1st December, 2005

The following is the text of the 2005 Acton Lecture on Religion and Freedom given by JIM WALLACE, executive chairman of the Australian Christian Lobby, in Melbourne last week...

New Threats to Freedom

Writing in the shadow of a looming American Civil War, The Hon Horace Mann wrote to his constituents a letter on New Dangers to Freedom and New Duties For its Defenders saying: “He who would provide for the welfare of mankind must first provide for their liberty”.

In 2005 we are long free of the specific problem of negro slavery to which Mann referred, and yet the condition of mankind in many parts of the globe remains at least analogous to it and in some instances little better in fact.

WHERE TO NEXT? Jim Wallace argues that the Church has a key role to play in the ongoing fight for freedom, not only from such human ills as slavery but from the challenges to freedom posed by the information revolution. PICTURE: nerffjones (iStockphoto.com) "The myriad forms of assaults on freedom in the globalised, high-tech world in which we live will only be addressed by comprehensive solutions by both domestic and international governments and organisations. I maintain the Church has an enlarged role to play in mobilising that political response."

In reality, slavery still exists in the exploitation of women and children in many parts of the developing world. Women are locked away in lives without opportunity or the same protection before the law as men in male-dominated cultures. Children are forced to be child warriors or sex objects. Families are increasingly locked in a hopeless subsistence existence as real poverty grows, even as the number of millionaires explodes in some emerging economies. Even the developed world has vestiges of these problems. For instance, even though it treats its own better on the whole, it often turns a blind eye to the plight of immigrant, particularly illegal, workers, and fails dismally to protect sex slaves procured overseas to serve legal domestic sex industries.

Slavery in 2005, though, is not only to human masters. Technology rules.

The information revolution now drives a pace of life not even imaginable a generation ago. Man is no longer the master of his house in almost any measure. Rather than driving a family routine, he is inevitably reduced to trying, increasingly unsuccessfully, to reconcile the competing demands of first work and family and then the otherwise full timetables of spouse and children, similarly victim to the speed and demands of modern life. If this is not difficult enough for relatively wealthy and technically-attuned developed societies, it goes beyond a challenge and is often a threat to developing communities and their largely conservative, family-centric cultures.

Still more insidious is our inability to control the information that forms our beliefs and values.

In Australia, over half of all children aged 14 years and younger spend 20 hours or more watching television a fortnight. Australian children also spend an average of 6.8 hours online per week, while teenagers aged 15 to 17 spend 15 hours online per week. The persuasive influence of these and other media is judged by experts to exceed the input of school and to challenge the influence of family in its effect on the child’s development, particularly character and values. Again, while challenging enough to conservative parts of developed societies, this uncontrollable deluge of Western values on conservative developing societies has even worse consequences, both domestically and globally.

As we consider this issue of freedom, to which, of course, Lord Acton would want to direct us in this lecture, it is clearly a much more complex one than he might have envisaged. The myriad forms of assaults on freedom in the globalised, high-tech world in which we live will only be addressed by comprehensive solutions by both domestic and international governments and organisations. I maintain the Church has an enlarged role to play in mobilising that political response.

Why a role for the church?

Many will question the appropriateness of the Church delving beyond what has become its more familiar international terrain of providing aid. People of faith are often the first to question any political involvement of the Church, seeing in history its worst periods being those when it became too preoccupied with the affairs of state. Still others will be dismayed that, having identified part of the problem as the lack of liberty in states controlled by religious zealotry, I should seek to exacerbate the problem by introducing another religious player.

However, this view, popular with those who want to marginalise the influence of the Church and its values, fails to acknowledge that for all its failures in particular events or periods of history, the effect of Christianity on the development of the world has, on balance, been very much positive and remains so.

We like to trumpet the civilising influence of Greece and Rome on the world, and indeed the thinkers and administrators of those times left us much that still resonates strongly in the West. But much of the more humane nature of these societies was strongly influenced by Christianity.

The fundamental Christian principle of imago dei, that all men are made in the image of God, was enough to turn empires and cultures on their heads. It saw off the practice of infanticide in ancient Greece and eventually put paid to the pagan spectacle of the Roman Games, where thousands of gladiators were slaughtered for the entertainment of crowdsix. Later it would see Lord Shaftsbury toil to outlaw child labour in the industrial revolution and give William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect the determination to finally prevail against slavery.

The influence on Wilberforce of his Christian faith as a motivation for his long struggle is evident in his Appeal of 1823 on slavery in the West Indies. He calls on all those who “value the favour of God” and reminds them of “the great day of account” which should motivate them to action, and describes slavery in strongly religious language as “the most heathenish irreligion". This same motivation carried the oft-maligned missionaries into all parts of the world.

It is popular today to laud the civic or creative attributes of the pagan societies with which Christianity collided in the period of discovery, while overlooking the barbarity of the great majority. In these pre-Christian lands, conquered peoples were almost invariably enslaved or killed, human sacrifice was a feature of many, to gods that, unlike Christianity’s, still demanded to be mollified or entreated by blood sacrifice. In the great majority of pagan cultures, the very lives of women and children lacked value. While they may have often been insensitive and intolerant of even the positive vestiges of culture in these societies, Christian missions did ameliorate their worst aspects.

There is enough lack of free conscience and liberty currently in the world to justify, on its own, the need for the Church to continue to bring its historical influence to bear on the human condition. But almost as important is the knowledge it can bring to developing democracies of the role of religion in society and particularly with government. History is marching inevitably towards political freedom and liberty, and the Church has not just theology but experience that can assist in this global journey.

The Church’s ability to influence secular government, without being a formal partner with the state, has only evolved through bitter experience. From the historical excesses of an often too close relationship with government, the Church mainly retreated from politics and government in the late 20th century. Increased prosperity, an emphasis on the physical/tangible world and longer life weakened religion’s appeal, its popular basis and therefore influence in democracies. At the same time, those championing alternative moral codes were keen to keep the Church from influencing public policy.

While it is only a moment in time, 2004, described globally as the “election year” for the fact that it saw elections in a number of states including Australia and the US, signalled the end of this retreat in at least those two countries. It saw evangelical Christians, in particular, working within a mature democratic paradigm of the separation of church and state, identifying themselves strongly as unique constituencies with the ability and willingness to affect elections. The constituency rose from a long, largely self-imposed, disenfranchisement to demand attention by politics, and politics realised it had to listen.

It was not that the Church had not been active in politics in either country, but except for usually life-related campaigns such as abortion or euthanasia, it had largely retreated to trying to influence issues from behind the scenes. Now it strode once more overtly into the public square as a constituency like any other, accepting both its role and responsibilities in the democratic process.

Nations struggling with the impact of globalisation and the demands for democracy need the value of that experience now. The time they have to get this right is much shorter, and the consequences of failure more dangerous. If we fail to carry the value of our experience of the church-state relationship, refined by its failures, into the experience of developing nations, we leave them to reinvent it in what might be much less forgiving domestic environments. At the same time, those failures are likely to have important consequences globally.

The most prominent contemporary threat to freedom in the world is, of course, Islamist terrorism. At its heart, it is the product of religion, of a worldview that sees in its pure form a nation in which there is no separation of church and state. However, the imperative for the Church to play a role in the solution to this new threat to freedom goes well beyond terrorism’s religious roots. The very complex nature of the problem demands a comprehensive solution that seeks to influence not only the manifestation of terrorism, but restrictions of freedom in all its guises that provide the leverage for those seeking to recruit adherents to its violent theology.

Global Terrorism

From the rash of terrorism in the 1970s and 80s, it was evident that this was one of the earliest products of globalisation. Causes fought for decades as local insurgencies, out of the sight and conscience of the global  community, suddenly beamed through television sets to invade the homes of people who not only knew little of the historical context of the conflicts but also often couldn’t locate them on a map.

The terrorist soon realised that the world was truly his stage, and a terrorist act in any part of it could carry  the message of his cause globally, as long as it was conceived as an event worthy of media attention. Bigger and more awful became better.

When it re-emerged in 2001, terrorism first seemed a containable problem. It was optimistically assumed that those responsible for 9/11 were an aberration and that the numbers of terrorists motivated by such extreme theology would be small. However, this hope has proven vain indeed, as the global nature of the problem and its ideological basis have forced the realisation that even if the smallest percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are motivated to terrorism, we are still facing an enormous problem.

America, especially, seemed to calculate that by removing the sponsor states, the phenomenon would die for lack of popular support, leadership and resources. This calculation has, of course, proven wrong. Iraq has gone from a state sponsor of terrorism to a breeding ground, a rite of passage for terrorists. Just as mujaheddin flooded to Afghanistan in the 1980s and developed networks that last to this day, so terrorists are flooding to Iraq and “earning their stripes”.

Despite very commendable international co-operation and the application of technologies that make terrorist movements and secure cash flows very difficult, terrorism continues to find new leaders. The faith-based nature of the problem has spawned independent, similarly motivated cells, with no interaction through which they can be tracked and identified. The effective removal of sponsor states in Iraq and Afghanistan has not seriously affected the availability of training grounds and support networks, which are now being found in democracy’s heartlands in places as previously unlikely as Western NSW and the tranquil suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne.

While the initial emphasis of the war against terror has been the military response, military force has never unilaterally solved an insurgency. A high level of military and security force activity is necessary to maintain the pressure on terrorists and disrupt their capacity to mount operations, but the “high grounds” of these battles are hearts and minds, not hills. The Church has a role to play in influencing both.

Winning Minds

At its most fundamental level, Islamist terrorism is a clash of ideologies or worldviews. While the degree to which the beliefs and motivations of terrorists can be justified even in mainstream Islam will continue to be debated, it must be assumed that the great majority of adherents to Islam do not share the Islamist’s interpretation of their holy texts. Being able to disavow Islamists of this view, to discredit its legitimacy within Islam, is the decisive task, the centre of gravity of the problem, and it can only be done by those within Islam, particularly by Islamic scholars and leaders with the authority and credibility to do so.

This may seem to leave little role for the Christian Church and indeed its role is necessarily reduced to a marginal one by the very offence that one religion will inevitably take in being instructed in its fallibilities by another. But there are nonetheless two very important roles for it to play in this crucial area.

The threat of terrorism to Western societies mainly comes through attacks on their own soil. Attacks on tourists or interests overseas are tragic or inconvenient, but manageable. Tourist destinations can be changed and in the globalised information age the physical footprint of Western industry and commerce overseas will naturally contract. While terrorists will inevitably, and have already, switched their attacks to what they see as domestic icons of Western influence or interests in other countries, these operations carry the risk of alienating not just governments, but whole communities. This has been well illustrated in the official and public responses to the attacks in Jordan in November 2005. The priority for most Western governments will therefore remain to discourage attacks on their soil.

It is here, within Western societies, that the Church can play an essential, mainly indirect role to assist moderate Islamics to win the ideological battle against extremists.

The first means of doing this is for church leaders to accept that Muslims are like the Christian Church, religiously motivated people, and that this provides an immediate point of common ground. This should not be confused, as the interfaith movement does, with a belief that we all worship the same God. The great majority of evangelical Christians can never share that view, but the common ground is instead our shared motivation by faith in something beyond this world and its temporal interests.

It was this common ground that kept large parts of the Arab world well disposed to the West even during the Cold War. The Arab world split politically with the West over its support for Israel, which placed it in the Soviet camp, but the alliance was never a happy one, with many Arabs uncomfortable to be allied to a regime that lacked faith. If this empathy between two monotheistic faiths could be maintained through the Cold War, it can certainly provide a reference point for dialogue today.

Heads of Churches worldwide should pursue such a dialogue to encourage Islamic leaders to disown extremists and promote the positive teachings of Islam that they are constantly assuring us it is mainly about. Without slipping into the morass of the interfaith movement, Christian leaders should seek to provide whatever support they can from this common ground and seek to expand it as appropriate into international forums.

The Church also has an important role to play in helping maintain an environment that will empower moderates within the Islamic community at the grass roots.

In any pluralist society that believes, as the West does, in freedom of religion, there will be a need to make reasonable provisions for the exercise of minority religions, including exceptions to some uniform clothing standards in certain professions. However, extremists within Islam constantly use these exceptions as a means of isolating their communities from the mainstream and keeping them under their control.

Two examples of this experienced in various parts of the West are the demands from extremists for exceptions to school uniform codes and for separate swimming times for Islamic women at public pools. The recent incident of a Sydney schoolgirl demanding a different form of uniform, despite an acceptable standard having been previously negotiated by Islamic clerics and community groups, is one example.

What we fail to see is that, by creating exceptions like these, we make it extremely difficult for moderates to resist being coerced into meeting the demands of extremists, in a culture where power is not equally or democratically held.

The Church in the West needs to use its political influence to encourage domestic governments not to abandon their Judeo-Christian traditions and values in the face of such pressure. Community standards in democratic societies almost never satisfy the sensibilities of orthodox religious communities, but an important element of the mature balance in church-state relationship in the West is the fact that the Church has come to live with what is reasonable. It has accepted that the universal principle of freedom of conscience demands that it do this, and it should do what it can to ensure that other religions leave their adherents similarly free. This problem is one that must also be addressed where it occurs overseas.

Despite even the best intentions to develop their countries into fully democratic states, many governments in developing countries are making concessions to state religions that leave their people no freedom of conscience in matters of religion. This may range from overt measures such as India’s proposed anti-conversion laws (now cunningly disguised as religious tolerance laws) to Indonesia’s failure to deal effectively with violence against religious minorities, including Christians.

Wherever and however freedom of religion is constrained and whether it occurs by commission or omission, the international community must bring pressure to bear to remove it. The Christian Church should be foremost in identifying these abuses and lobbying governments and the relevant international bodies. Not to do this is to empower and embolden radical elements in the usually dominant religion to harass minority ones.

We must establish an expectation internationally that freedom of religion creates an equal playing field from which all religions and certainly mankind benefit. The Church therefore has the capacity to contribute to the decisive campaign that must be waged against the very ideology of extremist Islam. Christianity’s status as a competing religion means that the role must be an indirect rather than direct one, but it is nonetheless important in establishing the environment both domestically and internationally where extreme ideology is less likely to be imposed or accepted uncritically. However, in the equally important area of winning hearts, the Church has a central role.

Winning Hearts

It is important in countering terrorism that, while we seek to limit the damage of terrorist actions and actively focus mainly on the ideology of hate that drives it, we simultaneously seek to limit its popular appeal. This means reducing the “sea in which the terrorist swims” by addressing the social, political or economic issues that often have some credibility as a catalyst for the problem.

While skewed Islamist ideology will always be the key issue, there are many examples of injustice, perceived and real, that the extremists use as levers to guarantee support and sympathy and therefore not only a flow of money, but recruits.

Refugee camps, wherever they exist, are breeding grounds for terrorism. People without hope become understandably bitter, and someone bitter and unemployed provides a perfect recruit to terrorism. Prior to globalisation, and particularly the information revolution, this was not a factor that carried threat outside the immediate region of the conflict that created the camps, but that has changed. Before satellite TV, the viewing diet of local people was usually restricted to locally produced programmes, which carried images that reflected their culture and relative wealth or poverty. Today that is no longer the case.

Dissatisfaction and bitterness are now aroused more quickly and universally as satellite dishes bring in images from Western television of a lifestyle and level of wealth these people can scarcely imagine and certainly never aspire to. At the same time, personal wealth in the West is growing under a political system that mainly measures a government’s eligibility to govern against its ability to maintain that growth.

The reasons for this disparity in wealth across the world are many and various and, like the solutions, never simple. But unless we address the freedom from want in the third world, we will find ourselves increasingly losing our freedom of movement and freedom from fear, as terrorism expands its appeal through the next decades. There are still large parts of the world that remain ignorant of their relative disadvantage, but this will not be the case for long in a globalised world.

Other parts of the developing world have shown amazing patience with the West despite the knowledge of their unequal opportunity and access to resources. The South West Pacific is one such area of immediate concern to Australia. Here we have populations with whom we share a Christian heritage and with whom, through proximity, sport and a relatively benign colonial history, we have great empathy culturally. However, they are societies where opportunity is limited and growing unemployment makes them equally vulnerable to terrorist ideology.

Where-ever this situation occurs, it is at heart a moral issue and one that therefore demands the attention of the Church. The problem is now widely acknowledged as much more than a simple issue of more aid, but even there the Church needs to be much more active in pressuring domestic governments to increase aid. International performance in this area is abysmal.

Although the international community agreed under the Monterrey Consensus to set a target of 0.7 per cent for overseas aid as a percentage of GDP, only five countries were giving at that level by 2004. Despite raising its level of commitment marginally in 2005, Australia is expected to be the third lowest giver of aid as a proportion of GDP in the OECD by 2006.

There is little doubt that the Church in Australia and presumably worldwide, feels the embarrassment of the current level of giving in Western countries. However, it needs to be making much more politically-coherent and combined efforts to lobby governments to address this situation. The recent combined letter by the CEOs of Caritas, World Vision and Oxfam to the Minister of Foreign Affairs calling for the Australian Government to contribute to the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund is one such example. But what is needed is a sustained combined effort, which comprehends and highlights both the moral imperative and the importance of addressing this issue for the future of human security.

There is little doubt that the answer beyond more aid is to build vibrant economies in third world countries to achieve a lasting solution. The best methods of doing this are hotly contested between economists of the right and left, and while forgoing third world debt and freer trade both have their critics, it is hard not to agree with U2’s Bono (Paul Hewson) that: “It’s a shock to discover that for all our talk of the free market, the poorest people on Earth are not allowed to put their produce on our shelves in an even-handed way.”

It seems that the West and even Christians in the West are happy to try and help the needy in the under-developed world, but only as long as it doesn’t impinge on our standard of living. We now face a critical crossroads. To continue to pursue an economic world order that serves only our interests is to consign our children and grandchildren to face an even more bitter legacy than the terrorism we face today. This is a moral question, and the Church needs to bring the full force of its moral authority to bear in the international forums that will decide the issue. It is not good enough that the crusade has so far been lead by rock stars; we need to see bishops at the forefront, applying in the international political scene all the courage of their new-found domestic political influence.

There is yet another critical battle to be fought on a moral platform that bears directly on freedom of conscience in developing societies and freedom from fear in the West.

The standard of morality in the West has gradually been eroded over the years by a broad principle that every adult should be able to do, read and watch what they want, as long as it doesn’t harm a third person. Creating adult-only venues and requiring classification labels on media were seen as creating an environment where you would only be exposed to what you chose to be.

Even in the West this logic has failed, with the almost constant stream of complaints about movies and other media proof enough that many people find themselves offended, usually unwittingly, by what they are confronted with in ever weakening classification bands. More importantly, there is growing evidence of the damage to children through incidental access to offensive or explicit material through lax control by parents or guardians. All this in societies almost numbed by the gradual weakening of religious mores, and years of incremental moral decline; its impact in the conservative developing world is much greater, however.

The same satellite links that inadvertently flaunt Western wealth through largely US television shows also carry the images of this moral decline so offensive to these cultures. It is understandable that they are so deeply offended by the Internet and other media that originate mainly in the West, and that they can be easily convinced to lash out at it. It provides a popular rallying call amongst Islamists who maintain that the West is invading their culture, and that they are losing the ability to determine the moral character of their societies under the onslaught of this “new imperialism”.

Rising to this challenge is probably difficult for a Church that has largely lost its appetite for fighting this cause on the domestic front. But in the minds of some fundamentalists, this is an issue even more important than freedom from want. They may not be good at assuring freedom of conscience in their own communities, but when the “evil” nature of the West can be so easily proved by pointing to this daily deluge of coarse and even filthy images and language, it becomes such a powerful inspiration to jihad for very religious young men that it must be addressed. The sources of the offence are diffused, but bringing pressure on Hollywood itself through the US government would be a powerful first step and is something well within the capacity of the international Church.

Conclusion

The world today is not only one that we would not want our children and grandchildren to have to inherit, but it contains the seeds of a much less equal and therefore violent place that will inevitably emerge if we don’t address them now.

The volatile nature of our circumstances can only really be appreciated when we look at the situation we are facing from the position of those sitting in disadvantage and the people who manipulate them to envy and ultimately violence. From this perspective, they really do become issues of freedom. People sitting in these circumstances need to see a way to freedom from the circumstances that oppress either their conscience or physical condition or many will join with those who will force the path.

Freedom and liberty have been history’s most powerful catalysts to both change and violence. Until this point in history, the speed and reach of information was such that large parts of the world were prepared to exist in circumstances that we could comprehend no better than they could our relative wealth and advantage. But that has changed dramatically in the last two decades.

It is true that religion in many parts of the world is part of the problem. It is being used as a means of maintaining control of people, keeping them in a time warp, despite natural and inevitable forces for change. Christianity is one of a few religions that have managed to make this transition throughout its 2000 years of existence. It is an experience both relative and vital to moving the world forward to a better existence, both at the personal and national or community level worldwide.

The Church must accept that it has a widened role in ensuring this freedom. That the solution to the world’s current problem lies essentially with governments and that they must be held to act in the interests of mankind through the moral imperative that the Church holds. This requires that the Church accepts this responsibility and pursues it energetically in all the available forums of international politics – it is time to go global.

Jim Wallace AM is the executive chairman of the Australian Christian Lobby (www.acl.org.au), one of Australia’s fastest growing political organisations, which aims to see Christian values better acknowledged in the way we are
governed, do business and relate as a community. He is a sought-after commentator on defence and security issues having left the Army as Brigadier in late 2000 after a 32 year career which included command of the SAS Regiment, Special Forces and the Army’s mechanised Brigade of 3,000 personnel and most of the Army’s fighting vehicles. He is a graduate of Duntroon, The British Army Staff College and the Australian College of Defence and Strategic Studies. He was appointed to the Council of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2003. Jim worships with his family at the Hughes Baptist Church in Canberra.

The annual Acton Lecture is delivered by eminent individuals (both lay and clerical) from all faiths and denominations. It provides a forum to discuss the contribution religious thought has made to freedom in the modern world and its effects on political, social and economic issues. The Acton Lecture on Religion and Freedom is the premiere lecture series for the Religion and the Free Society programme of research, begun by The Centre for Independent Studies (www.cis.org.au) in 1998. It was named after Lord Acton, the 19th century English historian and religious thinker. An annotated version of this speech can be downloaded from the CIS website.