Tag: Fred Nile

The Christian right has been a forceful presence in American political life since the 1970s. Australian political religion began as an expression of identity, but today draws much of its appeal on notions of self-governance. Catholics and Protestants For the first half of the 20th century, religious identity was a major faultline in Australian politics: Protestants tended to support conservative parties; Catholics generally favoured Labor. Among Catholics, disproportionately less educated, religion was still understood as a form of group identity rather than a way of living. They defied the Labor and Catholic establishment to form the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) after the 1955 Labor Party split. Australia provided only a faint echo, but for ambitious evangelicals, the American Christian right was a model. Evangelical Christians pushed into politics even more explicitly in the 2000s. In 2002, former Assemblies of God pastor Andrew Evans established the political party Family First, and was elected to the South Australian upper house. But this moral panic misjudged the appeal of religion. Political entrepreneurs like Evans successfully corralled religious voters, but for many of them the appeal of religion was as a technology of self-governance.