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Australia celebrates 125 years of Federation this Saturday. The brief history of Christian freedom in Australia, recounted below, is a teaser from the Australian Christian Freedom Index, which will launch at Parliament House, Canberra, later this month.

The freedoms that Australians take for granted—like speech, expression, conscience, association and religion—are, in no small part, a Christian inheritance. For generations, Australia’s laws and institutions reflected a coherent Christian vision of human dignity and the common good.

That vision was present from the earliest days of the British penal colony of New South Wales. When the First Fleet departed in 1787, Captain Arthur Phillip was instructed to ensure the due observance of religion and the celebration of public worship.

As Charles Francis QC noted, this meant Phillip was bound to grant “full liberty of conscience, and the free exercise of all modes of religious worship not prohibited by law”—while also ensuring the Book of Common Prayer “be read each Sunday and Holy Day”, and “the Blessed Sacrament be administered according to the rites of the Church of England”.^[1] Religious freedom and Christian practice were not in tension; they were established together. The liberty Phillip was instructed to protect belonged to everyone, not only believers.^[2]

That same spirit was present in the very first sermon preached on Australian soil. On 3 February 1788, the Reverend Richard Johnson addressed his congregation—churchmen and dissenters, Roman Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles alike—with the universal offer of the Gospel: “a free and gracious pardon to the guilty, cleansing to the polluted, healing to the sick, happiness to the miserable and even life for the dead.”^[3]

Johnson, the colony’s first chaplain, was an evangelical Christian who considered the Bible sacred writ, and arrived carrying 100 full Bibles, 400 New Testaments, 500 Psalters, and hundreds of devotional texts.^[4] Christian formation was part of the new settlement’s cargo from the outset.

What Johnson carried ashore in Scripture and faith, the colony’s governors would carry forward in law and institution. Governor Arthur Phillip (1738–1814), founder of the colony of New South Wales, was determined that the law of the land be steeped in Christian morality. He had no need to import that morality separately: it was already embedded in the English common law, itself a direct consequence of “the historical dominance of the Christian faith among the population in the colonies and historically in England,” as Emeritus Professor Michael Quinlan notes.^[5]

Phillip brought with him the Christian values that produced William Wilberforce’s campaign against slavery in England.^[6] Their practical effect was immediate: slavery was deemed a direct affront to the values of a Christian society, and Phillip’s declaration that “there can be no slavery in a free land and consequently no slaves” embedded abolitionist principles from the outset.^[7]

David Furse-Roberts records that Phillip “appreciated the role of religion, and Christianity especially, as the bases for an ordered and civilised society”. He sought to treat the indigenous people with respect, inviting them to be part of the new society, and supported the early chaplains in fostering the colony’s religious life.^[8]

Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824) believed, in the words of historian Niall Ferguson, that New South Wales was “not just a land of punishment but also a land of redemption”—that convicts would be “transformed into citizens”.^[9] He dispatched clergymen to every district, ordered all convicts to attend Sunday church services, and launched the Sunday School Movement alongside local branches of the British and the Foreign Bible Societies.^[10] Christian principles, in his view, were what would render the colony’s inhabitants “honest, faithful and useful members of society”—and “indispensable both for liberty and for a high material civilisation.”^[11]

Governor Richard Bourke (1777–1855) applied Christian principles to transform the colony into a more humane, free-settler society. A devout Anglican, his ambition was that New South Wales be a proud Christian colony—one that saw people of different persuasions united, in words he borrowed from Ephesians 4:3, “together in one bond of peace.” He ended penal transportation, encouraged the emancipation of convicts, introduced trial by jury, and reduced the severity of corporal punishment.^[12]

Bourke’s most enduring contribution was the Church Act of 1836, which funded the building of churches and the maintenance of ministers across all denominations, placing every Christian tradition on equal legal footing. As Furse-Roberts notes, Bourke’s disestablishment of the Church of England was driven not by secular impulse but by “a desire to afford justice to the aggrieved Catholic minority and to give equal strength to the various strands of Christianity in public life.”^[13]

Summarising what the colonists carried with them from Britain, historian Bella d’Abrera writes that “equality of man, individual dignity and the abolition of slavery were all bequeathed to the world by Christianity and Christian thinkers.”^[14]

A Young Colony’s Moral Reckoning

Christianity’s dominance in the colonial period was not without challenge. Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species (1859) and its successor The Descent of Man (1871) introduced a radical worldview that contradicted Christian theology at its root—denying the single human family on which the doctrines of creation and salvation depend, and providing intellectual cover for the dehumanisation of Aboriginal peoples.^[15] As Meredith Lake notes, Darwinism dealt “a severe blow to evangelical humanitarianism.”^[16]

But the leading opponents of racism in Australia remained faithful to biblical Christianity. When colonialists taken by Darwin’s theory treated Aborigines as less than human, Australian Christians clung to the biblical principle of one human family, affirming “both the sinfulness of such behaviour and the essential dignity” of the local population.^[17]

Lawyer Roy Williams contends that saving the Indigenous people from total extinction was among the Christian churches’ most important achievements.^[18] Christianity, not Darwinism, set the colony’s moral compass. Guided by the morality of the Gospels, the clergy and their congregations drove prison reform, established orphan schools, educated the poor, and championed the rights of Aboriginal peoples—animated by the same biblical conviction that had fuelled Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade.^[19] They helped lay the foundations of participatory democracy in the process.^[20]

The Common Law’s Christian Roots

Christian traditions came to Australia not only through its governors but through the English legal system itself. When New South Wales was established in 1788, the laws of England were transplanted into the colony through the doctrine of reception, formally recognised by the Australian Courts Act 1828.^[21] The common law became, from the outset, the sole legal system the colonial courts recognised and applied.

The idea that every person possesses inherent dignity, universal legal standing, and the right to freedom of religion had no foundation in the continent’s pre-colonial belief systems.^[22] It was a Christian import—carried here in the common law, owing to the Christian theology that shaped it. Governor Phillip’s Instructions of 1787 had already made this explicit in practical terms, enjoining all subjects to live with the natives “in amity and kindness” and requiring that offenders “be brought to punishment according to the degree of the offence.”^[23]

Justice Hargrave’s ruling in Ex parte Thackeray (1874) gave it legal force. The NSW Supreme Court declared that colonists had brought with them “this first great common law maxim” that “Christianity is part and parcel of our general laws” and that “all the revealed or divine law, so far as enacted by the Holy Scripture to be of universal obligation, is part of our colonial law.”^[24] The colonial courts, in short, understood Christian principles as universal—binding on everyone, and the common inheritance of all.^[25]

A Nation Humbly Relying on God

The Christian character of the colonial period found its fullest expression at Federation. Sir Henry Parkes, widely regarded as the Father of Australian Federation, had declared in 1885 that Australians were “pre-eminently a Christian people—as our laws, our whole system of jurisprudence, our Constitution… are based upon and interwoven with our Christian belief.”^[26]

When the Constitution of Australia Bill passed the Imperial Parliament on 5 July 1900, his conviction was vindicated. One of the Constitution’s most distinguished co-authors, Sir John Downer of South Australia, declared: “The Commonwealth of Australia will be, from its first stage, a Christian Commonwealth.”^[27] This was no rhetorical flourish. At the Melbourne Convention in 1898, Downer had stated that “the Christian religion… is part of the law of England which I should think we undoubtedly brought with us when we settled in these colonies.”^[28]

That conviction was written into the Preamble: the people of Australia united as a Federal Commonwealth “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God.”^[29] These words were not inserted by the drafters on their own initiative. As law professor Helen Irving notes, the 1897 Convention delegates had been “inundated with petitions” demanding that the Constitution include “a statement of spiritual—specifically Christian—identity for the new nation.”^[30]

Every colonial parliament submitted proposed wording acknowledging God.^[31] The constitutional drafters, John Quick and Robert Garran, recorded that the appeal to the divine was inserted “in response to numerous and largely signed petitions received from the people of every colony.”^[32] Christian values were so embedded in Australian life that the nation’s founding document could hardly be conceived without reference to God.

The same instinct shaped Section 116, the provision in the Constitution dealing with religious freedom. The Australian Constitution originated in a socio-political environment where different branches of the Christian church competed strongly for cultural influence.^[33] Rather than enforcing a secular state that excluded public religion, the framers recognised that the community had a religious character—one that would be hindered, not protected, by explicit federal involvement.

As Alex Deagon observes, the historical context of Section 116 was a “general endorsement of religion and a climate of tolerance based on a concern for the advancement of religion.”^[34] The provision—modelled on the American First Amendment—states that the Commonwealth shall not make any law “for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion.”^[35]

It is commonly misread as a secularising provision. It was not.^[36] The Preamble and Section 116 operated together: one affirming the nation’s reliance on Almighty God, the other ensuring no government could interfere with how that reliance was expressed.

The purpose of Section 116 was to limit the power of central government—not the freedom of the church. As Stuart Piggin observes, the reality in Australia from the beginning has been the interdependence of church and state, cooperating to build the nation.^[37]

Dr Nicholas Tonti-Fillipini further explains that “the Australian Constitution does not exclude religious arguments, religious people, or the Churches from public debate. The opposite is true. People are not to have their religious freedom infringed by the state and are to be permitted to express their religious opinions in the public square.” That freedom rests on a foundation deeper than constitutional text.

As Jennifer Marshall writes, religious freedom “is granted not by government but by the Creator”—a right recognising that conscience is answerable to a higher authority than the law of the land, and that in a free society, Christianity is not a threat to good government but its ally.^[38]

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