy Holidays, and become an opportunity militant secularists can seize to take offence at the mention of anything religious, claiming mental duress and suffering.

As we sit around the pool or the picnic table over the Christmas holiday, we should take stock and think about who we want to be as a society.

We can live tolerantly and cohesively, and flourish with difference and diversity. Or we can allow the world to be run by vindictive and intolerant progressives, watching everything we claim to stand for turn to dust. And that includes the traditions of our great Aussie Christmas.

Peter Kurti is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Australia.