mattered in Australia, and this can be seen in the fact that most Australian
prime ministers of that period had a religious connection, such connections
ranged from the Catholicism of Scullin and Lyons to the Anglicanism of
William Morris Hughes to the more exotic religiosity of Alfred Deakin
(Williams 2013). L. F. Fitzhardinge describes Hughes as‘deeply religious,
with a profound belief in the after-life and the all-pervasiveness of God of
which he seldom spoke except to a few old friends’(1979, pp. xvi–xvii).
Deakin is the most interesting and, perhaps, paradoxical of thesefigures.
Reading his contributions to the Federation debates one does notfind a man
seeking to create a religious or Christian country. Although he voted in favour
of the recognition of the deity in the preamble, he is not an outspoken
advocate of the need to put God into the constitution; almost paradoxically
that role falls to the Irish Catholic Patrick Glynn, future free trade member of
the Commonwealth parliament and Liberal minister. Rather wefind someone
soaked in the traditions of British common law and constitutional theory. At
times, one would think that one is reading Edmund Burke. But there also
survives fervent prayers recorded in Deakin’s private diary during this time
(Gabay 1992, ch. 4). It is as if there was a disjunction between one sphere of
Deakin’s life and another.
Or was there? This all depends on how one understands the connection
between political/legal ideas and Protestantism in the ideals of Britishness
which underpinned much of the public culture of colonial and federated
Australia. Henry Parkes (1867, p. 3) could speak of‘British subjects—of a
Protestant nation, recollect, and subjects of a Protestant Crown’. A British
country was a country which took its British inheritance for granted, and
this most certainly can be seen in the Federation debates. That inheritance
included Protestantism, but it was a Protestantism which could be simply
taken for granted. In a way, Protestantism, common law, and an empirical
approach to political matters were all just different elements of a complex
culture. They were all part of what Marshall Hodgson (1993, ch. 8) has called
‘cultural patterning’. Hence Deakin’s strange religious explorationsfitted in
easily with his British political ideals. They were just two sides of his
‘Britishness’.
4.3 Australia and the Secular
‘Secularism’in Australian history can be viewed in two ways. One is that it was
an expression of British cultural patterning and, hence, an element of the
Protestant religious ideal. British Protestantism, especially within the Church
of England, had evolved so that a certain‘this worldliness’was central to
its religious outlook. It has been argued (Nemo 2006, ch. 6) that Latin
Greg Melleuish and Stephen A. Chavura