Australia’s legalization of same-sex marriage in 2017 has opened the door to a series of federal, state, and territory-level religious discrimination bills (or proposed bills) that focus on anti-discrimination rather than protection of the autonomy of religious institutions, curtailing the capacity of such organizations to govern their affairs, writes Ian Tregenza in the Journal of Church and State (66). The religious freedom legislation that has been widely enacted in Australia since 2017 tends to focus on individual freedoms in the framework of human rights, where institutions are criticized for curtailing individualism and personal choice (such as whom to marry). Tregenza writes that legislation like the Victorian government’s Equal Opportunity Amendment Bill of 2021 limits the freedom of organizations to “recruit staff on the grounds of conformity to the religious beliefs of the organization [to cases where] such conformity is deemed an essential feature of the role in question.” In other words, freedom in recruitment is only allowed in the case of chaplains and religious instruction teachers but not in the case of mathematics or English teachers. A very similar approach has been proposed for such legislation at the federal level, he adds. Tregenza notes that there are no comparable laws that “prevent, say, an environmental organization or political party from selecting office holders or members committed to their aims or worldview or expelling them from the organization should they act in ways deemed detrimental to the cause.”
Source: FSP, https://socialism.com/fs-article/australia-far-right-christians-claim-god-given-right-to-discriminate/
This “pragmatic pluralist” position is supported by a secular worldview that largely equates “religion with a set of abstract beliefs or doctrines which can be demarcated or allocated to specialized roles,” he adds. Such a position runs against the historic practice of religions where beliefs, practices, and rituals create distinct communities with thick ties of belonging. In fact, contemporary religion scholarship has found how the modern state is built on the construction of religion as a private affair, enabling the control of churches by the state. Tregenza sees this scenario playing out as religious freedom is relegated to the lowest level in the hierarchy of rights, where “religious schools, charities and hospitals are still allowed to exist but they increasingly come to resemble their secular counterparts.” He concludes that the degree of autonomy a religious organization should exercise and what forms of discrimination could be considered legitimate will remain contested questions in an increasingly secular country. But Tregenza calls for a “procedural rather than a programmatic kind of secularism,” where more attention is paid to the kind of context in which each religious group operates, rather than enforcing a “blanket universalism of the human rights framework.”
(Journal of Church and State, https://academic.oup.com/jcs)
