{"id":14799,"date":"2024-09-11T17:19:04","date_gmt":"2024-09-11T07:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=14799"},"modified":"2024-09-11T17:26:18","modified_gmt":"2024-09-11T07:26:18","slug":"how-australians-view-the-religiosity-of-their-political-leaders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/11\/how-australians-view-the-religiosity-of-their-political-leaders\/","title":{"rendered":"How Australians view the religiosity of their political leaders"},"content":{"rendered":"

A <\/span>new Pew Research Center<\/span> study<\/span><\/a> assesses public opinion about the importance of their national leader\u2019s religion and religiosity. It\u2019s worth a look because it reveals some important insights.<\/span><\/p>\n

What the study measured<\/b><\/h3>\n

The public in many countries were asked about the personal importance of whether the Prime Minister or President: 1) has religious beliefs that are the same as your own; 2) has strong religious beliefs, even if they are different from your own; 3) stands up for people with your religious beliefs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Respondents chose between \u201cvery\u201d, \u201csomewhat\u201d, \u201cnot too\u201d and \u201cnot at all\u201d important. Those who answered \u201cvery\u201d or \u201csomewhat\u201d were aggregated into \u201cimportant\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For domestic relevance, I\u2019ll confine my remarks to the WEIRD (Westernised, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) English-speaking countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. Neither Ireland nor New Zealand were included.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also done the calculations to determine if answers are statistically different between these countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

Australia least \u2018religiously political\u2019<\/b><\/h3>\n

For all three questions, Australians were significantly <\/span>less<\/span><\/i> likely than citizens of each of the other countries to rate these things as important \u2013 18 per cent, 23 per cent and 47 per cent respectively (see Table 1 below). It\u2019s understandable that the third question, about general political representation, returns a much higher incidence of importance.<\/span><\/p>\n

The most different country is the United States, highlighting its current struggle with aggressive religious partisanship. More than three times more Americans (63 per cent) than Australians (18 per cent) say their leader should have the same religion as them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Further, while Australians, Brits and Canadians were each more likely to value a leader with religious views, even if different from their own, than a leader with the same religious views, the opposite was true for the United States. Partisanship on steroids.<\/span><\/p>\n

The pointy end of the political stick<\/b><\/h3>\n

But, in terms of political science, the aggregated \u201cimportant\u201d measure (which Pew focuses on) tends to overstate real-world relevance.<\/span><\/p>\n

What matters is the \u201cvery important\u201d measure. That\u2019s where opinion is most likely to convert into action. And for the first two questions in Australia, these are just 6 per cent and 7 per cent respectively.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This ties in well with other findings. For example, as I report in volume 3 of my <\/span>five-volume <\/span>Religiosity in Australia<\/span><\/i> series<\/span><\/a>, a tiny 5 per cent of Australians say that religion has a significant influence on their voting intentions. A whopping 86 per cent say it doesn\u2019t affect their vote at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s no surprise then that the specifically religious political party, Australian Conservatives, established by former Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi, failed to get any of its candidates elected to parliament. Worse, it lost two MPs amongst its founding membership. In just two years, it was plain to see there was no public appetite for a \u201ctraditional Christian\u201d party in Australia, and it was voluntarily deregistered.<\/span><\/p>\n

A chilling underbelly of religious dominionists<\/b><\/h3>\n

I also report in volume 5 of <\/span>Religiosity in Australia<\/span><\/i> that 3.9 per cent of Australian adults are religious dominionists. Those are people who <\/span>both<\/span><\/i> say that their religion is the only acceptable one, <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> that religious authorities ought to be the final arbiters of law.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s about 770,000 Australian adults who believe <\/span>their own clerics<\/span><\/i> ought to head our legal systems. The belief correlates strongly and positively with both personal importance of religion, and with hard-right political orientation.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The figure of 3.9 per cent suggests that around <\/span>two-thirds<\/span><\/i> of the 6 per cent of Australians who think the nation\u2019s political leader ought to have the same religious beliefs as themselves are religious dominionists.<\/span><\/p>\n

It exposes a chilling underbelly of Australians who reject democratic representation and the separation of church and state.<\/span><\/p>\n

In conclusion<\/b><\/h3>\n

This latest Pew research adds to our understanding of attitudes towards religion and religiosity in the political sphere. It shows Australians to be significantly less \u2018religiously political\u2019 than citizens of the UK, Canada and the US, and is consistent with previous findings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Religious Australians often create an impression of the political importance of religion, but these new findings confirm most Australians don\u2019t link religion and politics. Add to that the very short life of the Australian Conservatives party, the significant and continuing rise in the numbers of Australians who have no religion (already a larger group than Catholics and soon likely to be larger than all Christians), and the majority (69 per cent) \u2013 as outlined in volume 2 of <\/span>Religiosity in Australia <\/span><\/i>\u2013 who don\u2019t trust the churches.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s important in a robust democracy to respect and accommodate the right to a range of non-violent and non-discriminatory religious beliefs and views. But the numbers are in. It would be a courageous politician indeed who advocated special privileges for one or other religion, or even religion in general.<\/span><\/p>\n

Foolhardy, even.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Table 1: Prevalence of \u2018important\u2019 rating amongst English-speaking countries.<\/strong> Chi square significance (p): * < 0.05, ** < 0.01, *** < 0.0001. Note: \u2018religious partisanship\u2019 refers to having the same religious beliefs minus having strong religious beliefs even if different. Statistics are calculated using cell n counts back-calculated from total n\u2019s and prevalence percentages presented in the report tables. Don\u2019t know\/refused to answer were excluded from analysis. Figures will be very close to but may not exactly replicate raw data analysis.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Published 11 September 2024.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

If you wish to republish this original article, please attribute to\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Rationale<\/i><\/b><\/a>.\u00a0<\/i><\/b>Click here<\/i><\/b><\/a>\u00a0to find out more about republishing under Creative Commons.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Images: Melody Ayres-Griffiths <\/a><\/i><\/b>on Unsplash (CC).<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new Pew Research Center study assesses public opinion about the importance of their national leader\u2019s religion and religiosity. It\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":14803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[419,465],"coauthors":[410],"class_list":["post-14799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethics-religion","tag-religion-in-australia","tag-religion-in-politics"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14799"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14808,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14799\/revisions\/14808"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14799"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=14799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}