Capturing the religious spirit: A challenge for the secular state

Critical engagement with the politics of the Christian Right in Australia and, more important, analysis of the values underpinning their political activism has been the focus of some recent scholarship. 1 Yet as John Warhurst notes, religion and politics more broadly remain an under-researched field in Australia.2 Perhaps as a consequence, Australian experiences rarely appear in international scholarship tackling the rise of religion. Of the limited academic scholarship that has been undertaken, the subject of religion in contemporary Australia has been addressed as a sociological foray, cast as a confrontation between church and state, or treated as an investigation of political partisanship and shifting denominational relations.