Q: Why is the Centre-Right imploding in Australia?

A: It does not understand Public Theology.

The terms of this analysis take it as given that public worship and public theology are inescapable features of political meaning categories such the Common Good. This was the normal view of just about everyone across all cultures for most of human history. It was the normal view of the modern West up until about the 1850s. The West had a few rare refusers of this stance in the 17th and 18th centuries, being (usually closet) atheists, speculative rationalists, and – by the late 18^th century – Liberal Protestant theologians. But they were cultural outliers, until very recently.

The idea that politics is only about material and secular ‘reality’, and that public theology is ‘false consciousness’ because religion is only about private and mythological superstitions concerning some unreal ‘supernatural’ domain, are not taken on in any largescale cultural manner until sometime in the post World War Two boom period, in the twentieth century. But that was now some time ago, and you, dear reader, probably assume the secular materialist Lifeworld categories of our times without understanding how novel, how recent, and, well, how incredible these Lifeworld assumptions actually are.

To show how recent an entirely ‘secular’ conception of politics is, let us consider King Charles III of Australia, Nietzsche, and Marx.

The separation of religious authority from political authority has not yet been ‘achieved’ in the Australian political system. To this day, the King is the head of the Australian state, and he is anointed by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury to be the Christian regal sacrament of ruling authority for Australia. To this day, all ministers of the Australian parliament pledge their allegiance to the King. Even Senator Lidia Thorpe - an Indigenous anti-colonialist Senator - was not exempt from swearing allegiance to the King; for an Australian parliamentarian is a Minister of the Crown. However much secular, non-Christian, anti-royalists politicians my not like this, in the Australian system Ministers of the Crown are public servants who are the rule making body authorized by the Crown to uphold - ultimately - Christian categories of just order in the nation of Australia.

The King of Australia has no executive or legislative power, and he does not tell parliamentarians what laws to make, and he does not pass any judgement on the executive arms of government. But it is the Crown that is the sacred authority that differentiates parliament’s laws from the mere exercise of power, and makes those laws a function of divinely authorized power. In the Australian political system, the dignity of the courts, the honour of parliamentarians, and the authority of law itself rests, to this day, on traditional Christian public theology.

But let us push back a bit further in time to understand what has happened to how normal people now think about public theology.

If you look at the young Nietzsche and the young Marx, they also assumed public theology categories. It is a revelation to them - as passed onto them from Liberal Protestant Theologians (Richard Strauss et al) and Protestant Rationalist and Idealist Philosophers (Kant and Hegel) - that the sacred is an entirely human construction, indeed that politics itself is an entirely human construction. After receiving this revelation, Nietzsche thinks meaning is only accounted for by myth, and by myths that the strong and courageous simply create - ex nihilo - out of their own wills and imaginations. The only ‘true’ sacred to Nietzsche is what we ourselves simply dream up, and every false sacred that people believe in, as transcending human will and imagination, is an idol. On the other hand Marx - after reading Feuerbach as stimulated by Strauss – comes to believe that meaning is a gloss on economics, such that social organization (politics) is fundamentally about who owns the means of production and who can subjugate the working majority to the will of the rich minority.

Over the past 50 years the reduction of political power to economics (Marx) and the reduction of meaning itself to poetic legal constructions that we simply dream up (Nietzsche), have functionally replaced the old categories of public theology. Our popular culture now owes a lot to Marx and Nietzsche, but try explaining to John Howard and Peter Costello that their reduction of politics to “a balanced budget” illustrated the triumph of Marxism...

Contrary to the Lifeworld assumptions of our secular, materialist, and postmodern politics, I do not believe that public theology is anything like dead. I do not believe that it is even possible for public theology to die. I am of the view that if we are political animals (which we are) then we are also inescapably theological animals. Secular, materialist, and postmodern Lifeworld categories are to me public theology categories themselves. So in this piece I am not going to justify taking public theology seriously, I am just going to proceed in doing a public theology analysis of why Conservative Centre-Right politics is imploding in Australia.

---

In Australia there is no serious opposition to the Centre-Left (the Australian Labor Party) which power-shares with the Rainbow-Left (the Greens). This is not because the Left is doing fine and the Right is lost. The reality is, were Australians to presently have a government of the notional Centre-Right in power (the LNP), there would be no real opposition either. For the Centre-Right (the Liberal and National Party Coalition) and the Rainbow-Right (the Teals) taken together as a ‘conservative’ ‘opposition’, are largely indistinguishable from the Centre/Rainbow-Left on most matters of policy, ideology, and actual outcomes.

Now, there indeed are a few political brand differences between the Centre-Left and the Centre-Right, but we all know that it is the same political product that is being sold to voters by both political marketing corporations (or perhaps it is just two branches of the one political marketing corporation). The pressing question presented to voters is something like does ‘Surf’ or ‘Blue Omo’ washing-powder makes your clothes whiter, and which soap gives you better value for your money? It is not as if we are getting real alternatives of political vision to vote for. We are not getting a choice between pragmatic hip-pocket vote-buying, and anything else. The Centre is comprised of slightly different flavours of the same underlying neoliberal electoral pragmatism in both its Left and Right sides. This is an electoral ‘choice’ between different brands of chocolate milk, it is not a choice between milk and wine.

But here is the interesting thing. The Centre/Rainbow-Left has got something the Centre-Right wants, and indeed functionally has, but it does not seem to fit the LNP very well. The Left has got a moral and spiritual fig leaf which (at least to the Left itself) occludes its naked neoliberal and amoral econometric pragmatism. If you look at it from the best angle, under the most flattering lighting, within the correct group-think context, true believers in the neoliberal Left are able to persuade themselves that they are not only morally respectable, but they are infinitely morally superior to those deplorable Far Right Trump barbarians. That is, it looks as if the Left really believes in the justice of its cause, and from within the Leftist fold, the politicians, experts, advocates, and policy boffins of the Left seem genuinely committed to the vision of moral progress they claims to be taking us towards.

The fact is, the Left has got an at least marketable form of public religion, but the Right only has econometric self-interest, and the Right’s god (Mammon) is no longer marketable. Hence the LNP is a toxic political brand that cannot re-create itself as being in clear moral and spiritual distinction from the Left.

A quick trip down memory lane helps us see what has gone on.

It was in the mid-1980s that the neoliberal era replaced the traditional Progressives and Conservatives that flourished in the last decades of the culturally Christian West (the post-war boom era). Reagan, Thatcher, and Hawke were the prophets and messiah figures leading us out of the stagflation of the 1970s. The ‘first world’ traumas of the 1970s were produced by the US going broke from the Vietnam war, and then liberating Wall Street and carving up ‘the developing world’ as a means of maintaining American global dominance as a deficit rather than a surplus economy.

The deity of the “greed is good” 1980s is Mammon. That is, the making, accumulation, and agential power of Money is the central object of public worship in the neoliberal era. “Its the economy stupid” = Mammon is our god. But that era has been giving way this century to a post-neoliberal era defined by the power of transnational tech companies and the triumph of a new techno-feudal surveillance economy in cahoots with the legislative jungle and invasive omniscience of the security state. Money power is morphing into tech and governance power, and Mammon is being moved down in the public pantheon; there is war amongst the gods for dominance.

The fact of the matter is that the neoliberal prophetic dream that we were sold in the 1980s has failed. With this failure, the god of neoliberalism – Mammon – is losing its shiny gloss.

Mammon was always going to fail us. Yet back in the day (the 1980s) we were promised that if – as we inevitability must – we became smarter and more ruthlessly profit-driven, and de-protected our national industries and agriculture, fragmented and privatized our public assets, liberated the international financial sector, and unhooked the super-rich from arduous national responsibilities, this would take us to neoliberal nirvana. We were all going to get cheap imported consumer goods, everyone was going to be better off, financially, and hence each individual consumer of self-actualizing hedonism would be measurably happier. Personal wealth accumulation became the only ‘moral’ (that is, normative) virtue of the privatizing, transnational corporatizing, profit-driven, neoliberal new world order.

Unsurprisingly, the over-riding impact of the past 40 years of neoliberalism has been: the consistent and increasing ‘flourishing’ of wealth and opportunity inequality between better off and worse off Australians; the blossoming of privately scammed and increasingly ineffective public goods and services, and; a serious housing affordability crisis for the young. In this brave new neoliberal world, the young and middle Australia is heavily under stress as they try to not go under and get caught in the teeth of the bottom gears of our two-speed economy, or try to surge up, by superhuman effort, into the top gear system run by and for the established rich elites.

Theologically, Mammon gives you nothing higher than yourself to believe in (which is why we like it… but…). Mammon as a religion of self-worship, turns naturally to the various cults and fetishes of selfishness and delusional narcissism. This is not a satisfying or sustainable public deity. So there is the need for a new god, but we have not actually replaced Self and Money with anything authentically transcendent, so we are experiencing pubic theology choice paralysis.

However… the innovators of the neoliberal Left have come up with a ‘new’ public theology product. DEI rainbow washing is a religious enterprise which we can paste over the top of an ugly, and overtly amoral Mammon, without actually changing anything. The Left gets to feel moral and feel committed to just causes bigger than self-interest (upholding marginalized victims and saving the planet with Bill Gates via buying farm land so that we can have airplane bio-fuel). So the Left can feel moral and see itself as principled, without actually abandoning the basic tenants of Mammon, and without unwinding the opposite of DEI realities that neoliberalism has actually delivered to us.

Take DEI’s ‘D’. True diversity is now radically eroded as we are all reduced to nothing but bodies, consumers, massively legally regulated actors (and increasingly regulated speakers and thinkers), and numerical cyphers which can be better controlled by deeply intrusive algorithmically and informationally surveilling powers by both commerce and government. All for our enhanced freedom and safety, no doubt.

Take DEI’s ‘E’. Compared with the overall standard of common wealth and home ownership in the post-war era, we now live in a radically unequal society.

Take DEI’s ‘I’. Queering everything, disturbed and fetishizing minority deviance is now included at the cost of excluding all women from sex-based rights, whilst the state-based promotion of the irreversible mutilation and sterilization of our vulnerable and confused children excludes parents trying to protect their children from the marauding and devouring conversion therapies of Inanna.

The Left has chosen the Rainbow goddess. In ancient Mesopotamia she was known as Inanna, and her symbol was the rainbow. In the Hebrew biblical literature she is known as the Queen of Heaven, variously called Ishtar, Asherah, and other names. The Right goes along with this new cult too, but uneasily.

Whilst the Left is trying to cover over an unpopular cult of Mammon with a rainbow wash of new religious fervour, it must be noted that this is a very shitty religion which is highly unlikely to win over the ballast of ordinary people to its devotion. It is an elite imposed religion, with our symbolic capitalist class (knowledge workers, law-reforming political activists, and the lobbied-over heads of professional organizations) pushing it onto an unwilling hoi polloi.

The Centre-Right in Australia goes along with this Rainbow religious zealotry precisely because it is affiliated with our elite knowledge and expert class. But the reality is, the only thing that morally and spiritually differentiates the post-Christian pragmatic neoliberal of the Left from a Conservative is some sort of commitment to the old culturally Christian West. So the Centre-Right is trying to wear the Rainbow fig leaf too, but it is even less persuasive in the authenticity of its religious observances than the Left, and it is alienating the sorts of Australians who actually want a seriously Conservative alternative to the increasingly Kulturkampf mad Centre-Left. Hence, the Centre-Right is losing its membership at speed to the formerly Fringe Right of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.

Pauline is far from a theologically literate or spiritually sensitive person, but she has hard-nosed electoral intelligence, and she knows that Conservatives really don’t like the Rainbow religion. Further, Pauline is gutsy, and she is loudly and irreverently not going to sprinkle incense on the altar of Inanna, whatever names she gets called. She has been hauled off to jail before by the ‘virtuous’ elites, so she is hard to intimidate. In these matters she understands the naturally conservative electoral base of the Centre-Right far better than does the Liberal National Party Coalition. And interestingly, she has never been committed to neoliberalism, always holding out for some sort of nationalist protectionism, and some sort of culturally rooted national distinctive. It seems that it takes a fish & chip shop owner from Ipswich to just not play along with the public pieties of the Great and Good of the land, and to give ordinary conservatives an actual representative for the old cultural God of the West in our supposedly representative democracy.

But our Centre-Right elites find Pauline too popularist, and they are terrified of being cast by the Centre-Left as stooping to US ‘Culture War’ politics of bigotry, racism, and hatred. And the US Religious Right just doesn’t fly here.

On the one hand, the Centre-Right political apparatchiks have a point. Scott Morrison tried to be a neoliberal pragmatist who was also a soft version of the US Religious Right, and it did not fly for long with our classically secularist electorate. But note well, modern Australian secularism is usually an expression of non-conformist-origin cultural Christianity, it may no longer be Christian, but it is not pagan, and it is not ruthlessly materialist and pragmatic. And it is also the case that our Centre-Right apparatchiks are being willfully blind to their support base in a way that is costing them heavily in the polls.

The reality is, DEI is just as much a product of the American Culture War as is the Religious Right. Indeed, in recent decades, more so. For – as the sociologist Musa al Gharbi points out (We have never been woke) – this century’s Culture War was manufactured by the Left, not by the Right. That is, conservative ideological, value, and meaning stances have hardly changed at all over the past 20 years. It is the Left that has gone radically off to DEI Rainbow-land, discarding many an Old Lefty along the way. Having moved into a radical Culture War mode of operation, the Left now vitriolically attacks the Centre-Right as “Far Right”, and denounces any sign of traditional moral and religious conservatism as bigotry, hatred, and oppression, when in fact they are just being mainstream conservatives. When the Centre-Right goes along with these new Culture War designations, it is calling its own support base names. You cannot do that for too long before your support based abandons you. And indeed, this is the political genius of Trump. He has embraced being called names by the Leftist Kulturkampf because he realizes that this move endears him to the very large culturally conservative support base in his country.

In Australia, conservative people are simply not being represented by the Centre-Right any more. So why would Conservatives now vote for the LNP? The Centre-Right establishment is scared to death that it might attract a Leftist Culture War slur, and is determined to be just as ‘woke’ (ish), ‘green’ (ish), and ‘inclusive’ (ish) as the Centre-Left. But the new religious consciousness of the rainbow fig leaf does not work for the support base of the Centre-Right (and it only just works for the Centre-Left, but that is another story). As long as the party-machine gatekeepers of the Centre-Right are trying to play along with neoliberalism religiously clothed in Inanna’s rainbow vestments, they will continue to lose their voting base.

---

Whatever you might personally think of Charlie Kirk, what was most interesting about him was that he was a conservative trying to find his way back to the Christian roots of Western conservativism. That is, the public theology role that serious Christian faith played in his political life was a sign that the American Centre-Right (which the Republican Party actually is, whatever you may think of Trump) was exploring alternatives to neoliberal pragmatic paganism as the basis for the public worship core defining the public good. The Centre-Left in the US is now increasingly committed to being post (or liberal/apostate) Christian. Thus the Left is increasingly finding it cannot escape a pagan public theology stance, which it must pitch as progressive, as just, as scientific (regarding climate but not regarding sex), as humane, and as good for all. In my view - Old Christian Lefty though I be - the Left will not find any real spiritual depth in the direction in which it is currently heading, but the Right might.

The Alliance of Responsible Citizens movement is looking to the West’s Christian roots to try and revive moral and high meaning horizons in our public life. In a very different register, and from a different demographic, John Anderson is Australia’s Charlie Kirk. There are problems here (there still seems to be a deep commitment to neoliberalism without recognizing how profoundly corrosive of traditional Western values and meanings this stance is) but this just might work. Yet, as long as the Centre-Right political apparatchiks in Australia refuse to overtly reject Rainbow public religion, and refuse to represent Judeo-Christian high moral and metaphysical meanings as what now makes the Centre-Right distinct from the Centre-Left, the Centre-Right will continue to implode.

---