A Mammon-solution to an Allah-problem

March 25, 2009 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Letter writers to The Age are not impressed with demands from Muslim students for dedicated prayer rooms at RMIT. Plausibly enough, some argue that a secular institution like RMIT should not favour one religious group over another.

It seems to me than an obvious solution is being overlooked. The University should provide a Muslims-only prayer room, but do so on a commercial basis. RMIT could either rent a room to a Muslim group, or operate the prayer room itself by issuing students with swipe cards in exchange for a fee. Maybe the very religious could get bulk discounts for using the room 5 times a day, or maybe it could be like a gym membership, in which the sunk cost encourages attendance from those whose desire to get fit or show faith is not always matched with action.

If RMIT charged too much, this would provide an incentive for other groups to offer cheaper prayer space. Indeed, particularly for RMIT’s city campus I imagine there is a good business opportunity in seeking custom from the many Muslims who now use Melbourne’s CBD.

Another win-win market solution.

Is the Pope stirring up hatred of homosexuals?

December 26, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 49 Comments

The Pope’s reported comments* about homosexuality being as much a threat to the world as climate change have drawn the expected condemnation (surely gays are helping reduce climate change by not having kids??).

But I think Fred Argy worries too much when he fears that these comments may ‘stir up hatred of homosexuals’.

Certainly, religious doctrines on homosexuality help explain why non-believers are more likely than believers to be unworried by gays and lesbians. But Catholics in particular have long had a pragmatic approach to the sexual teachings of their church, as seen in the very low birth rates of many Catholic countries (and no, this is not due to abstinence).

Clive Hamilton and Michael Flood pointed out some years ago, using Morgan polling research, that Catholics are less likely than members of other Christian religions to believe that homosexuality is immoral (only 34%). Consistent with this, the 2005 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes found that Catholics were more likely than other Christians to support gay civil unions (50% support).
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Is Christmas shopping bad for your identity?

December 24, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ Leave a comment

It wouldn’t be Christmas without clerical complaints about commercialism:

But God is far from a capitalist, says Melbourne Anglican Archbishop Philip Freier, who said the commercialisation of Christmas and encouragement to spend increased the risk that people would define themselves only as consumers.

Praise the Lord and Clive Hamilton!

But outside Clive’s books, how likely is it that people would define themselves only as consumers? The 2007 Australian Survey of Social Attitudes asked its respondents to agree or disagree with the proposition that:

Shopping helps me create who I am

2% of respondents strongly agreed, and 11% agreed, for a total of 13%. But they were massively outnumbered by the 34% who disagreed, and 28% strongly disagreed, for a total of 62% (there was a large ‘neither’ response).

Unhappily for the Archbishop, listening to Christ’s message on a regular basis isn’t a big help in warding off the evils of consumerism. 11% of people who attend church once a week or more agree that shopping helps create who they are, exactly the same proportion as among the people who never go to church.
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Popular Buddhists

October 14, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

In commenting on my post on the increasing popularity of Muslims, Bruce said:

I think that comparing attitudes towards Muslims and and non-Muslim Asians would be a good comparison, since both groups have increases in immigration over a similar period. My guess is that positive attitudes towards non-Muslim Asians would have increased significantly more.

To recap, Muslims increased their positive low social distance rating (welcome as family member or close friend) between 1988 and 2007 by 14.5%, and reduced their negative high social distance rating (keep out of country or have as visitor only) by 8%.

In the world of religion, which seems to have been marked by significant increases in tolerance over the last 20 years, Bruce’s prediction is correct. For Buddhists, their positive low social distance rating is up 23.4% to 51.9%, and their negative low social distance rating is down 20.5% to 5.4%. Perhaps there is a Dalai Lama effect here; Eastern religions have long held a fascination for some Westerners.

But on ethnicity, the changes are less marked. The mainly Buddhist Vietnamese have seen their positive rating increase by 9.7% to 36.3% (less than the Muslim 38.5%), and their negative rating drop by 19% to 13.2% (better than the Muslim 24.5%).

I am surprised by the positive social distance advantage of Muslims over Vietnamese, and some initial further investigation indicates that the questions were in separate sections of the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2007, which were answered by different people. Maybe there is an issue with the sample.

The last post (I hope) on postmodern conservatism

October 11, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

On Friday Postmodern Conservatism in Australia co-author Matthew Sharpe left in the comments thread a large number of responses to my original post on his book. My responses on the main issue of how to characterise recent Australian conservatism:

On whether we have “postmodern” conservatism:

The main claim is that Howard’s appeal to ‘our values’, the ‘mainstream’ is relativist. It relies on the idea that ‘our values’ ‘are not ours because they are just, but just because they are ours.’

When conservatives criticise ‘relativism’ they are usually attacking the idea that all cultures are equal. A better description of the conservative argument here would be ‘particularist’ – the idea that our culture has value at least partly because it is ours, because of our historical experience. It is consistent with – and usually implies or expressly states – the idea that our culture is better than other cultures, which is not a ‘relativist’ notion. All conservatives have a particularist element to their thought (though as I noted in a slightly different context, complicated when the particular culture they are preserving has universal elements to them, liberalism and Christianity being the two most important in the West). So I am not convinced that calling contemporary conservatives ‘postmodern’ clarifies their thinking or distinguishes them from past Australian conservatives.
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The surprising increase in Muslim popularity

October 9, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

John Howard’s critics believed that he at least pandered to, if not stirred up, anti-Muslim sentiment. According to Malcolm Fraser:

for a variety of reasons, but not least because the Government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. (italics added)

What we’ve lacked in assessing these claims is comparable survey data over time that lets us track changing views towards Muslims. Now that has changed. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2007 has partially unlocked the results of their social distance question on Muslims, enabling a comparision with the same question asked in the Issues in Multicultural Australia Survey 1988.

The results are not what I expected. Especially since 2001, Islam has suffered one PR disaster after another. Yet over the nearly 20 years since 1988, Muslims have improved their position in the social distance survey.

In 1988, 24% of the Australian population would either welcome a Muslim into their family or as a close friend. By 2007, that was up to 38.5%. In 1988, 32% of the Australian population wanted either to keep Muslims out of the country or to have them as visitors only. That had dropped to 24.5% by 2007.

Overall, Muslims are the least popular group – the Jehovah’s Witness will find fewer people who want them in their house (31%) but also fewer who want to keep them out of the country (16%) – but to improve their position despite all that has happened is a good result.
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Postmodern conservatism?

October 2, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 19 Comments

The Times Will Suit Them: Postmodern Conservatism in Australia, by youngish Deakin academics Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, joins my pile of disappointing books about the Australian Right.

Its central fault is the usual one: an at best impressionistic understanding of its subject. It’s not quite Puseyesque in writing about a political movement seemingly without bothering to read anything its members had to say. But there isn’t very much direct quotation from Australian conservatives, and most of what is there is from John Howard. He’s certainly the most important conservative figure of the last 20 years, but hardly the only one. A few of the ‘Right’s culture warriors’ such as Andrew Bolt, Piers Ackerman and Janet Albrechtsen are mentioned in the introduction, but rarely appear again, and are never studied in any detail.

Writing about conservative movements is difficult. As I argued earlier in the year, conservatism is more whatever the people called conservatives happen to believe at a given time than a set list of key principles or ideas. Unlike American and British conservatives, Australian conservatives rarely help out with reflective pieces on their core beliefs (this excellent article by Owen Harries is a rare exception).

There is no substitute for a lot of reading and sorting, trying to work out the key themes and arguments, what is common enough to be classed as a core belief of Australian conservatives, and what is just the idiosyncrasy of one or a small number of people (this book does not discuss federalism, but I would put the Howard government’s centralism in the idiosyncrasy category, with negligible support among conservatives generally). It’s this research and analytical work that Boucher and Sharpe don’t seem to have done.

I can’t claim to have done a careful study either, though I’m sure I have read a lot more from conservative writers than Boucher and Sharpe, and I know a lot of conservatives personally. Some of Boucher and Sharpe’s assertions about what Australian conservatives believe don’t match my reading or conversations, which is why I would insist on a lengthy lists of citations before I would even grant them the starting points in their argument.

There is, for a example, a whole chapter called ‘culture wars and the new religiosity’. Certainly, many (though not all) conservatives are personally religious, and especially when they are Catholics this affects their views on issues like abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, and some forms of medical research. But is this right?:
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Secularism in schools

September 23, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 14 Comments

In the SMH yesterday, longtime public school advocate Jane Caro criticised the spread of religion into NSW public schools, under the sponsorship of the Howard government’s school chaplaincy program. There had also been criticism earlier in the month about Hillsong recruiting at public schools.

Caro complains that

For those of us, however, who have deliberately chosen secular education for our children, such a religious invasion of our public schools is unequivocally unwelcome.

My reading of the 19th century debates on the introduction of public education was that the idea was more for the schools to be non-sectarian than to encourage secularism. This was a way of persuading people of different faiths to send their kids to the same schools. They would do it much more reluctantly if they thought that either other religions or no religion were to be taught. To this day, the NSW Education Act (section 30) leaves open the possibility of non-sectarian religious instruction in public schools:

In government schools, the education is to consist of strictly non-sectarian and secular instruction. The words secular instruction are to be taken to include general religious education as distinct from dogmatic or polemical theology.

But it seems to me that we have preference mismatching in schooling. Continue reading “Secularism in schools” →

Should the Christian Brethren be tolerated?

September 8, 2008 ~ Andrew Norton ~ 53 Comments

The Sunday Age reported yesterday that the small religious group the Christian Brethren (not, apparently, to be confused with the Exclusive Brethren), is refusing to permit a gay support group, Way Out, to use its camp ground (the pun cannot be avoided).

Way Out is likely to lose its anti-discrimination case before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, but I expect that they will be one of the last groups to do so.

Exemptions for religious bodies under anti-discrimination law, which the Brethren will use as their defence in this case, are under sustained attack from human rights advocates, with a review of the Victorian legislation under way, and the federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner also calling for religious and other exemptions to be removed.

Though I doubt the exemptions will long survive, as with The Peel case last year I prefer a tolerance to a rights-based approach to these issues.
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