Missionary Genocide: Moral Illegitimacy and the Churches in Australia

Abstract

Most religious traditions advance value frameworks drawn from their scriptures. These frameworks rest on the assumed (and asserted) moral authority of a religious tradition intended to guide its adherents in choices about right and wrong. More broadly, societal debates about right and wrong are often framed by the moral principles thought to be shared between dominant religious traditions and a nation’s social and cultural norms. While these norms do evolve and change over time, it is often asserted that the theological moral framework underpinning a society draws on incontrovertible moral truths. In the Australian context, Christian churches are most likely to play this role in mainstream culture, with the Judeo-Christian tradition still thought of as the source of what some would call “Australian values.” This chapter seeks to complicate this view by examining the role of the Christian churches in Australia’s settler colonial past, which is here argued to rest on a genocidal morality.KeywordsIndigenous PeopleAboriginal PeopleTorres Strait IslanderMoral AuthorityTorres Strait Islander PeopleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.