What Christians Built, and What We’re Losing

Poverty, Institutions, and the Slow Retreat of Belonging

A FIVE-PART SERIES

Part Four of Five

Part One traced Fabian socialism from Shaw’s 1931 newsreel to its long, publicly acknowledged relationship with the Australian Labor Party. Part Two showed what that inheritance looks like inside Labor’s own institutions and unions. Part Three measured what it costs, in tax, debt and a state that grows without a vote. Part Four turns to the Christian tradition’s own answer to the question underneath all three: what Christians in Australia actually built, long before any of this was asked of them, and what of that inheritance may now be quietly slipping away.

Christianity did not need socialism to discover the poor

A Christian criticism of Fabian socialism becomes hollow if it sounds like indifference to poverty, disability, illness or economic exploitation, Christianity did not need socialism to discover the poor. The command to care for the widow, orphan, stranger, sick and hungry runs throughout Scripture. The early Church did not treat such care as a peripheral activity; Christians established organised forms of assistance for widows, orphans, travellers, prisoners, the sick and the poor. St Basil the Great’s fourth-century charitable complex at Caesarea remains one prominent example of this tradition.

An Orthodox social-ethos document, For the Life of the World, begins with the understanding that every human person is created in the image and likeness of God. It calls Christians to recognise that image in every person and speaks directly of obligations towards the poor, weak, displaced and disabled.

The Christian response to suffering arose from a fundamentally different starting point. The poor person was not valuable because he contributed to economic output. The sick person was not cared for only because she might return to productivity. The person with a disability did not need to justify the cost of his existence. Each bore the image of God.

Australia’s present charity sector retains something of this inheritance. The Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission reports that “religion and faith-based spirituality” remains the most commonly reported charity activity category, followed by human services and education. That classification should not be confused with a measure of direct poverty relief, but it demonstrates that religious institutions remain a substantial part of organised Australian civil society.

This should not become an exercise in Christian self-congratulation. Church institutions have failed people. Religious organisations can become bureaucratic, self-protective or overly dependent upon government funding. Christians can speak passionately about limited government while doing very little personally for those in need.

The person who says, “Government should not be doing this,” must be willing to answer another question: what am I doing? Am I serving, giving, visiting the lonely, helping the family in distress, supporting the person with a disability, strengthening the church, charity or community organisation that might carry responsibility more personally and locally?

Fabianism may rightly confront Christians, including me, when concern for economic freedom becomes an excuse for neglecting the neighbour.

The Christian alternative to Fabian socialism is not a society in which government does nothing. It is a social order in which human beings are understood first as persons made in the image of God, then as members of families and communities with real obligations to one another, and only then as clients of institutions or citizens of the state.

Government has legitimate work to do, sometimes work that no family, church or local community could carry alone. But its proper task should ordinarily be to support human responsibility, not quietly replace it. Christian tradition has a name for this ordering, subsidiarity, the principle that a higher authority exists to assist smaller communities in carrying their own responsibilities, not to absorb those responsibilities from them.

The disagreement is not whether the vulnerable matter

The deepest disagreement between Christianity and Fabian socialism is not whether society should care for vulnerable people. The disagreement concerns why they possess value, who bears responsibility for them and what limits should govern institutions claiming to act on their behalf.

For the Christian, human dignity is not earned, it is not granted by government, it does not depend upon independence, intelligence, health, economic contribution, social approval or the ability to make autonomous choices. This becomes especially important at the edges of life.

An unborn child cannot demonstrate productivity.

A person with profound disability may require lifelong care.

A patient with dementia may no longer be able to express autonomous preferences.

An elderly person nearing death may need care that costs far more than he could ever repay.

Under a purely utilitarian calculation, each may appear burdensome. Within Christianity, dependency does not reduce human worth; in fact, dependency reveals something true about every person.

No one is entirely self-created, no one survives infancy through autonomy, no one produces without first receiving, and no one remains permanently independent of family, community, inheritance, creation and God.

The perfectly self-sufficient individual is as much an abstraction as the perfectly manageable society.

The Institutions Christians Built, and May Be Losing

That inheritance is not only a theological claim. It has a visible, institutional history in Australia.

It would be inaccurate to suggest that Christians in Australia failed to build enduring institutions. From the earliest decades of settlement, churches, religious orders and Christian communities established schools, hospitals, orphanages, charities, aged-care services and organisations for the poor, sick and abandoned. They did not wait for the modern welfare state to discover social responsibility.

I live in South Australia, where in 1866 Mary MacKillop and Father Julian Tenison Woods began the Sisters of Saint Joseph at Penola with a very practical purpose: educating children from poor families who could not otherwise afford schooling. They did not begin with a theory of state administration. They saw children who needed something, formed a community, and built.

Christians were not the only people who built social institutions in Australia, mutual societies, unions, secular charities and governments did too. The narrower and more defensible claim is that institutional care for the poor did not have to wait for the modern welfare state, and Christians were major participants in building it.

Many of these institutions were built through sacrifice. Religious sisters and brothers served in hospitals and classrooms for little material reward. Churches raised funds from communities that were themselves far from wealthy. Parents and congregations built schools because they understood education as more than the transfer of information. It was also the formation of character, conscience and a view of the human person.

These institutions were not perfect. They could fail, become insular or protect themselves rather than those they were meant to serve. Christian institutions are built by fallen people and require the same accountability as any other. But their existence challenges the claim that organised concern for poverty, health and education arrived in Australia primarily through socialist politics or expanded government.

The more difficult question is whether Christians have faithfully defended and renewed what earlier generations built. Over time, Fabian and other socialist and secular-progressive currents have influenced Australian political, educational and professional life in different ways. It is not necessary to allege that these influences operated through one coordinated plan. Ideas can accumulate across institutions without every participant sharing the same motive or even recognising the intellectual history behind them.

One particularly influential idea has been a form of egalitarianism that moves beyond equal human dignity and equal protection before the law, principles Christianity can affirm without reservation. The tension begins when equality is interpreted to mean that institutions must progressively erase moral, religious and cultural distinctions that government regards as exclusionary.

A defender of the welfare state could reasonably answer that public provision has often protected precisely those people whom a market, an overwhelmed family or an indifferent community might otherwise neglect. Disability support, universal healthcare, aged care and emergency assistance can express a society’s refusal to measure human beings solely by economic productivity.

Christians should acknowledge that rather than pretend otherwise. My question is narrower. When public provision becomes the default answer to more and more human needs, does it strengthen the relationships and institutions closest to the person, or can it gradually make their responsibility appear unnecessary?

The examples that follow are offered in that spirit, not as an argument against government provision as such, but as a question about what it costs when provision becomes the default.

This is not hypothetical. In 2023, the ACT’s Labor-Greens government compulsorily acquired Calvary Public Hospital from the Little Company of Mary, the Catholic order that had run it since 1979, after a parliamentary inquiry into abortion and reproductive choice found it “problematic” that a major hospital’s “overriding religious ethos” restricted the services it would provide. The Sisters lost the hospital; taxpayers paid $88.2 million to settle it.

In federal parliament, the Greens’ Discrimination Free Schools Bill, first introduced by Senator Janet Rice in 2018, sought to remove the exemptions that let religious schools make employment decisions consistent with their faith, not only for students, but for the teachers and staff who work in them.

In South Australia, Greens MLC Robert Simms introduced a state equivalent in 2024, going further than even the state government’s own 2020–21 reforms had been willing to go by targeting the exemption that lets Christian schools hire staff who share their beliefs about marriage and gender. Neither bill has passed. The pressure has not stopped.

The evidentiary basis for the SA bill is itself traceable. Simms cited a report by Equality Australia, titled Dismissed, Denied and Demeaned, in the parliamentary speech introducing it. I traced the funding architecture behind that report, an American philanthropic foundation, an international coordinating body and an Australian advocacy organisation, in full in Who Funds the Redefinition of Sex? The question that matters here is narrower than who funded whom. It is what happens to a religious institution’s autonomy when a secular standard becomes the condition under which it may continue to operate as religious.

These are not isolated incidents. The inaugural Australian Christian Freedom Index, published in May 2026 by the Canberra Declaration, surveyed 10,808 Christians and conducted a legislative audit alongside it. Its legislative audit identifies 74 Acts of parliament passed over the past 25 years that the report classifies as restricting Christian freedom, almost half of them in the last five years alone, roughly triple the rate of the two decades before. Among its 10,808 Christian respondents, 92 per cent said it is riskier to publicly affirm Christian belief in Australia than it was five years ago.

The report’s most striking finding may be what it calls the “silence gap”: 73 per cent said they had felt pressured to keep their beliefs to themselves, while only 25 per cent said they had actually been denied an opportunity because of them. The chilling effect is running well ahead of the formal discrimination that would justify it. Christian healthcare specifically, the domain that includes Calvary, was rated free by only 8 per cent of respondents.

As a self-selecting survey of Christians, the Index does not claim to represent all Australians, but it remains a substantial body of documented testimony. The institution survives; its moral distinctiveness becomes thinner.

This may help explain why some Christian parents who once regarded Catholic or Christian schools as safe havens are now looking more closely at homeschooling, smaller classical schools or other forms of independent education. That should not be overstated, many Christian schools still contain faithful teachers and leaders doing valuable work. Nor is every family able, equipped or called to homeschool, but the question itself is significant.

When parents no longer assume that a school bearing a Christian name will reinforce the moral formation of the home, something important has changed. The lesson Christians should draw from Fabianism is therefore not that we must finally begin building institutions, we already inherited many. The lesson is that institutions must be continually renewed, defended and kept faithful to their founding purpose.

Fabian gradualism understood that culture is shaped patiently through education, policy, professional networks and administration. Christians should recognise the same reality without adopting Fabian political theology. Building a school is not enough if its governing board later loses confidence in Christian teaching. Building a hospital is not enough if its dependence upon government makes its ethical convictions impossible to maintain. Building a charity is not enough if service becomes detached from the understanding of the human person that first inspired it.

The challenge is not merely to preserve institutional property or branding, it is to preserve the freedom, leadership, formation and moral courage required for those institutions to remain recognisably Christian. That may require Christians to strengthen governance, educate boards, form teachers and professionals more deeply, support independent media and scholarship, reduce unhealthy dependence upon government funding, and build new institutions where older ones can no longer fulfil their original vocation.

The question is not whether Christians once built, the record shows that they did.

The question is whether we are prepared to steward what they entrusted to us, and whether we still possess the faith and courage to rebuild where that inheritance has been surrendered.

When the neighbour becomes a client

Institutions are only half of the picture. The other half is what happens to the relationship between citizen and neighbour once government, rather than family or parish, becomes the default answer to suffering.

Government can provide necessary and legitimate services, it can maintain hospitals, support people with disability, protect workers, relieve severe poverty and provide assistance during unemployment or disaster. I do not believe every form of taxation is theft, every public service is socialism or every expansion of government is inherently unjust.

Government can act as an instrument of justice, and individual public servants can and often do love the people they serve. What government cannot do is love for us. It cannot repent on my behalf, it cannot create communion on my behalf, it cannot discharge my own command to love my neighbour by collecting a tax on my behalf and spending it well.

As responsibility moves from families, churches, neighbourhoods and voluntary associations into professional systems, the suffering person can gradually cease to be a neighbour and become a client. The person becomes a case, compassion becomes service delivery, responsibility becomes compliance, a relationship becomes a program.

Shaw’s 1931 board never had to convene in Australia. It only needed a case file where a neighbour used to be, and a cost column where worth used to be judged. Justice can be institutionalised, services can be funded, but belonging cannot be administered.

Instead of asking, “Who is my neighbour?”, the citizen asks, “Which department handles that?” This is not an attack on public servants, many enter government employment because they genuinely wish to serve. The problem is structural.

Nor is government the only institution capable of this reduction. A market can do the same when the elderly person, the person with a disability, the unprofitable rural community or the worker whose labour is no longer required becomes primarily a cost to be managed. The standard I am describing here judges both, it begins further back than the question of state or market, asking whether a system recognises the person before it calculates his usefulness.

A large administrative system must rely upon eligibility rules, forms, reporting obligations, standardised assessments, risk frameworks and funding categories. Some of that is unavoidable when public money is being distributed, but administration cannot replace human belonging.

The proportion of Australians who volunteer through an organisation fell from 36.2 per cent in 2010 to 28.8 per cent in 2019, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, although the same data show a majority of Australians still providing informal, unpaid support to someone outside their household. Formal volunteering is only one measure of how Australians care for one another, and this figure cannot by itself establish that government growth caused the decline.

Individualism and statism can grow together

The two developments need not be opposites. It may appear contradictory that Australians could become more individualistic while government becomes larger, but under some conditions the two can reinforce one another.

As family, Church and local community weaken, individuals become less embedded in relationships of mutual obligation. The state then enters the spaces those institutions once occupied. Citizens increasingly relate vertically to government rather than horizontally to one another.

Alexis de Tocqueville described something close to this mechanism nearly two centuries ago, warning that a democratic people could gradually withdraw into private life while an expanding, benevolent-seeming central power quietly filled the space between them, a condition he called “soft despotism.”

The elderly become someone else’s professional responsibility, the poor are serviced through a program, the child is formed primarily through institutions, the lonely person is referred to an agency, and the taxpayer may come to believe that personal responsibility has been fulfilled because money has been collected on his behalf.

Government growth can then weaken social responsibility further by teaching citizens that difficult human needs belong principally to trained professionals. This does not mean the older world was ideal, families could fail, churches could neglect people, local communities could be narrow, prejudiced or cruel.

Government sometimes intervened because other institutions had genuinely failed.

The question is whether public intervention strengthens the ability of families and communities to fulfil their responsibilities, or gradually makes their displacement permanent.

Are Australians becoming less connected?

The previous section asked whether public intervention strengthens families and communities, or gradually makes their displacement permanent. There is evidence consistent with the latter, although it should not be overstated.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that, since 2021, Australians have become more pessimistic, less trusting of others and less connected within their neighbourhoods. Its overall social-cohesion index for 2023 and 2024 was the lowest recorded since the underlying study began in 2007.

The same report records important areas of resilience. Happiness measures how people have actually felt over the past year, and it remains comparatively strong alongside community participation, even as their outlook on the future has darkened. Australians continue to engage actively in their communities.

I am not suggesting that Australia has become a nation of uncaring people. Trust, however, is not merely a pleasant social feeling; government, commerce and representative democracy all rely upon it. Government cannot simply regulate trust back into existence.

Australia’s changing spiritual landscape

That decline in measured social cohesion sits alongside another profound change in Australian life: the weakening of the religious affiliation that once supplied a major part of our shared moral vocabulary, the account of why trust, duty and sacrifice mattered in the first place.

Australia has experienced a profound religious change over more than a century, and that change has accelerated sharply in the past two decades. The proportion of Australians identifying with Christianity fell from circa 96 per cent at Federation in 1901, to 68 per cent in 2001, to 43.9 per cent in the 2021 Census. By 2021, 38.9 per cent reported no religion.

Those figures do not prove that secularisation caused selfishness, loneliness or bureaucratic growth. Many people without a religious affiliation are compassionate, generous and willing to serve. Many who identify as Christian fail to live according to the faith they profess. The Census also measures religious affiliation, not the depth of belief, worship or moral practice.

Nevertheless, the cultural movement is significant. Christianity supplied a major part of the inherited language through which Australians understood duty, sacrifice, forgiveness, marriage, service, conscience and the sanctity of life, alongside the classical, common-law and Enlightenment inheritances it deeply shaped. Those words may survive after belief in their source has weakened, but how securely?

Australia continues to speak of human dignity, but what makes that dignity inherent? Australia speaks of equality, but why should every life possess equal value? Australia speaks of rights, but where do those rights come from, and what restrains a future government from redefining them? Australia speaks of compassion, but is compassion still a personal moral obligation, or mainly a service administered on the citizen’s behalf?

This may be one way of understanding the claim, made at length by the historian Tom Holland in Dominion, that a civilisation can live for a time on inherited Christian moral capital. The fruit remains visible after the roots have been neglected, however the more difficult question is how long the fruit survives.

Where does this leave us? Every strand in this piece answers to the same quiet exchange. Institutions built for love now often run on funding and compliance. Neighbours once known through family, parish and street are increasingly met through a department. And the belief that first explained why any of this mattered is fading faster than almost any other feature of Australian life.

None of this required a single law, planner or decision. It only required each generation to hand the next task to someone more qualified, more resourced, more official than themselves. When care becomes administration and belief becomes memory, what exactly is being asked to fill the space that is left?

“Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? ... Go and do likewise.” — Luke 10:36–37 (NIV)

The Samaritan did not provide every part of the man’s care himself. He treated his wounds, took him to an inn, paid another person to continue caring for him, and promised to return. The parable is therefore not an argument against institutions, professional care or shared provision. It says something more demanding. He could delegate part of the work, but he could not delegate away his responsibility to his neighbour.

The institutions earlier generations built are either being renewed or quietly lost within your own lifetime, which is happening around us, and what, specifically, are we doing about it?

That question, how long the fruit survives once the root has been neglected, is where Part Five begins. It is the question this entire series has been building toward, and it does not have a comfortable answer.

Thanks for reading.

God Bless.

Mark.