Quotes of the Day

Conservative politicians and Christians in Australia are learning to speak in tongues - each other's. Last July, Treasurer Peter Costello told an ecstatic congregation of pentecostalists that the country needed "a return to faith and the values on which our society was founded - the values of the Ten Commandments, respect for other people, respect for their property." The same month, Christian and family-values lobby groups, fearful that Labor would derail an amendment barring same-sex marriage, brought 1,100 polite protesters to Parliament House - and secured an instant pledge from the party to fast-track the change. Before the Oct. 9 federal election, Christian groups vigorously, and with some success, promoted "Christian values" candidates in marginal seats. Last week, as Parliament reopened, one of the hottest talking points in Canberra was abortion.

"The conservative Christian voice within the Coalition" is speaking with "increasing confidence and assertiveness," says Marion Maddox, author of the forthcoming God Under Howard. The Wellington-based academic, who's spent a decade tracing the links between religion and politics in Australia, notes that on election night new Liberal M.P. Michael Ferguson told a TV interviewer "that he loved the Lord. I can't really imagine that happening in any previous election." Says Baptist minister Tim Costello, "The prevailing wisdom that was, 'Don't talk about your faith, they'll think you're a religious fanatic,' is over."

Talk about it, and they might even vote for you: the government owes its fourth election win in part to candidates like Ferguson, a 30-year-old former campaigner against gay adoption who snatched Labor's key seat of Bass, in northern Tasmania; Louise Markus, a pentecostalist social worker who captured Greenway, on Sydney's northwestern fringe; and Family First, a three-year-old party of Christians whose second preferences boosted the Coalition vote in several marginal seats. David Marr, author of the anticlerical squib The High Price of Heaven, likely had tongue in cheek when he noted recently that "God is working for the Liberal Party." But that doesn't mean he was wrong.

Australia's conservative Christian vote is tiny. The country is not growing more religious, says Maddox, though regular churchgoers (about 1 in 7 Australians) have always been more likely to vote conservative, and theologically stern churches are growing at the expense of more liberal ones. Clearly, the "Christian values" message - pro-life, anti- drug liberalization and gay marriage - also resonates with voters who'd rather spend Sunday on the couch than on their knees. Steve Fielding, Family First's senator-elect, who counts several non-Christians among his 15 brothers and sisters, is sure of that: "We believe we have an affinity with the silent majority of Australians, people who support family values, helping each other, the traditional values that have stood the test of time."

Those values have been under sustained attack since the late 1960s, says Bill Muehlenberg, vice president of the Australian Family Association. In that rebellious era, "the importance of authority, family, religion were all chucked out in favor of the idea that God is dead, there are no values, we can all create our own right and wrong," says the Baptist theologian. "We've had a good 40 years of that social experiment, and by every indicator - crime, suicide, pornography, drug abuse - it looks like an experiment that's failed."

Christians who resist the anything-goes tide find themselves in a society that will tolerate almost anything but conservative Christians, says Jim Wallace, a retired SAS commander who heads the Australian Christian Lobby. "Until the '60s the influence of the Judeo-Christian ethic was quite strong, and that was very constraining for people with counter-Christian agendas, like the homosexual lobby, the sex industry, the marijuana lobby. They couldn't really get anywhere until they neutralized that influence." As a result, Christians have been "blasted and denigrated to the point where they are reluctant to stick their head above the parapet." A counterattack, says the keen strategist, is overdue: "As a soldier, I know that you have to take the high ground. And the high ground is government." Such talk dismays Lee Rhiannon, a New South Wales Greens M.P. who describes herself as an atheist. "To allow your personal faith to dictate what you do in the political world is very undemocratic," she says. "The religious right are trying to remake parliament and society in their own image." Counters Wallace: "People bring up the line, Don't legislate your morality on me. But every law has a moral component. If it isn't Judeo-Christian morality that is being legislated, it's somebody's morality. There's no vacuum." Says Muehlenberg: "Secular humanism is a faith. It has a right to air its opinions in the public arena. We say, Surely the other side can too."

The Greens are a chief target of the family-values lobby, which is thrilled that they've lost the balance of power in the Senate. Not only are the Greens the chief heirs of the '60s, notes Michael Hogan, a political scientist at the University of Sydney, they are also "almost an anti-Christian party." An election scorecard compiled by the ACL and other Christian groups gave the Greens 0 out of 26. Labor did little better, with 4. (The Coalition rated 16.) Shadow foreign affairs minister Kevin Rudd, a devout Christian, has expressed outrage at the notion that "God has somehow become some wholly owned subsidiary of political conservatism in this country." Labor needs, he said, to connect with voters "who are searching for some form of certainty in an age of great uncertainty." Social conservatives often lean left on other issues, says Wallace, so the values vote is "winnable by both sides." Labor has missed out on that vote because it's failed to articulate firm core values, says University of Melbourne sociologist Kevin McDonald, who contrasts the Howard government's clear "vision of moral purpose" with Labor's "absence of a defining message." Says M.P. Ferguson: "If Labor ever wanted to represent a cross-section of Australia on some of the more difficult moral issues, they have left that constituency behind."

There's no risk, says Hogan, that Australia will imitate the U.S., where conservative Christians overwhelmingly vote Republican: "The major parties are happy to get the support of religious leaders, but if those leaders oppose them they tell them to get stuffed, basically." Still, says the ACL's Wallace, "politicians are realizing there's a discerning constituency out there in marginal seats - that the church has woken up." Peter Costello knows what Wallace means. After his paean to the Ten Commandments, the Liberals' deputy leader said he'd never received such a flood of mail: "It tells me that there are a lot of people who are interested and want to hear this." For the Coalition at least, the language of Christian values makes a lot of sense.

• Elizabeth Feizkhah
• Faith-driven activists and politicians find that values mean votes