Is the Voice faltering because of cockiness, as Nine Papers’ Michael Koziel suggests? Have progressive forces been seduced by the idea that victory follows victory? If so, the Arc of history may be to blame.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” might be the second-most often-used Martin Luther King Jr quotation. It comes from a 1968 sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, a few weeks before he was assassinated. It rivals the “I have a dream” speech quotes from five years before, where he wishes his children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But arguably, the “arc of history” quote has contributed more to politics, becoming a driving mantra for a progressive movement. Successive waves of groups proclaiming liberation have seen themselves as part of the arc, of “being on the right side of history.” These causes of liquid modernism: anti-racism, feminism, sexual identity, and more recently, transgenderism, have seen themselves as part of the arc.
Jurgen Habermas, one of the founders of Critical Theory, identified Christianity as a primary source of the radical egalitarianism that has driven the search for equal rights, usually identified with the progressive left.
Historian Tom Holland has also seen Christianity in a similar manner. “If I had to choose any one book from the Bible, it wouldn’t be a Gospel”.” he tells podcaster Tyler Cowen. “It would probably be Paul’s LeVoiceto the Galatians because Paul’s Letter to the Galatians contains the famous verse that there is no Jew or Greek, there is no slave or free, there is no man or woman in Christ. In a way, that text – even if you bracket out and removeVoice“in Christ” from it – that idea that, properly, there should be no discrimination between people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, based on gender, based on class, remains pretty foundational for liberalism to this day.
“I think that liberalism, in so many ways, is a secularized rendering of that extraordinary verse. But I think it’s almost impossible to avoid metaphor when thinking about what the relationship of these biblical texts, these biblical verses to the present day. I compared Paul, in particular in his letters and his writings, rather unoriginally, to an acorn from which a mighty oak grows.”
He sees the US civil right’s movemnet led by Martin Luther King Jr as “The Third Great Awakening”, a reliogious movement following the pattern of earlier religious revivals. “When he tells White American Christians that Black American Christians are their brothers and sisters, he is going with the grain of everything that American Protestantism, radical Protestantism has been about since the very beginning. He can articulate the power of the Exodus story and the power of scripture as mediated by people upon whom the Spirit has descended. He can do so in a way that reverberates beyond the Black churches into the White churches and secularised throughout the ’60s.”
In Dominion Holland enlarges on that secularisation. “‘The wind blows wherever it pleases.’ That the times they were a changing was a message Christ Himself had taught. Again and again, Christians had found thenselves touched by God’s spirit; again and again they had found thenmselves brought by it into the light. Now, though, the spirit had taken on a new form. No longer Christian, it had become a vibe. Not to get down with it was to be stranded on the wrong side of history. The concept of progress, unyoked form the theology that had given it birth, had begun to leave Christinity trailing in its wake. The choice that faced churches – an agonisingly difficult one – was whether to sit in the dust , shaking their fists at it in impotent rage, or whether to run and scramble in a desperate attempt to catch it up. Should women be allowed to become priests? Should homosexuality be condemned as sodomy or praised as love? Should the age-old Christioan project of trammelling sexual appetites be maintained or eased?” (Dominion, Page 474, abacus edition)
Paul VanderKlay, a commentator in the Christian Reformed Church in the US and Canada which is undergoing a torrid same sex debate, has an interesting take on why the progressive cause in his church looks like failing. His church has just voted to retain traditional marriage – and the debate now focusses on when or whether affirming, pro-LGBTQIA churches should leave. (NSW/ACT Baptists will see a reminder of their current dilemma.) Paul VanderKlay’s analysis is a moderate middle has now found it unnecesary to follow the progressive arc. He builds on Tom Holland’s analysis (to which he alerted the The Other Cheek) asserting that in the US the Liberal-progressive hegemony has been broken. Inside his church an increasingly progrssive leadership has been surprised at the resistance to moving left.
A similar result, perhaps, to the effective conservative capture of the Anglican Church of Australia’s General Synod (national church parliament) in 2022. There was a real sense of shock in progressive circles.
Which brings us to the Voice. If you are a Labor voter – and if you are not, imagine for a moment you are one – were you thrilled when Albo, Anthony Albanese, made fulfilling the desire of the Uluru Statement from the Heart for the Voice the centrepiece of his victory speech? Of course, you were.
Even if doubts about winning a referendum, a notoriously difficult political event, lingered at the back of your mind, it seemed like political momentum would carry it over. Indeed the same forces for equality that won the marriage plebiscite would carry the day.
As poll percentages for the “yes” droop, it feels different in mid-2023. Nationally, support for the voice has dipped below 50%. Of course, and speaking as a supporter of the voice, it still could get up. Think of the 1951 vote and the surprise result when the Communist Party was not banned. But maybe that’s an example of how a “vote no” referendum campaign starts with a built-in advantage.
But the point of this story is not to predict the outcome of what is likely to be an October poll. But to note the surge of opposition. The liberationist struggle is, ahem, struggling. The intersectional ideal, of minorities oppressed by a cis-gender straight white mainstream joining together to wrest cultural power appears to be faltering in the great Southland. Faltering, but not failing – that would be too definate a pronouncement.
This is not to predict a Trumpy Australia. Or a Trumpy church. But the current polling for the Voice, and the fact that there will be struggle to win it at a time when Labor rules in every mainland state, both territories and in Canberra, may mark a turning point in the assumption that there is an arc of history.
Or is it that the arc of history is long, as Martin Luther King suggested? That is, that justice or equality takes a long time as the US African American experience showed? Or has the liberationist assumption run out of steam?