separate the Church from state endowment. There were many reasons why
such a society would achieve a reputation for irreligion.
Most importantly, Australia proved the perfect laboratory for aspirations for
Church–State separation, aspirations that could not be decried as‘revolution-
ary’in a new, pluralist society with no long-standing tradition of Church
establishment (Chavura and Tregenza 2015). At various points of time, close
to 50 per cent of the population may have been adherents of the Church of
England; but there has also always been a significant Catholic population, for
a long time largely Irish in ethnicity, of above 20 per cent of the population.
The rest were largely various forms of Protestant non-conformists, including
adherents of the Presbyterian Church, which is the national Church of Scotland.
What is worth noting is that, unlike America, Australia has not created any
new religions, nor has its public religiosity been characterized by the more
dynamic evangelical churches which prospered in the USA. Australian
churches have largely been mainstream. The basic divide has been between
the 75 per cent to 80 per cent who identified as Protestant and the 25 per cent
who were Catholic. For Protestants, the key factor on any issue was the
attitude of the adherents of the Church of England.
The basic issue facing Australian societies was that of managing religious
pluralism in a society in which one church, the Church of England, was for a
long time dominant. This was not just a religious matter, as religion was
connected to ethnicity, in particular the vexed issue of the relationship
between Great Britain and Ireland. Religion and race were entwined and
difficult to disentangle. A primary concern was to ensure that religious differ-
ence did not turn into religious conflict, thereby creating a social order riven
by violent, even murderous, activities, such as came to be the case in Ireland.
In this regard one must say that Australians were remarkably successful; hatred
there was, and suspicion, but bloody and violent confrontation was relatively
rare. When confrontation did happen, there could be an almost farcical
element to it, as the case of members of the Catholic Social Studies Movement
and readers of Protestant Publications’s theRockclashing over an attempt to
‘rescue’a nun from a convent (Duncan 2001, p. 123); or the Revd C. T. Forscutt
being chased from the Domain when he argued that Irish Catholics should
not be allowed to teach in NSW public schools (Melleuish 2015a, p. 64).
Despite claims that Australia was born‘modern’, and hence without any
real commitment to religious belief, there can be no doubt that, for a long
time, an extremely high proportion of Australians claimed adherence to a
religion. In fact, between 1947 and 1954 the proportion of those claiming
no religious belief or who refused to answer the religious question in the
census declined from 11.45 per cent to 9.96 per cent (Clark 1958, p. 285). It
was only in the 1960s, in line with other Anglo countries, excluding America,
that religious adherence began to decline seriously (Brown 2012). Religion
Utilitarianism contra Sectarianism