Australia: church statements on domestic and international events

 As Australian churches entered the New Year, the attention of the church media was devoted to several pressing issues of debate, both domestic and international.

The “same-sex marriage” debate

The push in Australia for the somewhat euphemistically named “same-sex marriage” has been increasing in momentum in recent times. Opposition is coming from various quarters, including the different Australian churches, in partnership with other faith communities.

During 2015, religious leaders from diverse religious traditions in Australia wrote a public letter to the then Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, calling on him to stand against attempts in Federal Parliament to redefine the meaning of marriage.

The letter included the following statements: “As leaders of Australia’s major religions we write to express the grave concerns that we, and those who share our various faiths, share regarding Bills that have or will be introduced into the Federal Parliament to change the definition of marriage in Australian law.”

The Australian Commonwealth Marriage Act 1961 clearly defines marriage in terms of “the union of a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life”. The letter to the Prime Minister described this definition as “ a truth deeply embedded across diverse communities, faiths and cultures.”

The letter was signed by 38 leading religious personalities, including the Anglican and Catholic Archbishops of Sydney, a bishop of the Lutheran Church, bishops from various Eastern and Orthodox Churches, Christian pastors representing major Protestant denominations, senior rabbis from the Jewish community and leaders from both the Sunni and Shia Islamic communities.

This issue has not yet run its course and at the time of writing, a march of several thousand people, led by leading Labor Party politicians, was underway in Melbourne, advocating for “same-sex marriage”.

Comments on international crises

Australians have fresh memories of several terrorist incidents in late 2014 and during 2015, though none were on a scale of the appalling terrorist attacks in Paris last November.

Australian churches issued various comments on the Paris attacks. Revd Ken Letts, who recently retired to Melbourne after serving for 20 years in France, first as a parish priest, then as Archdeacon of France, reflected in The Melbourne Anglican monthly on the attacks in Paris that killed 129 innocent civilians. He was quick to address those commentators who had implied criticism of the level of media attention given to the Paris attacks:

 “Many have said that similar – or worse – events have taken place recently in Africa or in the Lebanon or in other places, atrocities which received neither the coverage nor the response as did the murders in Paris. Why? Simply because France, and more specifically, Paris, has become for us an icon of the high-points of human civilisation, and of the human spirit…”

Revd Letts was refreshingly frank in explaining what he saw as the root causes of such terrorist strikes on everyday locations: “Why should places like a stadium or a theatre or restaurants – places of human enjoyment – be the targets for such violence? Because there are those within Islam who find in the Quran warrant for their puritanism and violence.”

Not every church spokesman was as willing to call a spade a spade. In somewhat different vein, the pluralist-leaning Uniting Church of Australia also considered the problem of international terrorism. One of its statements attributed the root causes of terrorism very differently from the analysis of Rev Letts:

“In the month of November alone violence and terror traumatised the people of Lebanon, Iraq, the West Bank, Somalia, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mali, Tunisia, France, Libya, Niger, Bangladesh, East Jerusalem and even the USA.”

However for this particular statement, the Qur'an and its fundamentalist readers were not put in the dock: “We must not be led astray by commentators who would blame this terror on any particular faith or those who want to incite racial and religious hate. Terror is indiscriminate violence and hate wrought against our shared humanity.”

This is a safer statement in our politically correct times perhaps, but one which misses the mark by a long way.

Meanwhile, the Kairos Catholic Journal reported that the President of the Australian Catholic Bishops conference Archbishop Denis Hart offered prayers for the "millions of Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing… atrocities" by Islamic State against Christian and other minorities. Australia has shown particular concern for persecuted minority groups among the refugee masses, favouring them in its expanded refugee intake.

A concern for justice issues lay behind media statements by the Australian Christian churches (Assemblies of God), which have thrown their considerable weight behind the Global Freedom Network that has set as its goal the eradication of modern slavery and human trafficking across the world by 2020. The quarterly magazine for ACC leaders stated that "with an estimated 36 million people forced to live in slavery around the world today, there is an urgent and compelling need to eradicate modern slavery and trafficking in human beings".

For years prior to the digital age, Australia played catch-up with its cultural cousins in Europe and North America. However the above statements by Australian church spokespeople show that in our globalised world, Australian Christians are very much engaged with the big issues of the day.

 This article first appeared here.