Changing the Subject

An article in The Age today by one Dennis Altman, the 2005 Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University and author of a book called Fifty First State - no prizes for guessing what that would be about - highlights an alarming trend among Australia's left-wingers, elites, members of the chattering class and "people like us"s. When confronted with the biggest issues of our time: terrorism and the rise of political Islam generally, their stock standard response is to dodge the question in some transparently desperate manner - that hasn't changed, of course - but now they have a new distraction to the main game: Christians.

Apparently, conservative politicians are cosying up to them, indeed, some of them may even be Christian. Whatever happened to secular democracy! As everyobody knows, the decent thing to do in any free, modern society is to hide one's religious convictions away in the basement like your grandparents did with your crazy uncle, not parade them around, and certainly never let them influence your attitudes or values.

In fact, in Australia, Christianity has become so marginalised that professing any degree of belief practically makes one a social dissident. The fact that otherwise intelligent people can become so paranoid about the success of a few fringe pentecostal churches or, in Altman's case, tax breaks for churches which have likely existed for decades or centuries, attests to this. Which is what makes the "Christians under the bed" movement so very ridiculous.

Today, the greatest internal threat to our secular democracy (realistically, radical Islam is, thanfully, a threat from without) is militant atheism, not some mythical resurgence in pre-enlightenment Christianity. For those Christians who haven't been cajoled by wider society into leaving the mainstream churches - still, numerically, the main source of this alleged Christian scourge - these churches are deserting them. Whether it's in a desperate attempt to remain relevant, or some other pathology which afflicts dying organisations, the establishment branches of Christianity seem to have decided to go cold turkey on the fire-and-brimstone stuff and instead taken a course of soft-left happy pills. Which is fine, unless you're a believer, which is probably why so very few people still are.

So what happens when faith has been ridiculed away and descredited in the minds of the masses as so many silly fairy stories unworthy of belief? Well, you could always worship the state instead, that's worked out fine in the past, hasn't it?

Just don't mention the terrorists (or the communists, for that matter).