Above Rubies ‘Up and Coming Events’ leaflet, distributed Oct. 2006:

Christians are now a minority group in Australia …

[Hey, Above Rubies, will you keep that quiet, please? The official line as spouted by the Australian Christian Lobby, Salt Shakers, Bill Muehlenberg etc. is that the vast majority of Australians are Christian, and that therefore the government should ban abortion and homosexuality and make women wear longer dresses. In future, keep your subversive ideas to yourselves.]

Nancy Campbell ‘From Our Home to Yours’, Above Rubies, Jun. 2006 (distributed in October), 3-4:

[God] does not want our enemies to rule over us, but that we should rule over them and beat them into the dust. We have many [evil] enemies … in our land today, evils of abortion, homosexuality, the breakdown of family life [etc.]

['Beat them into the dust', eh? Funny how rarely 'love your enemies' makes it into Christian right literature.]

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Filed in: Their Own Mouths

(5) Is Muehlenberg a theocrat?

Bill Muehlenberg denies that he is a theocrat, but I disagree. In national terms, a theocrat claims that a god is a particular country’s ultimate ruler and that the nation should be operating according to that god’s laws. In the longer run, Muehlenberg would like to see Christ returning to earth and directly ruling the entire planet. In the short term, he wants to accelerate the process by which this situation might occur by ‘Christianising’ the nation. I’ll begin by drawing rather extensively on an article I wrote in 2003 entitled ‘Australia’s Theocratic Right‘.

The modern ‘Christian’ theocratic approach to politics is often termed ‘dominion theology’ and it has a wide range of guises and levels of intensity. Adherents of dominion theology encourage Christian political activism leading to sweeping social change rather than mere adjustments to the social system. In practice, these proposed changes tend to be of an authoritarian kind.

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Filed in: Christian Right, People, Theocracy

(4) Muehlenberg vs the culture vandals

Like the late B.A. Santamaria, head of the National Civic Council, Bill Muehlenberg views himself as a soldier engaged in a war:

As in all conflicts, there are two competing sides seeking dominance and victory. On the one side there are those who hold to the Judaeo-Christian world view. On the other side are those who can best be described as secular humanists.

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

(3) 2000-2006

Having rejoined the Australian Family Association (AFA) as National Secretary early in 2000, Muehlenberg was later appointed National Vice-President of that body (Muehlenberg, letter to Age, 27 Mar. 2002) although his responsibilities - writing of articles, media liaison etc. - seem to have remained the same.

Having soft-pedalled the origins of his Bible college degrees for most of the 1990s, Bill suddenly became very up-front about them. He began reviewing books for Amazon and in one such review (Scott Hahn Hail, Holy Queen, 31 July, 2002), Muehlenberg referred to having graduated from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston (fifth review) ‘with highest honours’. He has since referred to his outstanding performance in this degree on a number of occasions. - www.christian-witness.org/archives/Entre/authors.html (second last entry)

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

(2) 1989-2000

Between his arrival in Australia in 1989 and his appointment to a position with the National Civic Council’s (NCC) ‘Australian Family Association’ early in 1992, Bill Muehlenberg immersed himself in the conservative side of Australian political culture. AD2000, an NCC publication, told its readers that Muehlenberg:

… who is a Baptist, is a graduate from Wheaton College and the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the United States and has had extensive experience in research and library work in the Netherlands and US. He was until recently head of the environmental policy uni[t] at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne. He is the author of ‘Modern Conservative Thought: an Annotated Bibliography’, published by the Institute of Public Affairs. - (Introduction to) Bill Muehlenberg ‘Christians and the “Green” prophets of doom: the need for scepticism’, AD2000, Aug. 1990, 4

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Filed in: Christian Right, People

Andrew Lansdown, ‘Writer and Editor’ for Life Ministries WA, has strong views about justice. Justice demands, for example, that animals which happen to kill human beings must be held morally responsible for their actions, and put to death:

God will not tolerate the killing of innocent human beings, whether the killers are humans or animals. He will hold them to account at the cost of their blood … (’Sympathy for a shark’, Salt Shakers Journal, Feb. 2001, 13)

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Filed in: People, Sexuality

Family Life International(Australia) (FLI) recently distributed a leaflet called ‘The World’s Greatest Con Job … The Real Truth About Condoms’. I received one of these (a leaflet, not a condom) from the National Civic Council’s ‘Australian Family Association’ and found little ‘real truth’ but a long list of reasons why readers should postpone sex until marriage:

It is the only 100% foolproof way of avoiding unplanned pregnancies.

So all pregnancies within marriage are planned? Don’t think so.

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Filed in: Sexuality

(1) 1953-1989

William John (’Bill’) Muehlenberg has been a leading figure in the Australian Christian Right for the past 15 years. He has held a number of official positions with organisations such as the Australian Family Association, Australian Christian Lobby, Focus on the Family Australia and Salt Shakers. He currently runs his own CultureWatch website. He also played a key role in the National Marriage Coalition, which in 2004 successfully pressured the Howard Federal Government to pass legislation banning same-sex marriages. I’ll begin this series with a brief biographical sketch.

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Filed in: Christian Right, People