Ever since Marion Maddox's book God Under Howard, it has become relatively commonplace to refer to the emergence of a Christian Right within Australia.
Maddox provided an implicit definition of the concerns that help to unite members of the Christian Right and to separate them from other parts of the Christian political spectrum. The particular emphases of the Christian Right include promotion of "family values" based on heterosexual monogamy and patriarchal gender roles.
The Christian Right opposes perceived threats to these family values, such as the availability of abortion and recognition of gay and lesbian relationships. It promotes the virtues of free market capitalism and is hostile to economic intervention and control by governments.
This combination of market liberalism and social conservatism draws its cues from the American Christian Right. Its network of Australian promoters and followers are most visible among the rapidly growing Pentecostal "megachurches", such as Hillsong in Sydney's western suburbs.
Maddox notes, however, that the Christian Right appeals more widely, particularly across mainstream Protestant denominations such as the Anglican and Uniting churches, which "contain conservative groupings who share many 'family value' Christian right priorities."
Christian Right activities within the Catholic Church have received less attention, although some of Archbishop George Pell's public stances and the increasing number of prominent Catholics within the Coalition are commonly bundled into the evidence for a politically active Christian Right.
Apart from the churches themselves, a range of inter-connected para-church groups such as the National Assembly of Christian Leaders promote aspects of the Christian Right agenda, as do religiously-oriented units within secular right-wing think tanks such as the Centre for Independent Studies.
But just how influential is the Christian Right in Australian politics? An examination of the last two elections paints a rather different picture than that advanced by Marion Maddox.
Whatever role the Christian Right played in Labor's 2004 defeat, Labor prospered at the 2007 election. One important question raised by this reversal of fortune is whether Labor, in its efforts to win office in 2007, courted the Christian Right by moving onto the ideological ground outlined above.
The answer is that it did not.
In fact, in its leadership, policies and electoral strategy, the Labor Party resisted the temptation to compete with the Coalition for the Christian Right's support. This was despite the churches' determination to assert their influence in the 2007.
Recall that, throughout the Howard era, the Government had regularly urged the churches to stay out of political debates, except on 'moral issues' such as abortion, sexuality and euthanasia. Coalition ministers were particularly critical when the churches entered debates over economics, industrial relations, the environment, international affairs and the like, accusing them of ignorance and ideological bias.
Introducing the National Council of Churches in Australia (NCCA) Election Briefing Kit 2007, for example, the Anglican Bishop Richard Appleby wrote "I have no doubt that member Churches of NCCA will have experienced, in various ways, the gibe from politicians telling us to 'keep out of politics and to stick to religion'. But, of course, we won't oblige, not least prior to an election!"
The Australian Catholic Bishop's Conference (ACBC) stated, "At a time when some argue that religious faith should be removed from politics altogether, we urge Catholics to take their democratic freedoms seriously and become involved in the political process."
The Uniting Church in Australia (UCA) argued that "Like all citizens in a democratic state, Christians have a responsibility to actively engage in the political processes of their country. As Christians, however, we have a particular responsibility both to bring hope to those processes and to seek hope as an outcome."
The ecumenical NCCA - whose seventeen members include the Catholic, Anglican and Uniting churches, along with the Greek, Antiochian, Coptic, Romanian and Syrian Orthodox churches, the Lutheran Church, the Churches of Christ, the Salvation Army, the Congregational Federation, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Chinese Methodist Church, the Mar Thoma Church and the Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers) - also produced an election guide.
The well-known churches missing from the above list are the Baptists, Presbyterians and Pentecostals. The Baptist churches produced no election material of their own. The Presbyterian Church was equally quiet.
While some Pentecostal churches, such as Hillsong, deliberately avoided giving electoral advice, others, like Catch the Fire Ministries, freely canvassed election issues.
Individual leaders and members of the Baptist and Pentecostal churches were involved within the networks of para-church organisations active during the election. These para-church organisations lie outside formal church structures and draw their personnel and supporters from across the denominations.
The Australian Christian Values Institute (ACVI), for example, which produced a widely cited election policy checklist, predominantly drew its advisory team from lay members of the Baptist, Pentecostal and Catholic churches.
Overlapping memberships among different para-church organisations allowed these groups to develop informal networks in their attempts to mobilise voters.
The ACVI, for example, was linked through key participants to other organisations such as the National Alliance of Christian Leaders and the ACL.
The oldest of the para-church interest groups active in the 2007 election was the Festival of Light (FOL), formed in 1973 to respond to "the attacks on moral values and family life seen in the dramatic increase in the availability of pornography following the relaxation of censorship laws by the Whitlam Labor Government."
The newest group, the Centre for an Ethical Society (CES), was formed in 2006 "as a mainstream Christian body focused on social justice." The CES shared the FOL's strategy of using support from mainstream church leaders to help establish its legitimacy.
Members of the CES included Anglican Primate of Australia, Phillip Aspinall, the President of the Australian Catholic Bishop's Conference, Archbishop Philip Wilson, and the President of Uniting Church in Australia, the Reverend Gregor Henderson.
Other para-church groups prominent in the 2007 election included the ACL and Micah Challenge. The ACL, led by Managing Director Jim Wallace, is a non-denominational group with a claimed membership of 7,500 that lobbies government to promote "Christian values in public policy."
Micah Challenge is a church-based "partner" of the secular Make Poverty History campaign to support the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals of halving global poverty by 2015. In 2007, it drew support from forty-two church and para-church groups, including the Anglican, Uniting, Catholic and Baptist denominations.
If all of the church and para-church organisations listed above were focused on the same issues and repeating the same message, then the churches' contribution to the 2007 election could have been significant.
In reality, the contributions of the churches were remarkably diverse, leading the Baptist Minister Rod Benson to complain that the churches had "served up too much conflicting and confusing commentary."
The two Protestant denominations, along with the NCCA and the CES, attempted to draw their supporters' attention to general issues of government, domestic socio-economic issues and international issues.
The ACVI and FOL focused on the churches' relationship with government and personal morality issues. So, to a large degree, did the ACL, although it also drew attention to some domestic and international issues.
The ACBC covered a range of domestic and international issues, while also highlighting personal morality. Micah Challenge's emphasis was entirely on international issues.
Taken together, these results indicate the pluralist, disparate character of electoral efforts of the various church and para-church organisations.
This pluralism gave the Labor Party as much scope as the Coalition to highlight policy emphases that were aligned with those of at least some of the election guides.
Furthermore, the church and para-church organisations involved in the 2007 election were generally careful to avoid any impression that they were endorsing particular parties or candidates, or attempting to direct votes.
There were exceptions to this neutrality. Subtle voter direction could be found in Christian commentary that did not mention parties by name but took a stance on issues that divided the major parties from each other, or from minor parties.
The direct and indirect voting advice given by church and para-church groups was far from uniform. The voting advice of the Christian Right was thus one voice competing with others for the attention of believers.
It is not possible to give a definitive answer to the question of what impact all of this conflicting activity by church and para-church groups had on voters.
The omnibus Australian Electoral Study surveys do contain two basic questions on religious identity and frequency of church attendance. These questions allow comparison of vote swings between 2004 and 2007 among regular churchgoers (those attending at least once a month) and non-attenders (those attending less than once a year).
The first preference swings to Labor in each group of voters between 2004 and 2007 were almost identical (8.6 percent for churchgoers and 7.5 percent for non-attenders).
This finding suggests that the Christian Right could do nothing to prevent Australian churchgoers from moving to Labor in 2007, along with the rest of the electorate. It cannot tell us whether the two sets of voters moved for the same or different reasons.
Another test of the influence of Christian organisations on voters was provided by the ACL.
During the election campaign, the ACL promised to target fifteen electorates in four states with mailouts and open meetings. This campaign was driven by the ACL's support for Family First and opposition to "libertarian" Labor candidates and the Greens.
Nine of these seats were held by the Liberals after the 2004 election and six by Labor.
The election results across the fifteen seats indicate the failure of ACL's intervention to prevent swings to Labor and the Greens.
Labor gained seven of the seats, retained four and lost two, leaving it with eleven of the fifteen, a net gain of five. It gained two-party preferred swings in all but two seats (both in Western Australia, where Labor's results were most mixed overall).
In eleven seats, Labor's swings exceeded the state average.
The Christian minor parties made first preference gains in all but five seats, averaging a 0.6 percent gain across the fifteen seats. These gains were more than offset by the increased votes for the Greens, who increased their first preference votes in all but one seat and gained an average swing double that of the Christian minor parties (1.3 percent).
Aggregate results such as these can only be indicative. However, the patterns they reveal undermine claims by individual para-church groups such as the ACL that they can have a determining influence on election results.
Several reasons can be advanced to explain the difficulty that the Christian Right has in mobilising voters.
First, the voters who are the targets of Christian Right electoral messages are, except in a few small closed sects, open to electoral influences from outside the church.
Second, the Christian Right does not have the religious field to itself. Church and para-church groups promote conflicting rather than uniform electoral messages.
This is compounded by the fact that the overlapping denominational membership of different para-church groups means that the electoral messages encountered by Christians cannot easily be controlled by the leaders of particular denominations.
Third, although some local church leaders speak out on political issues, many are reluctant to do so, for fear of alienating sections of their congregations, causing internal conflict and losing disaffected members to other churches.
Fourth, even nationally organised para-church groups like the ACL lack the resources to reach large sections of the Christian vote. In the 2007 campaign, the ACL organised "Meet Your Candidate Forums" in 52 electorates, or just one-third of all House of Representative seats.
This was an increase on the 36 forums in 2004 - however, the 2007 forums attracted 4,000 people, some 2,000 fewer than in 2004.
The ACL claimed that the August 2007 'Make it Count' webcast featuring Howard and Rudd reached an audience of 80,000 to 100,000 voters, an estimated 35,000 voters visited its "Australia Votes" website during the campaign and 5,800 churches were sent ACL material.
These were impressive efforts, but they represented a minority of the approximately 17 percent of the electorate (2.3 million voters) who were regular churchgoers.
The strategic interests of Australian Christian Right pressure groups require them to project an image of themselves as powerful bodies with widespread voter support.
In the last years of the Howard Government, this projection was reflected in much of the academic and popular writing on Australian religion and politics.
But analysis of the 2007 Federal Election suggests that key elements of the argument for the rise of an Australian Christian Right were overstated or flawed.
The available evidence suggests that general and specific efforts by conservative para-church organisations to prevent swings to Labor and the Greens were unsuccessful.
More generally, I am suggesting that the political activities of the Australian churches early in the new millennium should be understood as pluralist - characterised by genuine contest and fluidity over time - rather than being dominated by a hegemonic single orthodoxy.
Recognising and exploring this pluralism further will lead to more satisfactory accounts of the relationships between churches and politics in Australia.
Rodney Smith is Chair of the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. This article is based on research that he published in "How Would Jesus Vote? The Churches and the Election of the Rudd Government," Australian Journal of Political Science 44 (2009), pp. 613-637.