It is time to reconnect with our societal foundations

As the government works to hammer out the legislation for marriage equality, it knows there is widespread concern in the community about protections for religious freedom.

When it comes to protecting the rights of religious Australians to live by their beliefs, the so-called ‘progressives’ are fierce opponents. Being free to believe, they say, just means being free to hate.

Such a claim is nonsense. Freedom of religion has long been named as a fundamental human right which protects something that goes to the heart of human identity and personhood.

Even more important, though, is that those who would eject religion from society fail to recognise that the very notion of human rights they are so keen to ‘protect’ has deep religious roots.

Whereas the ancient world assumed natural human inequality, Christianity taught the inherent equality of all people, and that all of us bear individual responsibility for our acts.

This golden thread of individual moral agency is woven through all our ideas about truth, faith, freedom and rights that make up the Western civilisation — of which Australian society is a part.

No wonder we are waking up to the need to reaffirm those roots and to reconnect with the foundations of Western civilisation on which our liberal, secular society is built.

So-called ‘progressive’ critics regularly denounce Western civilization as racist, imperialist, and misogynistic; and hold it responsible for everything they think is wrong with our society.

Ordinary Australians know that these views are anything but progressive yet they threaten to tear down everything we hold dear about this country of the ‘fair go’.

It has never been more important to uphold — and celebrate — the civilisation that has given us all the freedoms and liberties we can so easily take for granted.

Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, and the author of Reason, Repentance, and the Individual: Recovering the Religious Roots of Western Civilisation. This is an extract of a piece published by the Daily Telegraph.