Christ at the Centre: Christian Political Philosophy and Australia's Forgotten Foundations

A response to the Political Philosophy Masterclass with Dr Christopher Reynolds and Steven Tripp of Australians for Better Government, and an invitation to follow the conversation.

A note to the reader: This is a longer piece than most you will find here. It needs to be. The conversation it responds to, between Dr Christopher Reynolds and Steven Tripp of Australians for Better Government, opens territory that cannot be honestly covered in a short article. Political philosophy, constitutional history, Christian theology, and the question of what kind of society Australia could and should become are not topics that yield to brevity. If you read to the end, I believe you will find it worth the time. If you prefer, the section headings will let you move to whatever draws you most. Either way, I am glad you are here.

Where This Begins

I don’t usually write about conversations. I write about ideas, about the slow machinery of institutions, about the structures that govern our lives often without our full awareness or consent. But occasionally a conversation comes along that does something rarer than inform. It provokes. It pulls you toward questions you’ve been circling for years and asks you to stop circling and sit down.

That happened recently when I watched Steven Tripp of Australians for Better Government sit down with Dr Christopher Reynolds for the opening episode of what promises to be an important series — a Political Philosophy Masterclass. I know both men. Steven is someone I’ve worked alongside closely, and Dr Reynolds is one of those rare people who carries genuine learning without the armour of academic distance. He thinks out loud, and when he does, you want to be in the room.

WHY DO WE NEED A CONSTITUTION? - Political Philosophy Masterclass - With Dr. Christopher Reynolds on ABG YouTube

What struck me watching that conversation wasn’t any single argument. It was the territory they were entering. Political philosophy. The why beneath the what of government. The questions that lawyers in parliament rarely ask and fiscal policy never answers. Why do we form governments at all? What does that say about us? What does it say about what we believe, about God, about human nature, about what a life is worth?

Those are not abstract questions. They are the most practical questions a society can ask. And Australia, I would argue, has largely stopped asking them.

I write as a Christian who holds to the faith of the early apostles and believes that Christ is not one voice among many in this conversation. He is its foundation. That conviction shapes everything that follows, not as a sectarian imposition but as the honest declaration of where I stand and why I believe it matters for every Australian, Christian or not.

A note on method: what follows is not a summary of Dr Reynolds’ views, nor a transcript of the conversation. It is a Christian reflection on the territory he and Steven opened, one that goes deeper into the theological roots than a single conversation can reach. Where I agree with Reynolds I say so. Where I extend the argument beyond what either man said, the conclusions are mine and the responsibility for them is mine alone.

I want to go deeper into that territory here, not to duplicate what Steven and Dr Reynolds began, but to follow the thread they pulled, and trace it back to where I believe it originates. Because underneath the political philosophy, underneath the constitutional architecture, underneath even the language of rights and liberty and representative government, there is a set of convictions that are irreducibly Christian. And understanding that matters, not to score a point for the church — the body of Christ — not to stake a sectarian claim, but because you cannot defend what you do not understand, and you cannot rebuild what you have forgotten how to name.

The Four Questions

Dr Reynolds opens the conversation with something worth pausing on. He suggests that beneath everything humanity has ever written, studied, debated or built, there are only four questions. Four. Everything else, every law, every constitution, every philosophy, every theology, every science, is a response to one of them. In his words: “Anything else that we study, anything else that’s been written, anything else that we do, all the interactions that we have, everything else is a response to, or gives an answer to, one of four questions.”

What is the nature of God? What is the nature of man? What is the nature of society? And what is the meaning of life?

I’ve turned those four questions over since watching that conversation, and the more I sit with them the more convinced I am that they are not parallel questions of equal weight. They are sequential. Each one depends on the answer you give to the one before it. What you believe about God shapes what you believe about man. What you believe about man shapes what you believe about society. And what you believe about society shapes, profoundly and practically, what you believe a human life is worth living for.

This is not a new observation. It is in fact one of the oldest. The Apostle Paul, writing to the church in Rome, makes precisely this point, that the knowledge of God is not locked away in scripture alone but is written into the fabric of creation itself, visible to those willing to see it. - “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made.” (Romans 1:20)

The natural order speaks. The question is whether we are still listening.

What Christianity brought to political thought, and this is the thread Reynolds is pulling on, even when he doesn’t name it explicitly, is the answer that most profoundly shaped Western constitutionalism. Other traditions have grappled with the same questions. The Stoics discussed human dignity. Classical natural law predates Christianity. But it was within the Christian tradition that the particular understanding of human dignity which shaped Western constitutionalism was most fully developed and most forcefully applied.

God is personal, sovereign, and the source of all value. Man is made in his image, Imago Dei, which means every human being carries an intrinsic dignity that no government granted and no government can legitimately remove. Society is the arena in which that dignity is either honoured or violated. And the meaning of life is not comfort, not accumulation, not even survival, it is, as the Greek tradition Reynolds draws on would have it, the pursuit of excellence, of arete, the fullest expression of what God made us to be.

Strip out the Christian answer to the first question and watch what happens to the others. If there is no God, the nature of man becomes a matter of competing definitions, and history shows us clearly who wins those competitions. It is not the poor. It is not the weak. It is not the child.

We have seen this experiment run at scale, and the results are not ambiguous. Stalin’s Soviet Union systematically replaced God with the state as the source of all meaning and value. The church was suppressed, the family subordinated, and human dignity became a function of political usefulness. The Holodomor, the engineered starvation of millions of Ukrainians, was not, in Reynolds’ framework, an accident of policy but the kind of consequence that follows when a system has answered the first question with silence and filled the void with power.

Mao’s Cultural Revolution went further still, Year Zero, the deliberate erasure of every pre-revolutionary source of meaning: family, faith, history, culture. Scholarly estimates for the death toll of the Great Leap Forward range widely, but even the most conservative figures number in the tens of millions.

Pol Pot’s Cambodia killed approximately one in four of his own population. Nazi Germany is often reduced to racial ideology, but at its theological core it was a replacement religion, the state as the sacred, the Führer as the messianic figure, the church either conscripted or crushed. These were not failures of administration. They were the consequences of a particular answer, or a deliberate non-answer, to the question of where human dignity comes from.

But I want to be careful here, because the threat is not only visible in the obvious tyrannies. Unchecked power wearing a democratic costume is just as dangerous, and in some ways more so, because it is harder to name and easier to excuse.

A Contemporary Illustration

What follows is my own extension of Reynolds’ argument into recent experience, the conclusions are mine, not his.

I know this from personal experience. Like many Australians, it was the events of 2020 and 2021 that drove me back to the root of these questions with a new urgency. What I watched during those years was not a government responding proportionately to a genuine crisis. It was something else, the discovery, by governments that had never properly answered Reynolds’ four questions, of just how much power they actually held and how few structural constraints existed to limit it.

State premiers governed by decree for months. In Victoria, a parliament whose entire purpose is to scrutinise executive power recorded just thirteen sitting days across both houses in 2020. Curfews were imposed not through legislation but through a police chief citing a verbal instruction from a premier. When pressed for the legal basis, the answers were vague, then shifting, then simply absent. The Hotel Quarantine system detained Australian citizens, including the elderly, the vulnerable, the mentally ill, in conditions a court would later find wanting, with oversight that was, to put it generously, invisible.

These were not the actions of monsters. That is precisely the point. They were the actions of people operating within a system that had no philosophical floor beneath the exercise of power, no answer to the question of where human dignity comes from that could withstand the pressure of an emergency. When the machinery of democratic government has never been grounded in a coherent account of the nature of man, it turns out to be surprisingly easy to suspend the rights of man in the name of protecting him.

Australia was not alone. In Canada, Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in that country’s history, not against an armed insurrection, but against a convoy of truck drivers exercising what in any honest reading was peaceful protest. Bank accounts were frozen without court order. Donations to a legal protest were seized. It was done democratically, done legally, and done with the full apparatus of a liberal state. The form was democratic. The spirit was something older and less benign.

This is why Reynolds is right to say that political philosophy and theology are not separate disciplines that occasionally borrow from each other. They are, at their roots, the same inquiry. What you believe about God determines what you believe about man. What you believe about man determines how much power you are willing to let a government hold over him. And what you believe about the limits of government determines whether, when the emergency comes, and the emergency always comes, there is anything left standing between the citizen and the state.

Australia has largely stopped asking these questions at the level of governance. And we are, I would argue, only beginning to understand what that costs us.

Human Nature and the Architecture of Government

There is a passage in the Federalist Papers that Dr Reynolds quotes in the conversation, and it is worth sitting with at length. Written by James Madison in 1788, in the period when the framers of the American Constitution were making their case to a sceptical public, it reads: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this, you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” (Federalist No. 51, James Madison, 1788)

Madison was a lawyer, a politician, and a landowner. He was also, by the evidence of his own writing, a man who had thought carefully about the nature of man, and had arrived at a conclusion that is, at its core, thoroughly Augustinian. Men are not angels. They are capable of great good and profound evil, often simultaneously, often in the same act. Power does not change that nature. It reveals it.

To understand why this matters, it helps to know a little about Augustine of Hippo, the fifth-century bishop and theologian whose reflections on human nature, power, and political authority profoundly shaped Western political thought, making him one of the most influential political thinkers in the Western tradition. Writing in the shadow of Rome’s collapse, Augustine drew a distinction between two kinds of society operating simultaneously in the world.

The City of Man, built on the love of self, the will to dominate, the appetite for power, and the City of God, built on the love of God and neighbour. He was not naive about which city most human institutions most naturally resemble. Government, in Augustine’s framework, is a necessary restraint on the worst of the City of Man. It is not the source of human flourishing. It is the fence around human destructiveness. It is good insofar as it limits evil. It becomes evil the moment it mistakes itself for good.

Whether or not Madison read Augustine directly, and the evidence is suggestive rather than conclusive, the Augustinian understanding of human nature ran through the intellectual tradition he did demonstrably absorb. Madison studied at Princeton under John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister whose moral philosophy carried the full weight of Reformed and Calvinist thought on human depravity and the necessity of limited government. That tradition is itself deeply Augustinian in its bones. The framers of the American Constitution were, with few exceptions, men formed by both classical learning and a Christian theological framework, even where that framework was held with varying degrees of orthodoxy.

When they designed a system of checks and balances, separating executive, legislative and judicial power, setting ambition against ambition, building friction into the machinery of government, they were not being cynical about democracy. They were being honest about humanity. They were encoding into constitutional architecture a Christian understanding of man, a doctrine that takes seriously both his dignity and his fallenness.

This is the insight that Reynolds is drawing on when he reads that passage aloud. And it is the insight that Australia’s constitutional settlement largely failed to incorporate.

Our system was not designed with Madison’s question in mind. It was designed, as Reynolds notes, to protect the continuity of responsible government, the monarchical tradition, and to safeguard the financial interests of British capital invested in the colonies. The question of how government controls itself, how power is structurally prevented from expanding beyond its proper limits, was not the animating concern. Convention would handle it. Tradition would hold. The right sort of people would be in charge.

That faith in convention, in tradition, in the right sort of people, it is not without merit in a stable society with a shared moral framework. But it rests on an assumption about human nature that history repeatedly refuses to honour. The right sort of people, given enough power and enough pressure and enough ideological cover, have done terrible things. We established that in the previous section. The question is not whether good people exist. The question is whether your system of government is designed to function when they don’t.

The Apostle Paul puts it with characteristic directness:

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23)

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a design specification. A society that builds its institutions on the assumption of human perfectibility will be repeatedly and brutally surprised. A society that builds its institutions on an honest account of human nature, one that takes seriously both the Imago Dei and the reality of the fall, has at least the architectural possibility of limiting the damage that fallen men in powerful positions can do.

This is what Madison understood. This is what the framers built. And this is what Reynolds is pointing toward when he says that if you don’t understand human nature, you are not in a position to design a society that reflects humanity or your faith in God.

Australia has a constitution. What it has never quite had is a constitutional philosophy, a coherent, articulated account of why the structures exist, what they are protecting, and what vision of the human person they are built to serve. We inherited the machinery without the manual. And when the machinery is under pressure, when the emergency comes, when the premiers reach for the decree, when the parliament stops sitting, there is nothing in the foundations to push back. No angels. No Augustine. No Madison. Just power, and the convention that it will restrain itself.

It hasn’t always. It won’t always. And we should have known that from the beginning.

What Locke Actually Said — and Where It Came From

When Dr Reynolds mentions John Locke in the conversation, he does so almost in passing, as one of the English philosophers standing behind what the American framers were writing and understanding. But Locke deserves more than a passing mention, because he is the bridge between the theological convictions of the Christian tradition and the constitutional language that the modern world has largely forgotten how to trace back to its source.

John Locke was not a secular thinker who happened to use religious language. He was a deeply serious Christian, influenced by the tradition of natural law theology that runs from Aquinas through the Reformation, who believed that the rights of man were not philosophical abstractions but theological facts. They derived not from the generosity of kings, not from social contracts negotiated between equals, not from the progressive development of civilisation. They derived from God. They were, in the language that would eventually find its way into the American Declaration of Independence, inalienable, incapable of being surrendered or removed, because they were not humanity’s to give away in the first place.

Locke’s foundational argument in his Two Treatises of Government is worth stating plainly, because it has been so thoroughly laundered through secular political theory that most people encounter only the conclusions without the premises. His argument is this, human beings are the workmanship of God. We belong to our Maker, not to ourselves, and certainly not to any earthly ruler. Because we are God’s property, no man has the right to destroy, enslave or arbitrarily dispose of another. The right to life is not a legal convention. It is a theological boundary. To take a life without just cause is not merely a crime against the victim. It is an act of profound presumption against God.

From that foundation Locke derives the rest. Liberty, the freedom to govern oneself according to the law of nature, which is the law of God, is not a privilege extended by government. It is the natural condition of a creature made in the image of a free God. Property, the fruit of one’s labour, the extension of one’s will into the material world, carries a dignity that government exists to protect, not to redistribute at will. And the pursuit of happiness, which Reynolds rightly traces back to the Greek eudaimonia and the concept of arete, the pursuit of excellence, is not the licence to do whatever one pleases. It is the God-given calling to become fully what one was made to be.

Reynolds makes the point in the conversation that these rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are written into the American Declaration of Independence by men who knew what they were talking about, that these were God-given inalienable rights. He is correct. It is worth noting, for precision, that Locke's original formulation named three: life, liberty and property. It was Thomas Jefferson who, drawing on Locke and the Greek philosophical tradition Reynolds traces back to eudaimonia and arete, adapted that triad into the Declaration's famous phrase.

The substitution of the pursuit of happiness for property was not a softening of the argument. It was a deliberate theological and philosophical expansion, pointing not toward comfort or accumulation, but toward the fullest flourishing of a person made in God's image. Reynolds understands this, and so did Jefferson. But I want to press that point a little further, because I think it matters enormously for where Australia finds itself today

The language of rights, the language that underpins every serious conversation about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the protection of the individual against the state, did not originate in a secular Enlightenment that had moved beyond Christianity. It was carried into the Enlightenment from the Christian natural law tradition, most powerfully through Locke himself, who was both an Enlightenment figure and a serious Christian theologian. The two were not opposites in his hands.

But as the Enlightenment developed, later thinkers increasingly detached the language of rights from its theological premises, keeping the conclusions while quietly discarding the foundations that made them coherent. That detachment did not strengthen the case for rights. It hollowed it out. Rights without a transcendent grounding are not rights at all. They are preferences, and preferences can be overridden, renegotiated, suspended in an emergency, redefined by a court, or simply legislated away by a parliament that has never been told it cannot.

This is precisely what the Apostle John captures in the prologue to his Gospel:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.” (John 1:1, 4)

The Logos, the rational ordering principle of all creation, is not an abstraction. It is a person. And it is from that person that human dignity, human freedom, and the architecture of a just society ultimately derive their meaning and their force. To put it plainly, if you want to know why freedom matters, why life is sacred, why the state cannot simply do whatever it wishes to the people it governs, the answer is not found in a parliamentary act or a legal convention. It is found in the one who said “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Australia inherited the language of rights without fully inheriting the theology beneath it. We speak of freedoms, and then discover, when the pressure comes, that no one can quite say where they come from or who is obliged to protect them. We assumed the floor was there. We never built it.

Locke would not have been surprised. Madison would not have been surprised. And any Christian who has thought carefully about what it means to be made in the image of God should not be surprised either. You cannot maintain a structure whose foundations you have forgotten how to name. And you cannot defend a freedom whose source you have been persuaded to be embarrassed about.

The Pursuit of Excellence

There is a moment in the conversation where Dr Reynolds says something that I suspect caught more than a few viewers off guard. He is talking about the God-given inalienable rights enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The phrase itself traces back to Locke's triad of life, liberty and property, adapted by Jefferson into language that carries both Lockean natural law and the Greek philosophical tradition Reynolds is about to unpack. And when he gets to that last phrase, he pauses.

The pursuit of happiness, he says, doesn’t mean what we think it means. In his own words: “The pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of excellence. Arete. So the pursuit of excellence itself becomes a virtue. The highest of virtues is the pursuit of excellence which is to be good at what you can do. It’s an achievement thing. It’s a self-satisfaction thing, I’ve reached happiness because I’ve achieved something.”

In the Greek philosophical tradition that sits beneath so much of Western thought, and Reynolds is careful to draw this thread, the word translated as happiness is eudaimonia. And eudaimonia is not the feeling of being content. It is not comfort, or pleasure, or the absence of suffering. It is something far more demanding and far more dignified than any of those things. It is the state of a person who is fully flourishing, who is becoming, through effort and virtue and the exercise of their God-given capacities, the most complete version of what they were made to be.

The Greek word at the heart of that concept is arete, excellence. Not excellence in the competitive sense of beating others, but excellence in the deepest sense of fulfilling one’s nature. The pursuit of happiness, understood rightly, is the pursuit of excellence. It is anti-apathetic by definition. It demands participation, effort, creativity, growth. It is the opposite of the passive consumer model of human life that much of modern Western culture quietly promotes.

To put it in plain terms, the framers of the American Constitution were not enshrining your right to sit on the couch. They were enshrining your right to become someone. To build something. To exercise the gifts and capacities that God placed in you without a government, a class system, or an accident of birth permanently standing in your way.

This is a profoundly Christian idea, even though it arrives to us dressed in Greek philosophical clothing. The parable of the talents in Matthew 25 makes the same argument in theological terms. The servants who take what they have been given and multiply it through effort and risk are commended. The servant who buries his talent in the ground, who plays it safe, who opts for comfort over growth, who mistakes the preservation of what he has for faithfulness, is rebuked. The Christian life, in this reading, is not passive. It is the active, disciplined, courageous pursuit of what we were made for.

Reynolds makes the point that the pursuit of excellence is itself a virtue, the highest of virtues in this framework. And when you hold that alongside the Christian understanding of vocation, the idea that every person is called by God to a particular kind of work and service and becoming, the two traditions reinforce each other powerfully. You are not an accident. You are not merely an economic unit. You are not the sum of your productivity or your political usefulness. You are a creature made in the image of a creative God, endowed with particular gifts, and called to the excellence of their full expression.

This has direct implications for how we think about government. A government that understands the pursuit of happiness in this sense, as the pursuit of excellence, of full human flourishing, will build very different institutions than one that understands happiness as the absence of discomfort. The first builds conditions for freedom, for ownership, for education, for opportunity, for the removal of arbitrary barriers between a person and their potential. The second builds a managed society, comfortable, dependent, and slowly diminishing.

We should be honest about which direction Australia has been drifting.

The Apostle Paul captures something of this tension in his letter to the Philippians:

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)

In its original context this is not, as it is sometimes read, a promise of miraculous intervention in every circumstance. It is a statement about the sufficiency of divine strength in the pursuit of what God has called us to, including suffering, hardship, and the kind of disciplined striving that excellence requires. It is, in its own way, a theological account of arete. The Christian life is not the easy life. It is the excellent one.

A society that builds its political philosophy on that understanding of human capacity and human calling will look very different from one that has quietly abandoned the question altogether. Reynolds is pointing toward that difference. The conversation he and Steven Tripp are beginning is, in part, an invitation to recover it.

What Australia Was — and Wasn’t — Built On

Dr Reynolds says something in the conversation that I think deserves to be heard clearly, because it cuts against a narrative that well-meaning Christians, and I count myself among them, can be tempted to reach for too quickly.

Australia, he says, was never meant to be a democracy. His words in the conversation are worth quoting directly: “I’ve been told and I think I can’t find a democratic phrase in our constitution. It wasn’t set up that we should become a democracy. Democracy was considered a dirty word, republicanism was a dirty word at the time when we had our constitution written.”

Not in the Christian democratic sense. Not in the Lockean sense. Not in the sense that the American founders meant when they spoke of God-given inalienable rights, of government deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed, of a people declaring themselves sovereign before God and one another. Our constitution contains no democratic principle in that sense. It doesn’t mention a Prime Minister. It has no Bill of Rights. It was not a declaration of independence or of sovereignty. It was, in legal terms, another act of the British Parliament, carrying no greater constitutional weight than the legislation that had governed each of the colonies individually. We did not declare ourselves a people. We were administered into a federation.

To understand what this means, it helps to follow three Latin terms that Reynolds uses in the conversation. They trace the legal and moral journey of the land itself, and explain why Australia’s constitutional foundations differ so fundamentally from America’s.

Terra nullius — nobody’s land. This was the legal fiction used to justify British sovereignty over Australia. It declared, in effect, that the continent had no prior sovereign, no existing system of law, no people with a recognised claim to the land. It was not true. It was known to be not true by many who deployed it.

Terra regius — the king’s land. This is what Australia became when sovereignty was declared. Where the king went, the king’s law went. Where the king’s law went, the king’s army, the king’s justice, and, it must be said, the king’s protection also went. Reynolds notes that we still have Crown land today as a direct legal remnant of this settlement. The land was never transferred to the people. It remained the Crown’s.

Terra populii — the people’s land. This is the destination Australia never quite reached. It is the concept that animates the American founding, “We the people”, the declaration that sovereignty resides in the people themselves, derived not from conquest or royal grant but from God. It is the Lockean principle given constitutional flesh. And it is precisely what was absent from the Australian settlement of 1901.

The animating concerns of those who wrote our constitution were, Reynolds argues, primarily two, the preservation of the Westminster system of responsible government, and the protection of British financial interests in the colonies. The privy council sat over everything as a final check. Not the people. Not God. The Crown, and the capital behind it.

This is important to name honestly. Because the Christian instinct, and it is a good instinct, is to look for the hand of God in the founding of this nation, and it is there. But it is there in ways that are more complex, more compromised, and more interesting than a simple narrative of Christian nationhood allows.

Christians were among those who enforced terra nullius and the injustices that followed. Christians were also among those who resisted it, who established missions, who advocated for First Nations peoples in London when colonial governments would not, who kept records of languages and cultures that might otherwise have been entirely lost. The picture is not clean. It never is when fallen men carry even genuine faith into the exercise of power.

But here is what Reynolds points to that I think is genuinely important and genuinely Christian, the letters patent. When King George established the colony, the foundational document of British authority in this land included a remarkable instruction. The king declared the native peoples of this land to be his subjects, his people, and instructed that where the Crown went, the Crown’s protection went also. They were not to be enslaved. They were not to be sold. They were, in the legal framework of the time, persons under the king’s protection. This was not consistently honoured. But it was written. And it was written by men operating within a tradition, the Christian tradition of the sanctity of the human person, that made such a declaration possible in the first place.

The gift of land to convicts tells a similar story. In England, you could not own land unless you were wealthy. Land belonged to the church or the Crown. The mass of people were tenants on someone else’s property, their labour extracted, their dignity contingent on the goodwill of those above them. In this new country, the Crown gave land to people who had been transported for stealing bread. Second chances, written into the founding settlement. The Imago Dei, the dignity of every person as a bearer of God’s image, breaking through the surface of an imperial project that in other respects was thoroughly self-interested.

At the time of Federation, approximately 96 percent of Australians identified as Christian. That is not a peripheral fact. It means the cultural substrate from which Australia’s founding values drew their nourishment, the hospitals, the schools, the charitable networks, the assumption of human dignity, the concept of the fair go, was overwhelmingly formed by people who, however imperfectly, had been shaped by the Christian story. The ethos worked, broadly and imperfectly, because the culture that carried it was broadly and imperfectly Christian.

That figure today sits at just under 44 percent, and falling.

Much of that shift reflects genuine and freely made reconsideration of faith by individuals across generations. That must be acknowledged honestly. But the assumption that the decline is entirely organic, that it is simply what happens when a modern educated population is left to think freely, deserves scrutiny. Because as I have documented in detail elsewhere on this platform, the institutions, laws, and cultural norms that once carried Christian values in the public square have not simply been left alone to evolve.

They have been the deliberate target of coordinated, well-resourced, institutionally sophisticated campaigns operating over decades. The same international philanthropic network that helped reshape Australia’s sex discrimination law in 2013 is now systematically targeting the religious exemptions that allow Christian schools and organisations to remain distinctively Christian. I have traced that pipeline in detail in Who Funds the Redefinition of Sex? and Who Targets the Church? None of it required a conspiracy. It required only sustained, coordinated, well-resourced advocacy operating through institutional channels over time.

The point is this, the cultural retreat of Christianity in Australia has not occurred in a neutral environment. It has occurred in an environment that has been actively shaped by forces with a clear and documented interest in that retreat. Christians who understand this are not paranoid. They are paying attention.

The problem is not that Christianity failed Australia. The problem is that Australia’s constitutional settlement never adequately incorporated what Christianity, at its most serious and most honest, actually has to say about the nature of man, the limits of power, and the source of human dignity. We got some of the fruit without planting the tree. And now, several generations on, we are discovering that fruit does not grow indefinitely from roots you have forgotten to tend.

Reynolds is not calling for a theocracy. Neither am I. What he is calling for, what this conversation is an invitation toward, is a recovery of the philosophical foundations without which a free society cannot sustain itself. A constitution that answers his four questions. A bill of rights that knows where rights come from. A form of government that has read Madison and Augustine and means it.

We have not had that. We could. The question is whether we still have the philosophical vocabulary, and the moral seriousness, to build it.

Where Godless Systems End Up

Dr Reynolds is generous toward Karl Marx in the conversation, and I think rightly so. He describes him as a great mind, a serious philosopher, a man of genuine passion whose analysis of labour and value was not to be dismissed. The Communist Manifesto, Reynolds notes, is a remarkable piece of writing, urgent, morally charged, driven by real outrage at real suffering. Marx looked at the industrialising world of the nineteenth century, at the conditions in which working people lived and died, at the vast machinery of capital extracting wealth from human bodies, and he was angry. That anger was not without justification.

But Reynolds identifies something in Marx’s framework worth examining closely. The moment Marx sets up his central dualism, the proletariat as pure, righteous and deserving, the bourgeoisie as corrupt, destructive and evil, he has made a theological statement. Reynolds puts it plainly in the conversation: “The moment you see he set up that dualism of good and evil, it’s a religious statement isn’t it? See, the moment, how do you define good and evil?” He has divided the world into good and evil. And the moment you do that, the question that cannot be avoided is this, on what basis? By whose authority? According to what standard that exists outside the system itself and cannot be manipulated by whoever holds power within it?

Marx’s answer, whether he fully acknowledged it or not, was that he knew. That the philosopher, the vanguard, the party, the enlightened ones, could identify good and evil by the criterion of economic position. It was a neat division. It was also, as Reynolds notes, a religious statement dressed in the language of science and history.

To put this in plain terms, every system of government, every political philosophy, every constitution, is ultimately making a claim about good and evil. It cannot avoid doing so. The question is not whether your system of government has a moral framework. The question is where that moral framework comes from and whether it can bear the weight of power without collapsing into the interests of whoever happens to be holding it.

The Christian tradition has a name for the particular error Marx made, and that every godless system eventually makes. It is the error of believing that fallen human beings can define good and evil for themselves, by their own reasoning, without reference to a standard that stands above them and judges them. Reynolds gestures toward this in the conversation when he connects it to what he calls a Luciferian concept, the individual, or the collective, or the state, arrogating to itself the authority that belongs to God alone.

This is not merely a theological abstraction. It is a design flaw with predictable consequences.

When the Soviet Union declared the church an enemy of the people and set about replacing God with the state as the source of all meaning and value, it did not create a vacuum. It created a substitute religion, complete with its own sacred texts, its own priesthood of party officials, its own heretics and show trials and inquisitions, its own vision of a workers’ paradise perpetually arriving and never quite here. The forms of religion were preserved. The content, the transcendent standard, the God who stands above the state and judges it, was removed. What remained was power, dressed in the language of liberation.

Mao understood this instinctively. The Cultural Revolution was not simply a political purge. It was a religious reformation, the systematic destruction of every competing source of meaning and loyalty. Family. Faith. History. Culture. Education. Art. All of it was subordinated to the revolution, because all of it represented a potential claim on human loyalty that did not pass through the party. When you remove the God who made man in his image, you do not free man. You simply transfer ownership of him to whoever is strong enough to claim him.

This is the pattern. It repeats. And it repeats not because these systems were implemented badly or led by unusually wicked people, though some of them were, but because the logical structure of a system that answers Reynolds’ first question with silence or with the state will always tend toward this destination. Remove the transcendent source of human dignity and dignity becomes negotiable. Make dignity negotiable and power will negotiate it downward, always, in the direction of the powerful.

The twentieth century is the laboratory in which this experiment was run at scale. The results are in. Conservative scholarly estimates, drawing on sources including the Black Book of Communism and subsequent academic work, place deaths directly attributable to Marxist-Leninist governance across the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and their satellite states somewhere between eighty and one hundred million. These were not deaths caused by war or famine alone, though war and famine were among the instruments. They were deaths caused by systems that had answered Reynolds’ four questions in a particular way and then acted consistently on those answers.

But I want to return to something Reynolds says in the conversation that I think is the most searching point of all. He asks, where do you get your values from? Not your laws. Not your policies. Your values. The things that make you say this matters and that doesn’t. This is worth protecting and that can be sacrificed. This person counts and that one doesn’t. Reynolds puts it directly: “Where do you get values from? And even a sense of hope, of faith, of future, where does it all go? If life just ends at the age of 75 and it keeps returning over, why bother?”

Without a transcendent source, without the God who made every person in his image and therefore placed a value on every person that no earthly power can legitimately override, values do not disappear. They are simply captured by whoever holds power. And whoever holds power will, being human and therefore fallen, tend to define value in ways that serve their interests.

This is not cynicism. It is Augustine. It is Madison. It is the consistent testimony of scripture and history simultaneously.

“Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save.” (Psalm 146:3)

The Psalmist is not being politically naive. He is being architecturally precise. A society that places its ultimate trust in human power, however democratically organised, however well intentioned, has built on sand. The emergency will come. And the question of what remains standing will be answered not by the sophistication of the system but by the depth of the foundations.

Reynolds and Tripp are not calling for a theocracy. Neither is this article. What they are pointing toward, and what I believe the Christian community in Australia needs to engage with seriously and urgently, is the recovery of the philosophical foundations that make a genuinely free society possible. Not the imposition of faith. The recovery of the reasoning that faith alone has historically been able to sustain.

Godless systems do not produce freedom. They produce, with remarkable consistency, the opposite. And the democratic systems that quietly abandon their theological foundations do not immediately collapse. They drift. They hollow out. They discover, one emergency at a time, that the floor they assumed was there was never properly built.

We are not immune. We have never been immune. And the conversation that Steven Tripp and Dr Reynolds have begun is, among other things, an invitation to stop pretending otherwise.

The Questions This Raises For Us

I want to be honest about something before I close.

It would be easy to read everything in this article as an argument about other people. About godless systems and their inevitable failures. About framers and philosophers and the founders of constitutions written in other countries in other centuries. About politicians who have forgotten how to ask the right questions and premiers who reached for power when the emergency came. About a constitutional settlement that was never properly grounded and a parliament that has never properly read Madison or Augustine or understood what they were building toward.

It would be easy. And it would be a way of avoiding the harder question, which is what any of this requires of us. Of me. Of the Christian community in Australia right now.

Dr Reynolds and Steven Tripp have begun a conversation that I believe is one of the most important conversations available to Australians at this moment. Not because it is politically convenient. Not because it offers easy answers. But because it is asking the right questions, the four questions that Reynolds identifies as sitting beneath everything else we study, debate and build. And those questions will not be answered by government. They never have been. They never will be.

Most people, including many Christians, have quietly come to believe that government is the answer. That if we could just get the right party in power, the right policy through parliament, the right judge on the bench, things would improve. And I understand that instinct. I have felt it myself. But it is, I think, a form of misplaced faith, and it produces exactly the kind of passive, reactive citizenship that Reynolds is implicitly critiquing when he talks about parliaments overrun by lawyers and fiscal policy crowding out every serious question about why we are doing any of this at all.

Government is not the answer. But abandoning the field of government is not faithfulness. It is abdication. And the Christian community in Australia has, I would argue, been abdicating for long enough.

So let me ask some questions rather than issue some demands, because I think the questions are more honest and more useful than the declarations.

What would it look like for Christian pastors and priests and ministers, across all traditions, across all denominations, to recover the moral courage that this moment requires? Not the courage to be partisan. Not the courage to endorse a party or wave a flag. But the courage to stand in their pulpits and name, plainly and without apology, the things that are socially destructive. The erosion of freedom. The redefinition of the human person. The quiet dismantling of the foundations that make a just and free society possible. The silence of the church on these questions is not neutrality. It has never been neutrality. It is a choice, and it is a choice with consequences that are now visible in the culture around us.

And let me be direct about something that should sharpen the urgency of that call. The declining Christian presence in Australian public life, from approximately 96 percent at Federation to under 44 percent today, is not simply the story of people freely walking away from faith. As I documented in Section 6, and in fuller detail in Who Targets the Church?, the forces reshaping our culture are not abstract. They are documented, resourced, and coordinated. The church has been a deliberate target. That is the context in which the call to moral courage must be heard.

This is not a counsel of fear. It is a call to clarity. You cannot respond faithfully to a challenge you have not honestly named.

“You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” (Matthew 5:13)

What would it look like for Christians to be genuinely upstream of the political process, not just voting, but actively working to see godly men and women preselected within existing parties, or encouraged and supported to stand as independents? The problem with Australian politics is not only that bad people hold power. It is that good people, people with the theological formation, the moral seriousness, and the genuine concern for the common good that this moment requires, have too often decided that the arena is too dirty, too compromising, too discouraging to enter. And so the field has been left to those who have no such formation and no such concern. We do not get to complain about the harvest if we have refused to plant.

What would it look like for Christians in every electorate to vote not by habit, not by tribe, not by economic self-interest alone, but as a moral act, as an expression of what we actually believe about the nature of man, the source of human dignity, and the purpose of government? The vote is not just a civic mechanism. In a democracy that has any remaining connection to its theological roots, it is an act of stewardship. We will give an account of it.

And what would it look like, and this is the longest and most patient work of all, for the Christian community to work together toward the kind of constitutional and philosophical reformation that this country has never quite managed? Toward a terra populii, a people’s land, a sovereign people under God, rather than the terra regius we have quietly inhabited since 1788? Not a theocracy. Not the imposition of faith on those who do not share it. But a recovery of the foundations, the Lockean, the Madisonian, the Augustinian, the deeply and irreducibly Christian foundations, without which genuine freedom cannot be sustained and genuine justice cannot be done.

At the centre of that foundation is not an ideology or a party or even a constitution. It is a person. Three persons in eternal communion, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the triune God whose own nature is the pattern of all just, relational, non-tyrannical authority. The Trinity is not a theological curiosity reserved for Sunday school. It is the answer to the question that every political philosopher from Aristotle to Madison has been circling, how do you have genuine unity without the erasure of the individual? How do you have genuine authority without tyranny? How do you have genuine freedom without chaos?

The answer, for the Christian, is not a system. It is a relationship. And every just human institution is, however partially and imperfectly, a reflection of that relational order.

I did not name this platform Faith Culture Politics by my own design. If I am honest, it was named by a prompting I can only attribute to God. A conviction, planted quietly and grown slowly, that the sequence mattered. That you could not understand the crisis in our politics without understanding the crisis in our culture. And that you could not understand the crisis in our culture without returning to the question of faith, the Christian faith, as the headwaters of everything that flows from it.

Faith. Culture. Politics. The name is the argument. And I believe God placed it there before I fully understood what I was being asked to build, a platform that has in turn shaped my own thinking, deepened my investigations, and continues to grow me as I write. Politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from faith. And faith, the Christian faith, the faith that holds together the nature of God and the nature of man and the nature of society and the meaning of life in a single coherent vision, is where renewal begins. Always has been. Always will be.

Get the theology right and the culture begins to heal. Get the culture right and the politics follows. This is not a guarantee of easy victories or quick results. The Christian calling has never promised those. It promises something better and harder, the calling to be salt and light in every sphere. In the pulpit. In the party room. In the polling booth. In the long, patient, Spirit-led work of cultural and constitutional renewal.

I am genuinely looking forward to seeing where Dr Reynolds and Steven Tripp take this conversation over the coming fortnights. What makes this series particularly worth following is not just the depth of knowledge Dr Reynolds brings to it, a lifelong Christian whose faith is not incidental to his scholarship but foundational to it, the lens through which he reads history, law, philosophy and the nature of man. It is the dynamic between the two men. Tripp, by his own account, approaches these questions as an agnostic, genuinely open, genuinely searching, and willing to ask the hard questions without pre-loaded answers. That combination of settled conviction and honest inquiry is rarer than it should be in public discourse. It makes for a conversation worth watching carefully, and I would argue, worth watching whether you share Reynolds’ faith, Tripp’s openness, or find yourself somewhere between the two.

The Political Philosophy Masterclass series, working through the great questions of political philosophy with seriousness, historical depth, and the kind of intellectual honesty that our political culture so badly needs, is exactly the kind of contribution this moment in Australia’s history calls for. I encourage you to follow it, engage with it, and share it widely. And if you haven’t yet encountered Dr Reynolds’ book What a Capital Idea, I commend it to you. Likewise, the work of Australians for Better Government deserves your attention and your support.

Reynolds and Tripp are doing their part. The question the Holy Spirit is pressing on all of us, on me, on you, on every Christian who has read this far, is whether we will do ours.

I believe, by the grace of God, that we can. I believe, by the grace of God, that we must.

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10)

Until next time.

God bless.

Mark Neugebauer