Spend an afternoon at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market, Sydney Road in Brunswick or Dandenong Market, and you will encounter a range of beliefs, values and identities that would have been unimaginable to an earlier generation of Australians. Or venture down the Hume Highway during the school holidays, passing through evolving multi-ethnic communities all the way to the town of Shepparton — considered the most culturally diverse town in Victoria — and you will see what I mean.
People from different religious, cultural and social backgrounds move through the same spaces on the understanding that Australian democratic norms and laws will protect minorities from the whims of the majority. Yet beneath this everyday scene lies one of the defining questions of modern democratic life: how do people with profoundly different beliefs and values share the same public space? The answer, at least in part, is secularism.
Although most Australians would reject a theocracy or any political system in which public policy is dictated by religious doctrine, there is far less agreement about the role faith should play in a culturally diverse democracy. The challenge is not simply to keep religion out of government. It is to determine how people of faith and no faith can coexist without either group imposing its worldview on the other.
Existing models of secularism offer useful lessons, but are ultimately inadequate when applied to Australia’s cultural contours, social needs and political realities.
Queen Vic Market is a secular space for all, and has been multicultural since the beginning. Photo: Depositphotos
The French model restricts forms of religious expression in public life, while the British model affords privileges to an established church. The American model, for its part, regards religion as a private matter and seeks to maintain a strict separation between church and state. The British model presents a particular problem. By elevating one faith tradition above others, it sits uneasily within an egalitarian and culturally diverse Australia.
There is also a more strident form of secularism that periodically surfaces in Australian politics. It is evident whenever politicians call for the banning of religious attire, oppose the construction of mosques or portray certain religious communities as incompatible with Australian values. In recent years, elements of this rhetoric have found expression in the politics of One Nation and similar movements that draw on “culture war” grievances and anti-immigration anxieties associated with the Trump-era MAGA movement.
What advocates of stricter secular arrangements often fail to appreciate is that faith is not like a hobby or pastime that can be managed in the same way one manages a golf schedule. Deep faith cannot simply be set aside like a hat or jacket. A person’s convictions do not disappear the moment they step into the public square. Nor should a society that values freedom of thought and expression expect this of them. Religious Australians ought to be free to carry their beliefs into public life, just as non-believers carry their moral and political convictions.
The challenge for a liberal secular democracy is not to exclude those convictions from public debate, but to ensure that no group acquires the power to impose its beliefs on others.
Cultural conformity or “assimilation” — to use a term revived by the leader of One Nation — is largely untenable in a society that has become so diverse, so pluralistic that there is no single culture to assimilate into. The promise to reclaim a past that is long gone is about as futile as trying to restore a photographic negative once it has been exposed to light.
The purpose of secularism is not to preserve a particular cultural identity, nor is it to drive religion from public life. Its purpose is to manage diversity and competing beliefs in a fair and equitable manner. An Australian model of secularism should rest on a simple principle: all religious and non-religious groups have a legitimate place in the public arena, provided they do not seek to impose their beliefs on others.
This principle has practical implications. Australians are free to attend places of worship, enrol their children in faith-based schools and practise their faith as they see fit. They are not entitled to use state institutions to evangelise on their behalf. At the same time, secularism should not be used as a weapon against religion or cultural identity. A genuinely Australian secularism would, for instance, protect a Muslim woman’s right to wear a hijab just as readily as it protects an atheist’s right to reject religion altogether.
The test of any secular arrangement is not how it treats beliefs we agree with, but how it treats those we find confronting. A yarmulke ought to be as legitimate in the Australian public square as a crucifix, a footy beanie, a keffiyeh, a T-shirt declaring “God Is Dead”, a burqa, or an Aboriginal flag displayed beneath the words “Always Was, Always Will Be”.
In a febrile political climate in which suppression of thought flows from both left and right, there has never been a better time to give serious consideration to a secular framework that promotes, rather than diminishes, diversity.
In my own inner-city suburb of multicultural Brunswick, a vibrant mural of the Palestinian flag spans the north wall of a double-storey building. People ought to be equally free to hoist an Israeli flag as high. Jews should be able to display a Star of David with the same confidence that inner-city activists parade the now fashionable keffiyeh.
People should be free to display political and cultural symbols, whether widely embraced or strongly contested. Australians ought to be free to adopt such messages, reject them, criticise them, satirise them, or simply walk past them. What they are not free to do is demand their removal from the public domain simply because they offend.
An additional feature of my Australian model is its commitment to unrestricted criticism. The secular model I propose does not shield ideas from scrutiny. No belief system is immune. Religious and non-religious beliefs alike must remain open to criticism, satire and debate. Freedom of religion and freedom from religion are impossible without freedom of expression.
This is not to suggest that tensions between competing groups will disappear. The function of secularism is not to unite the nation in a group hug — wonderful as the thought may be — but to provide rules that allow people with fundamentally different beliefs to live together freely.
That is what it means to live in a diverse, open and democratic society. And that is what an Australian model of secularism should protect.
This opinion was first published on the ABC Religion and Ethics.
* Chris Fotinopoulos is an educator and ethicist and regular contributor to Neos Kosmos and other publications. He has taught medical ethics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne and Monash University. He currently teaches English at Ivanhoe Grammar School.
