Sydney, Australia - Fading religious belief and the sidelining of churches from public debate has left Australia with little defence against fundamentalist politics, an academic has warned.
Dr Marion Maddox said attempts to publicly silence churches were designed to squash the few independent voices willing to criticise the Government on human rights and democratic values.
In a paper to be presented today at a conference on religion and multicultural citizenship organised by the University of NSW, Dr Maddox suggests US-styled religiously inflected conservative politics has taken root in the "secular soil of Australia".
Dr Maddox is a senior lecturer in religious studies at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and wrote God under Howard: the Rise of the Religious Right in Australian Politics.
Dr Maddox said the space for democratic participation had been dramatically curtailed by a government determined to quarantine itself from church criticism.
The Government had sought to constrain this criticism by publicly berating church leaders and less overtly by its control over employment and schools funding, she said. "Recent Australian experience suggests the often heard liberal view that religion is least toxic for public life when confined to the private sphere is not an adequate protection even from the most obvious forms of fundamentalist politics."
A highly individualised version of Christianity, best exemplified by the Hillsong Church, had emerged in the place of public religion, leaving little room for non-Christian traditions, she said.
Her paper comes a week after senior politicians - among them the Premier, Bob Carr, and five federal cabinet ministers, including the Treasurer and Minister for Foreign Affairs - attended the opening of a Hillsong Church convention.
Dr Maddox said the religious credentials of politicians had been increasingly on display with the emergence of Family First, religiously outspoken Coalition candidates and the religious positioning of cabinet ministers.
Hillsong was the emblem of a new alliance between Pentecostal religion and Liberal Party politics, Dr Maddox said.