It is so hard to talk about a lot of Christian ethical issues in society and sound reasonable, isn’t it? Many people now seem resigned, and rightly so. It seems unavoidable that society will drift in a way that shrink the place of religion in public life and broadens the diveristy of moral and sexual options. It feels inevitable.
It it/was it some kind of historical necessity? Is it where society was bound to go once the power of the Holy Roman Empire crumbled? Or once the Enlightenment or Reformation took place? Does a pluralistic, secular, modern democratic society necessarily lead here? Is there an irrepressible logic to it? How can you embrace diversity and not loosen laws? How can you allow the whole population to vote and not slowly represent more and more of the population’s diversity? How can you allow religion to be public when it encourages conversion to a singular truth?
I know we can’t really say, since this last 500 years is the only time there ever has been a modern, secular democracy. So it’s hard to know what intrinsic to the model and what’s just part of a set of cultural accidents.
But can you imagine an alternate universe where religion was a more central and envliening force in modern secular pluralistic society? What would it look like? What would Australia look like if the central cultural narrative, values and norms were Christian? How would we have dealt with:
- increasingly diverse religious minorities among our citizens?
- increasingly numbers of ‘no religion’ people among our citizens?
- women’s rights?
- prisoners rights?
- loosening unjustifiable blasphemy laws and overly prudish decency laws?
- the decriminalization of homosexuality, without its normalization?
I feel like without having the cultural imagination to picture this, it’s hard to be compelling in speaking in our world.
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