Imagine

Imagine a country where the titular ruler of the “secular” country is also the head
of a centuries old supernatural tradition * where two Prime Ministers, from
opposite sides of politics, state there is a separation of church and state in the
country, while, constitutionally, there is not * where Christian crosses feature
in the national flag even though a significant proportion of the country have no
religion and there are many other faiths * where a census question misrepresents
the degree of religiosity in the country * where the Prime Minister, the Leader
of the Opposition and the Governor-General celebrate the proposition that Jesus
Christ reigns over their country on a National Day of Thanksgiving * where
the Parliament prays every session that Jesus Christ will return thus ending the
parliamentary democracy which they are elected to represent * where a Christian
archbishop who has sworn to ‘serve God’ is made Governor-General to ‘serve the
state’ and no one fully analyses the contradiction * where a Governor-General,
at the suggestion of a private citizen, uses his authority to include a reference
to ‘God’ in a verse in the National Anthem * where a significant number of
members of Parliament use parliamentary offices to attend private Bible study
meetings * where the publicly available Hall in the Parliament is used by
fundamentalist Christians to decry homosexuality * where tens of millions of
dollars of public money are given to a supernatural tradition (the largest land
holder, the largest private employer, in the top five of organizations by wealth
were it a for-profit organization) so that the global leader of the tradition may
visit the country * where religious organizations (all tax-exempt) run commercial
businesses (also tax-exempt) making them into multi-billion dollar organizations
while the number of their adherents has been in free fall for decades * where
these same organizations increasingly become arms of government through very
lucrative contracts to provide services * where their private schools, especially
the wealthiest, collectively receive billions in public money, and details of how
the money is allocated is made behind closed doors and reports about it are kept
confidential, while public education is allowed to slowly wither * where a former
leader of the republican movement, and possible future Prime Minister, decides
in his mature years, to convert to Christianity some time prior to his preselection
for a parliamentary seat * where that same republican movement has never
advocated separation of church and state as part of a republic * where the correct
answer in a government citizenship test for immigrants is that Australian values
are Judeo-Christian not secular – yes, this is the soft theocracy called Australia…
… where the relevant dot points above are not connected in first year university
political science textbooks, the history of how this came to be is almost totally
ignored by the country’s historians and blindsided journalists rarely think to ask
questions about it.

 

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‘This is courageous scholarship. He risks fatwahs from Christian (and other)
faiths and may well invite eternal damnation. For the first time, someone has
dared to ask questions about this parallel universe in our society.’
Phillip Adams, Foreword. Imagine