Bill Muehlenberg recently offered the following response to the series of blogs concerning his background and activities that have appeared on this site during the past few weeks. This response took the form of a letter to the evangelical fortnightly New Life (2 Nov. 2006, 10):

I have long been aware of the number of people and organisations that really do not like me and what I am doing. But lately I have learned of even more hatred and animosity being directed at me, and all this makes me realise how much more I need your prayer covering. The hatred and vitriol is of course symptomatic of a deeper spiritual war, as Scripture tells us …

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(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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(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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(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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(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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(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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Christian Right groups throughout Australia are usually very vocal about anything concerning the overlap between religion and politics. Abortion, therapeutic cloning, IVF, homosexual rights, censorship, euthanasia - you name it, they’re all over it.

So why are they all so quiet about recent revelations - Separate Lives, ABC Four Corners, 25 Sep 2006 - involving the Exclusive Brethren (EB)? I mean, here you have this nice, quiet Christian church, very ‘pro-family values’, anti-abortion (even anti-contraception!), outspokenly opposed to queer rights, perhaps just a little weak on the grog question, but running a beaut patriarchal show and being appallingly persecuted by those awful pagan Greens.

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This is a story about wheels within wheels.

Canadian Dr Darrell Furgason, a regular visitor to these shores, works with Christian Right leader David Noebel’s Summit Ministries in America. Furgason is as much to blame as anybody for the epidemic of ‘Christian worldview’ seminars currently on offer around Australia. His line is that everyone has to operate on the basis of some coherent ideology, most of which are very bad news:

If you’re not learning a biblical worldview, you’re learning another one, be it humanist, Marxist, Islamic or whatever. And that will affect your whole life, how you live your life. (Quoted in Carl Wieland and David Catchpoole’s interview with Furgason, ‘Islam and worldview: the big picture’, Creation (Creation Ministries International), Sept.-Nov. 2006, 52)

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Filed in: Christian Right, Creationism, People

Around the beginning of this year, Bill Muehlenberg started up his own website, calling it Culturewatch. Bill arrived in Australia from the USA (via Holland) back in 1989 and has since spent most of his time trying to straighten out our ideas about religion, morality and a few other small matters. He’s worked for more Christian right organisations than you could shake a stick at - Australian Family Association, Focus on the Family Australia and Salt Shakers among them - but is currently between gigs.

Bill wants to see a Christian revival sweep across Australia. What would a ‘revived’ Australia be like?

… The police report that jails are emptying out, streets are quiet and little police work is necessary … Many police devote their time to singing in choirs or helping out at church services…

Many of the large sporting facilities like the MCG or the Gabba sit empty, partly due to lack of interest and partly due to so many athletes converting to Christ. People like Wayne Carey, Kieren Perkins, Cathy Freeman, Shane Warne and Andrew Gaze now spend most of their time holding evangelistic crusades and attending prayer meetings. (’Revival in Australia’, Salt Shakers Newsletter, May 1998, 3-4)

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The Christian right tries to exaggerate its influence by pretending that the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, and within the denominations themselves, really don’t exist any more. Conservative Protestant leaders appear on platforms with conservative Catholics and even conservative Jews, because, hey, we all believe in the same god, don’t we, and everything in the garden’s rosy.

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