(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

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

Bill Muehlenberg (ex-Australian Family Association, current Secretary of the minuscule Family Council of Victoria) has a Christian right take on just about everything. I knew he was a creationist and had assumed he subscribed to the virulent version known as Young Earth Creationism (YEC) whereby the Christian god directly created the world about 6,000 years ago.

But writing recently about the global warming controversy Muehlenberg approvingly quoted a writer named William Kininmonth as follows:

For the past 10,000 years, the Earth has been near peak warmth in the climatic roller-coaster that has characterised the past million years. Yet only 20,000 years ago, great ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe …

A true YEC believer might just cope with the ‘10,000 years’, but definitely not the 20,000, and as for the million years - forget it! Pity that so many of Muehlenberg’s strong supporters are YECs, such as Tas Walker of Creation Ministries International, for instance. It’ll take a snowstorm of emails to sort this one out.

Filed in: 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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Filed in: Christian Right, People

There have been many attempts to discover whether praying to the Christian god has any effect. During the last few years, some studies have been conducted in which groups of Christians and others have prayed for certain types of hospital patients. But apart from obvious methodological problems e.g. how do you exclude the effects of prayers by a patient’s family members and others outside the assigned group of supplicants, none of the scientific studies has demonstrated significant effects.

Richard Hole of Tolga in Queensland has a much more far-reaching idea and placed this ad in a recent issue of New Life evangelical magazine (’Does prayer make a noticeable difference?’, 10 Aug. 2006):

We are seeking people to help us to search for those who are obviously led and helped by God … If we can find divinely led people the benefits would be enormous, as they would be able to help, encourage and pray for us.

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Filed in: Fundamentalism, People

Charles Francis AM QC is the honorary legal adviser to Endeavour Forum, an anti-feminist group run by his wife, Babette Francis. Writing in the National Civic Council’s News Weekly magazine of 5 August 2006, Charles informs us that:

It has taken the World Health Organisation [WHO] decades to warn that the contraceptive pill is a Class 1 carcinogen, in the same category as tobacco and asbestos, and no doubt it may take decades for WHO, wedded to the ideology of population control, to acknowledge the link between abortion and breast cancer. (’Pregnancy counselling services under threat’, 11)

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Filed in: People, Sexuality

Right to Life Australia (RTLA) supporter Ted Watt doesn’t like the ‘Advanced Health Directives’ (AHDs) which may become available in WA soon. By making one of these directives, competent patients may refuse consent to specified treatments or to any treatment for specified illnesses, to take effect later if the patient should become incompetent. The bill before state parliament provides for ‘Enduring Guardians’ and ‘Persons Responsible’ to be appointed with power to make all health care decisions on behalf of an incompetent patient. (Dr Ted Watt, ‘WA to Debate Medical Treatment Bill’, RTLA News, Jul.-Aug. 2006, 4)

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Filed in: People, Voluntary Euthanasia

Many Jewish people think that the Christian Right is basically well-disposed towards them. After all, conservative Christians in both America and Australia strongly support the bulk of Israel’s foreign and domestic policies as well as providing plenty of tourist dollars.

In fact, however, most Christian fundamentalists and other conservative evangelicals foresee a brief but violent future for the Jews. When Jesus returns ’soon’, Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or die, generally in battle or through plagues and famine. There will be no Jews in Jesus’ millennial kingdom.

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Filed in: Biblical criticism, Christian Right, People

Our Bill is not a happy man. Interviewed on Channel 7’s Today Tonight program earlier this month he was most concerned about the treatment he received:

Strange, but when I was introduced, I was called ‘deeply religious’ and part of the Australian Family Association [AFA]. They got it wrong on the latter, as I twice told them I was secretary of the Family Council of Victoria. (’Vic. Education Dept promotes gay agenda’, News Weekly, 24 Jun. 2006)

Well, I can understand your frustration, Bill, but you must admit that following all your peregrinations is a challenge. As far as I can make out you arrived in Australia in about 1989 from America via the Netherlands and did some work with the Institute of Public Affairs and Quadrant magazine. You were then employed by the National Civic Council’s AFA in 1992 and moved to Focus on the Family Australia in 1996, having first become (part-time, honorary?) Secretary of the Family Council of Victoria in 1994. You moved to Salt Shakers in 1998 but by 2000 had returned to the AFA where you remained until the end of 2005. And you still have articles appearing in AFA and National Civic Council journals.

So I can see why journalists might get a little confused.

Filed in: People

Bill Muehlenberg parted company with the National Civic Council’s Australian Family Association (AFA) around the end of last year. He has since been writing freelance articles for a number of Religious Right outfits and has started a website of his own - www.billmuehlenberg.com.

Some people can handle editorial independence but I have my doubts about Bill. In a recent commentary, he assails Alistair Nicholson, former Chief Justice of the Family Court, for some remarks he made on the SBS Insight program on 16 May. Bill was particularly incensed by Nicholson’s ‘incredible claim that it is “an act of cruelty” to not recognise and legalise same-sex marriage and adoption rights.’

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Filed in: Christian Right, People, Sexuality