AustLit

'Any historian who researches the role of religion – particularly Christianity – in Australian history will be aware of the fundamental challenge of convincing audiences that this is an interesting topic. The importance of religious institutions in Australia, particularly prior to the 1970s, may go without saying. But in much contemporary historical analysis, religious belief and practice appear simply as the background noise of conservatism, an indistinguishable hum against which the important matters of politics and culture play out. In Australian history, as Phyllis Mack has written in relation to the field of gender history, religion is largely seen as ‘a secondary phenomenon’, in which religious belief and concepts are significant only as they point to the more profound categories through which hierarchies of power are maintained and expressed. Alternatively, accounts of religious history by confessional historians often go to the opposite extreme of interpreting theological debates and religious experience entirely on their own terms, with no wider critical frame of reference. These various approaches to religious history – some of which I have adopted myself – may have their uses, but they do not make for particularly interesting reading.' (Introduction)