Christian Soldiers

(2 of 2)
Su

ch talk dismays Lee Rhiannon, a New South Wales Greens M.P. who describes herself as an atheist. "To allow your personal faith to dictate what you do in the political world is very undemocratic," she says. "The religious right are trying to remake parliament and society in their own image." Counters Wallace: "People bring up the line, Don't legislate your morality on me. But every law has a moral component. If it isn't Judeo-Christian morality that is being legislated, it's somebody's morality. There's no vacuum." Says Muehlenberg: "Secular humanism is a faith. It has a right to air its opinions in the public arena. We say, Surely the other side can too."

The Greens are a chief target of the family-values lobby, which is thrilled that they've lost the balance of power in the Senate. Not only are the Greens the chief heirs of the '60s, notes Michael Hogan, a political scientist at the University of Sydney, they are also "almost an anti-Christian party." An election scorecard compiled by the ACL and other Christian groups gave the Greens 0 out of 26. Labor did little better, with 4. (The Coalition rated 16.) Shadow foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd, a devout Christian, has expressed outrage at the notion that "God has somehow become some wholly owned subsidiary of political conservatism in this country." Labor needs, he said, to connect with voters "who are searching for some form of certainty in an age of great uncertainty." Social conservatives often lean left on other issues, says Wallace, so the values vote is "winnable by both sides." Labor has missed out on that vote because it's failed to articulate firm core values, says University of Melbourne sociologist Kevin McDonald, who contrasts the Howard government's clear "vision of moral purpose" with Labor's "absence of a defining message." Says M.P. Ferguson: "If Labor ever wanted to represent a cross-section of Australia on some of the more difficult moral issues, they have left that constituency behind."

There's no risk, says Hogan, that Australia will imitate the U.S., where conservative Christians overwhelmingly vote Republican: "The major parties are happy to get the support of religious leaders, but if those leaders oppose them they tell them to get stuffed, basically." Still, says the ACL's Wallace, "politicians are realizing there's a discerning constituency out there in marginal seats - that the church has woken up." Peter Costello knows what Wallace means. After his paean to the Ten Commandments, the Liberals' deputy leader said he'd never received such a flood of mail: "It tells me that there are a lot of people who are interested and want to hear this." For the Coalition at least, the language of Christian values makes a lot of sense.