theguardian.com (4.13.2017)
In the church I grew up in it was culturally assumed that Christians would vote Liberal. Jesus wasn’t party-partisan, we knew, but on “family values” issues – sexuality, marriage, abortion, euthanasia, drugs – we were pretty sure his values aligned with ours and so did the Liberal party’s and so a conservative victory was a win for the “Christian” way of life.
By extension, the subconscious – and sometimes overt – assumption was that the remainder of the conservative policy platform must also have God’s blessing. Environmentalism, refugee rights, multiculturalism, unions, welfare, reconciliation with Australia’s First Peoples … these were at best irrelevant to our faith and, more regularly, derided as evidence that Australia’s Christian values were being undermined by a progressive, socialist or humanist anti-God agenda.
