Decolonising Studies of Religion in So-Called Australia: Truth-Telling, Collective Reflections and Future Trajectories

ABSTRACT

Studies of religion in the lands now called (by some) Australia have thus far focused mainly on so-called Abrahamic traditions of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the southern states of New South Wales and Victoria and on theories from the global North. This is despite the fact that Australia is a religiously and spiritually diverse nation, and that diverse worldviews in Australia have long been and continue to be shaped by First Peoples, and South–South flows of migration across the Pacific and Indian oceans, particularly in Australia’s far northern regions. This article begins with truth-telling of the historical and contemporary reality of the religious and spiritual composition of Australia, challenging the myth of a White Christian nation. It then includes a series of scholarly and personal reflections, by the paper’s authors, on why and how there is a need to decolonise studies of religion in Australia. These author narratives, recounting lived experiences from their diverse positionalities including their First Peoples, Indonesian, Chinese, African, and/or European backgrounds, further reflect Australia’s multifaith and ‘multicultural Real’ (Hage 1998). The paper concludes with an analysis of these narratives and posits ways forward to dislocate coloniality in the study of religion across the Asia-Pacific region.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology of religion
• decolonising
• Australia
• Indigenous

Introduction

There is a changing narrative in studies of religion in the lands that some now call Australia. It increasingly recognises, problematises and critically examines the enmeshment of colonisation with religion, and the persistence and often invisible continuity of the British empire, culture and religion in this ‘nation’ from the eighteenth Century onward. Modern, contemporary Australia is a national construct founded on colonial violence in all its travesty, which continues to enforce claims on Indigenous people in particular, but also non-white people. This brutal history has long been understated; even Australia’s most recent former Prime Minister Scott Morrison minimised it by saying that there was no slavery in Australia and then apologising for saying so (Murphy 2020), without conceding to the extensive existence of slavery in this country (Anthony and Gray 2020). Morrison’s presentation of history rides on a dominant political and cultural narrative that depicts the ‘founding’ of modern Australia as a British-Christian penal colony in a far-flung part of the world. The historical construction and normative treatment of such an Australia – as white, unified and Christian – is, however, more of a political ‘fantasy’ (Hage 1998) than a reality given the linguistic, cultural and religious diversity of First Peoples in these lands, whose sovereignty has never been ceded, together with subsequent waves of immigrants (Ganter 2006; Halafoff 2021; Watego 2021; Weng et al. 2021a, 2021b).

Such a troubling historical account – of white, Christian Australia – can be viewed as a fantasy as it perpetuates ‘the myth of peaceful settlement’ (Carlson and Farrelly 2023: 4) as it understates and minimises the forceful dispossession of Indigenous Peoples of their lands, families, cultures and spiritualities, that have occurred at the hands of the British colonisers, often in partnership with missionaries (Pattel-Gray 1998; Deverell 2018; Wolfe 2019). Bidjara / Kari Kari theologian Anne Pattel-Gray (1998: 30) has demonstrated that Australian governments and churches were in ‘collusion’, working together to facilitate Aboriginal dispossession. Similarly, Trawloolway theologian Garry Deverell (2018: 21) notes:

The movement of Christ’s gospel into the Indigenous communities of this country was, and is, far from straight-forwardly positive, however. There is a saying in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: ‘When the white man came, he made an exchange: the bible for the land and the sea’. … It was the bible in exchange for our languages, lore and kin as well.

Additionally, this account of a white, Christian Australia, also inaccurately presents Australian history by rendering less visibility to the narratives of non-white, non-Christian peoples, cultures and religions in Australia, and especially the long history of Indigenous people and triangulated relations between Indigenous, Asian and European Australians (Reynolds 2003; Ganter 2006; Halafoff et al. 2022). For sociologists of religion in Australia in particular, intentional retelling and rethinking of the stories and studies of religion can be active strategies of truth-telling and decolonisation, broadening and problematising the myth of a white Christian nation.

Without engaging in this work of retelling and truth-telling, Western forms of knowledge production remain dominant. This dominance, coupled with the marginalisation of Indigenous and non-western knowledge forms, is a mode of maintaining colonial, imperial power, and an act of ongoing colonisation (Connel 2014; Hedges 2021: 171–172). To decolonise is to acknowledge colonial violence and oppression, past and continuing, and to commit to a future which is different from that past and the present (Paradies 2020). Mary Frances O’Dowd and Robyn Heckenberg (2020: n.p.) details the impact of colonial violence, stating that: ‘Colonisation is invasion’ that ‘erases Indigenous sovereignty’. It ‘is more than physical. It is also cultural and psychological in determining whose knowledge is privileged.’ The harmful impacts are enduring. Decolonisation, they explain, ‘seeks to reverse and remedy this through direct action and listening to the voices of First Nations people.’ It involves ‘restorative justice through cultural, psychological and economic freedom.’ O’Dowd and Hackenberg conclude: ‘True decolonisation seeks to challenge and change white superiority, nationalistic history and ‘truth’ … [and] must involve challenging both conscious and subconscious racism’ and discrimination.

While we are aware that anti-colonial work within the university, within research practices, is only ever a fragment of wider decolonial projects and anti-racist work (Smith 2021), our initial steps to decolonise studies of religion in Australia, involves prioritising the voices of First Peoples scholars, and also scholars of colour and of culturally and religiously diverse backgrounds, to dismantle the fantasy of a white, Christian nation, and its resulting racial and religious discrimination. Here we are also informed by critical theory, given its focus on emancipation from oppression (Horkheimer 1972).

Sociology of religion scholarship in Australia has until recently been dominated by white, Christian and non-religious narratives. This echoes the whiteness of Christian practice and leadership within Australia (Deverell 2018; Pattel-Gray 2023; Weng 2023). In more recent years, scholars have moved to studying so-called Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. A privileging of Christianity, and also Abrahamic faiths, in the public sphere, including in Australian media and curriculum, has also been documented in recent studies on religious diversity in Australia (Maddox 2005, 2014; Byrne 2007, 2014; Halafoff 2013, 2015; Weng 2019, 2020; Weng et al. 2021a, 2021b; Halafoff et al. 2022; Ezzy forthcoming). The long history of Asian religions, of Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism, in Australia has only recently begun to receive more significant scholarly attention (Bilimoria et al. 2015; Halafoff et al. 2022).

Yet, despite the privileging of white Christianity within the sociology of religion and Australian media, Aboriginal theologians and Christian leaders have been prominent in the fight for First Peoples’ justice and civil rights, and have long used the Bible and Christian faith as a tool of resistance and reconciliation (Common Grace 2022). Contemporary Aboriginal Christian leaders and theologians continue to be leading voices challenging the colonial legacy of Christianity, and, advocating strategies of resistance, reconciliation and decolonisation within faith communities and institutions (Deverell 2018; Wolfe 2019; Pattel-Gray 2023). For instance, Pattel-Gray (2023) has recently highlighted the importance of centring Indigenous knowledge and leadership within the church and theological education as a decolonising strategy, and Trawloolway academic Wolfe (2019) has previously set out six practical steps for church communities to work for reconciliation, starting with understanding the ways in which the Christian church is implicated in colonisation.

Authors of this paper, and editors of this Special Issue, are leading this turn to a more inclusive and truly representative sociological study of diverse worldviews – spiritual, religious and non-religious – in Australia (Halafoff et al. 2021, 2022, 2023; Weng et al. 2021a, 2021b). We began working together on various projects and collectives pre-Covid, including the Australian Research Council-funded project on Religious diversity in Australia, a pilot Alfred Deakin Institute-funded study on Buddhism in the Far North of Australia and the ‘(Con)spirituality, Science and the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia: Material and Digital Practices’ project. Halafoff, Weng, Abur and colleagues drew on Ghassan Hage’s (1998) insights in ‘White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Nation’, and applied them to the study of religion in Australia, arguing that the myth of a white Christian Australia has repeatedly tried to erase the multifaith reality of this nation, both pre and post the introduction of the racist Immigration Restriction Act known as the White Australia Policy. Halafoff, Weng and colleagues documented this religious diversity, particularly across the Far North of Australia, building on Regina Ganter’s (2006) work on the triangulated cultural diversity of Indigenous, Asian and European Australians. Winarnita has previously studied religious diversity in the Cocos Islands, and Winarnita and Weng began collaborating on foregrounding the significant but understated role that diaspora media producers play in bridging their communities in Australia. As part of the Earth Unbound collective, Halafoff and Paradies discussed similarities in frameworks of world-repairing and resistance to colonialism and neoliberalism, within First Nations and Buddhist relational knowledges of interdependence and non-linear time. Weng, Halafoff and Paradies concluded that more work needs to be undertaken in this space and that a common and critical theme was decoloniality. Led by Weng, and Abur, Winarnita, Halafoff and Paradies, we applied for funding from the Alfred Deakin Institute and conducted a Colloquium on (Dis)locating Coloniality in 2021, which resulted in this Special Issue.

Another significant factor in undertaking this work is our positionality, given our culturally, spiritually and religiously diverse identities, we have all seen and experienced things in our everyday lives and in our research that previous scholars in our fields have over-looked or missed, which better reflect the multicultural and multifaith reality of these lands. It is our personal, affective experiences, belonging to so-called minority groups – in terms of race/ethnicity, culture, religion and/or gender – in Australia, that have led us to call for these much-needed changes to decolonise the study of religion in Australia and challenge white Christian privilege in our discipline. We also recognise the value of diverse perspectives and our varying levels of privilege (or lack thereof) in shaping our views.

In this paper, we write as a diverse group of scholars who come from a myriad of backgrounds with connections with these lands spanning from over 60,000 years ago to recent decades. Yin Paradies is an animist anarchist activist Wakaya man following in the traditions of his mother’s line for tens of thousands of years. Enqi Weng is of Chinese-Singaporean heritage and a first-generation Australian migrant. William Abur is a South Sudanese-Australian who migrated from Africa as a refugee. Monika Winarnita is an Indonesian who came to Australia at the age of 12 under her mother’s PhD scholarship and then remained as an Australian Permanent Resident. Anna Halafoff was born in Australia into a white, Russian Orthodox family and converted to Buddhism in her early 30s. Rosie Clare Shorter is a feminist and an Anglican, descended from white-settlers (protestants and Free Masons), and European Jewish and Catholic migrants.

We have different connections to Australia, and to different parts of Australia, and in this article, we reflect on our diverse experiences collectively through a critical lens to challenge the pervasive white Christian narrative prevalent in Australian society and in studies of religion in Australia today. In these accounts, we also acknowledge the strong and enduring presence of other religions within this national story that traverses beyond mainstream white Christian narratives.

As we reflect on these divergent experiences, we particularly note the social and cultural milieu we are situated in as we write this, and that Australia was heading towards the Voice to Parliament referendum at the end of 2023, alongside calls for Treaty and Truth, as outlined in the Uluru Statement from the Heart (2023). While we, as authors, have diverse stances on these developments, these initiatives are clearly historically important moments in an ongoing journey of (re)conciliation with First Peoples in Australian politics. This paper also serves as an opportunity to promote inclusivity within academia, to encourage active and ‘deep listening’ (Ungunmerr 1988; Ungunmerr-Baumann 2022) and to share our stories despite our differences. Collectively, we reflect on the importance of decolonising studies of religion in this context and at this time, through our personal narratives. We do so as a critical and creative method of truth-telling, to dismantle the fantasy of a white Christian Nation and to reimagine a new relational and regenerative reality in its place.

Personal Reflections

Yin Paradies: Syncretic Syncopations of Animist Amalgamations

I grew up in a Catholic family in Darwin, my father from a fairly devout Filipino background and my mother converted to Catholicism, from a vaguely Christian background, to marry him. My parents tell of me being fascinated with Jesus from an early age. We went to mass infrequently, with my most memorable exposure to religion (and the amateur sociological analysis thereof) being my time at a Catholic primary school. However, my disenchantment with what I experienced as Catholicism’s foundational whiteness and abstract transcendent monotheistic hierarchisation was evidenced by my refusal to undergo Confirmation in my last year of primary school. Such teachings that I encountered at my Catholic primary school stood in stark contrast to the gentle aesthetically arresting presence of Indigenous elders whose echoing spirits rejuvenated and nurtured me via an understated essence of spiritual life (Kenny 1998).

Although not as obsessed with rationality as the philosophy of religion has tended to be (Haynes 2019), sociology of religion’s coloniality is no more apparent than in the tendency to left-brain dominance and right-brain atrophy (McGilchrist 2021) in approaching ‘study’ as an exercise in the literal, logical, linear, rational, causal and factual rather than open-ended entanglements with the haptic, incarnate, embodied, tactile, somatic, kinaesthetics of religiosity as an immersion in the mysterious, mystical, mythical, magical, metaphorical, multitudinous and musical.

Of course, this colonial sensibility is merely a manifestation of a much wider, deeper, and broader trend that Wynter (2003) calls ‘degodding’ – what I call de-sacralisation of salience or cosmological de-consecration. To (en)treat the world as holy is to beckon beyond the soul-siphoning spectral sameness of secularity to feel the shoreless ocean of immaculate fractal consciousness like a parrhesiac quivering through the kismet of the cosmos. This is gnosis as direct conjunctive soul-beholding rather than abstract conceptual banked knowing of so-called things.

As Horii (2023: 106) articulates ‘the classification … of religion … is not neutral and natural; it has colonial heritage’. Much of what the sociology of religion could learn from Indigenous practices is neglected because most of the vast wisdom there is to welcome into our beings is not classified as ‘religion’ but, rather, as spirituality, shamanism, mysticism or ‘simply’ rites, rituals and ceremonies.

Because religious spirituality or spiritual religiosity is deeply intertwined in quotidian Indigenous lifeways, it has been almost entirely missed (or mischaracterised) by almost all sociologists of religion over the relatively brief time that this discipline has existed. To inquire, attune, attend, feel, sense, emulate, respond and anticipate patterns and shapes in the music, song, dance, and weave of place-times is a sporadic practice within the unbearable anthropocentric whiteness of Western academic circles, including the sub-circle constituting the sociology of religion.

Given this, it is apt for Malory Nye (2019: 2) to ask if ‘the study of religion [is] a rotten fruit of the poisoned tree of colonialism?’. To refrain from reproducing the refrain of rote religious scholarship, we need to attend to more than the questions of adolescent cultures: ‘Why are we here? How should we live? What will happen when we die?’ (Yunkaporta 2019: 102). In fact, Indigenous modes of religion have very little to do with questions at all, being much more focused on the soft fascination (a non-attachment to attachment rather than an attachment to non-attachment) of largely wordless inquiry into perceptual palpable presences. For example, dadirri or deep listening as a wave-like transformative convergence in the stream of life (Ungunmerr-Baumann 2022) is an initiation into hearing with our eyes and watching with our ears, so as to reconsecrate a de-sacralised world of worlds in which we are merged. Tuning into the cadence, rhyme and timbre of silence and stillness, rather than the speed, stimulation and satisfaction of modernity. Yielding to mystery, metaphor, intuition and imagination rather than seeking comfort, choice, convenience, control, closure or certainty. Discernment of patterns, weavings and braidings of life’s irreducible wholeness; instead of the desecrated desiderata of segmented flattened boxed reality.

It may well be that we are the best versions of ourselves within sinuous structures of synchronous resonant ritual pulsing kinship; where we are blessed with vital necessary ra/(u)pturous experience anchored in harmonic order. Certainly, this is the experience of spirituality in many Indigenous traditions, a topic very much worthy of further sociological inquiry. How can we baptise the sociology of religion in more-than-human multi-textured dynamic emergent heretical hermeneutics that surface an interdependent relationality of religious praxis? Can we embrace the afikomen of animistic panpsychism as a consciousness that comes from inhabiting the bountiful bhav of becoming in reverberant textures, warps, wefts, essences and emanations of pluriversal existence-scapes. Within multiphasic multiverses can we taste-listen (dhäkay-ŋama; Armstrong et al. in press) for, and to, topographic tapestries of totemic threads?

Enqi Weng: Asian (in)Visibility, Christian Diversity and Whiteness

When I arrived in Naarm/Melbourne as a postgraduate student from Singapore in 2010, I volunteered for an English conversation class initiative. Coming from Singapore’s (post-colonial) British education system, which emphasised English as a primary language, I had a strong grasp of conversational English. I saw volunteering as a way to explore and learn about Australian society and culture. These classes took place at an inner-city Anglican church in Melbourne. The volunteers mainly consisted of retired white/Anglo women, from different Anglican churches, while the majority of participants were international students, particularly those from Asian and South American backgrounds. Sometimes, parents of students would also attend. It was within this intercultural and interfaith space that I quickly encountered the politics of race and religion in Australia.

While I was warmly welcomed as someone outside the usual volunteer profile at these English conversation classes, I found myself entering a specific culture and context that made my experience somewhat unsettling. During my brief involvement in these face-to-face activities (later transitioning to volunteering in administrative matters), I often found that the white/Anglo women frequently mistook me for a participant, despite wearing a coloured lanyard that distinguished me from the participants. Simultaneously, participants seemed hesitant to engage in conversation with me and appeared to prefer interacting with my white/Anglo volunteer counterparts instead. In other words, I was not visibly perceived as a volunteer because I appeared visibly Asian and might have an accent that signalled that I was not adequately qualified to lead conversational English discussions. Additionally, having a non-Anglo, ‘ethnic’ potentially introduced an additional dimension of intercultural challenges for both the volunteers and participants to navigate.

Australia has a historically complex relationship with whiteness that continues to perpetuate contemporary society; this is also evidenced through international students’ experiences in education and society (Hage 1998; Weng et al. 2021a). Christianity has a significant role to play in the formation of this whiteness; here I use whiteness as a way to refer not to ‘people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning making’ (Jennings 2020). This whiteness has an enduring presence and persistence within Australian communities, including religious ones, and this is experienced by Indigenous and non-white Christians alike (Okuwobi et al. 2020; Prentis 2021; Weng et al. 2021b). Challenging whiteness is problematic in multicultural Australia because of a paradoxical dilemma; its strong association with social capital makes Australia attractive to international students as a place to pursue their higher education; however, it can also undermine Australia’s multicultural agenda and dissuade international students from selecting Australia as a migration destination (Seet and Zhao 2021). This paradox is reflected through Australian tertiary students’ evaluations of their teaching staff, where they tend to be biased towards women teaching staff, and especially those from non-English speaking background (Fan 2019). Moreover, international students tend to identify authentic Australians as ‘Caucasian’ or ‘white’ (Gomes 2016: 168). In short, international students are drawn to (white) Australia as a destination for higher education, and the social capital it offers is viewed as an alluring force since: ‘Whiteness [is] … a signifier of cultural and social power so much so that whiteness by association is sought-after’ (Gomes 2016: 168).

The above encounter is one of many experiences I have had since I arrived in Australia, and one of several reasons that prompted my doctoral research, where I was interested in unpacking normative assumptions about religion in Australia through a media analysis of public discourses. In many ways, my doctoral findings affirmed the unsettling aspects of my experiences within Christian communities in Australia where I began to see, through my outsider perspective, how white/Anglo culture has a strong, yet unchallenged, position in practices and social norms within these communities, often assumed to be doctrinally-informally. This racialised way of discussing, thinking and performing religion/Christianity is central in the Australian context (Weng 2019; Weng 2020; Weng et al. 2021b). Jon Stratton argues that ‘In modernity Christianity was reconstructed as fundamentally European and white’ and that ‘this Christian morality is implicitly White’ (Stratton 2016: 17). That in fact, modern Australia, as we know it today, ‘has been shaped by Christianity that that Christianity is profoundly white’ (Stratton 2016: 29). And yet, the issue of whiteness is currently underexamined in sociological studies of religion. There is a strong need to further interrogate the place of culture, context, race and ethnicity (Spickard 2017), and their role in intercultural and interreligious interactions (Bouma et al. 2022; Hage 2012) in Australia and internationally.

William Abur: Growing up in Christian Community in Global South

I was born in South Sudan and migrated to Australia during the civil war between South Sudan and Sudan. Despite the challenges of the civil war, practicing of religion as Christian group was one of the daily activities that youths were expected to engage in. there were pros and cons of the religion practice in global South which included colonisation values and practices. For example, local values and knowledge were not and are still not considered in the space of religion practice. Young people were denied, and nothing was taught about, their cultural values and local knowledge. In 2006, I migrated to Australia for safety reasons with my family. We went through settlement challenges, including learning a new language. Access to basic education was rare during the civil war in South Sudan, so I decided to take my education seriously, as one of the ways of overcoming the settlement issues I was facing. I completed my PhD at Victoria University, while I was working full-time.

My settlement experiences in Australia are similar to many migrants from newly arrived groups that come from non-English backgrounds. Particularly people of black colour face challenges, far worse than imagined. Australia is a multicultural society and is proud of its multiculturalism. However, there were many hurdles and obstacles for me, including having English as a second language. I also personally encountered some harmful racism and discrimination in Australia. Racism and discrimination have unfortunately been common problems for many African community members because of the visible colour of our skin, and negative perceptions of Africa as a poor continent linked to processes of colonisation. These issues of racism and discrimination faced by African community groups and individuals have been well documented in recent scholarship (Baak 2019; Losoncz 2019).

My experience of racism and discrimination shaped my critical studies in migration and settlement for newly arrived refugees. I became aware of the historical and ongoing issues and injustices facing Indigenous Australians. I also learned about the White Australia Policy, which was formally ended in 1973, and how the Racial Discrimination Act was introducedin 1975 (Abur 2019; Weng et al. 2021b). It then took until 1989, for multiculturalism to be officially embraced and translated into policy by the Federal Government. The aim of the multicultural policy is to recognise the diversity and foster harmony in Australia (Abur 2018; Macaulay 2022).

When talking about decolonising or decolonisation of the study of religion in Australia, it is about rethinking other better ways of educating rather than replicating invaders’ ways. Some of us are calling for the reconstruction of curricula on religion using lenses of local Indigenous peoples and culturally and religiously diverse peoples. This is a call for consideration of diversity and valuing people’s local people’s knowledges and practices.

As a young person, I was brought up in a Catholic tradition during my school years. We were taught much about Catholic doctrine, including the 10 commandments. It was also a place for learning and connection with other people who have common interests such as faith values, compassion, care and support. However, my Catholic education failed to recognise the traditional beliefs and practices from my ancestors and there were no ways of recognising traditional knowledges in this system. We were all expected to adopt and practice Catholic church values more than any other faith values. Some of the traditional base values teach useful philosophical ideas about life. For instance, Ubuntu in Africa teaches values of humanity, kindness, charity, voluntarism, human connection, respect and empathy, values that are meaningful to local people (AburMugumbate 2022). Young people are taught about history in the form of stories as well as other important lessons such as leadership, health and environmental lessons. I was taught by my siblings at an early age about the importance of sharing resources with our relatives, visitors or other community members. This was done through informal teaching, and these lessons can be more powerful than formal education.

A significant way of practicing these Catholic and Indigenous faith values is by providing assistance to poor and vulnerable community groups. As my own experience attests, people from refugee backgrounds, in particular, are vulnerable during migration and settlement periods. They tend to face many challenges in areas such as employment, racism and discrimination, and lack of support in education and other services (Abur 2019, 2018).

Belonging is essential for every person in life and helps refugees and migrants gain a sense of connection with their new community. Belonging to a religious institution, such as a church or mosque, can help African migrants in Australia with settlement, and to no longer feel alone or isolated (Abur 2019, 2018; Weng et al. 2021b). African culture highly regards community because through community your basic needs can be met, and you can find support, love, and harmony. Religious communities can play a positive role in settlement, providing hope by sharing positive stories, particularly when they consider and respect Indigenous and immigrant knowledges and understandings. Researcher’s studying migration need also to be aware of this. There is a great need for reform in the space of religious settlement, and the study of it, to consider Indigenous and immigrant practices and ways of knowing, beyond the colonial perspective of viewing the world.

Monika Winarnita: Understanding Australia’s Neighbour: Religion, Positionality and Power Relations

As an Indonesian studies lecturer in Australia, one of the main topics I teach students is how religion is part and parcel of understanding Indonesian society, Australia’s neighbour. It is a country known to be the most populous Muslim country in the world (about 87 per cent of its population); however, there are six recognised religions: Islam, Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Monotheism is enshrined in the Indonesian constitution under the Pancasila (five principles), with its first principle being a belief in an almighty God. My Indonesian citizenship identity card states my family’s religion as ‘Catholicism’ and this identity was important to my parents as it united both my father’s and my mother’s sides of the family, who otherwise come from different ethnic backgrounds. My father is Javanese (Central Javanese), the largest ethnic group in Indonesia that can claim indigeneity to the island of Java (a majority ethnic group). Because my paternal grandfather was the eldest son of a rice field-owning family, he was able to be educated at a Dutch Catholic school. In official state history, Indonesia was colonised by the Dutch for 350 years until proclaiming independence in 1945. The Dutch brought Chinese labourers to build the capital Batavia, now Jakarta, and were well known to favour the Chinese in a hierarchy of race; though lower than the Dutch, they were put higher than the Indigenous population. My mother is of the minority ethnic Chinese descent, from the peranakan or assimilated group in East Java whose ancestors have lived in Indonesia for over 300 years. My mum’s parents also had the privilege of attending Dutch Catholic schools. Yet, those of Chinese descent, even assimilated peranakan are always seen as a ‘foreigner’ in Indonesia as they are not able to claim indigeneity status or pribumi ‘native’ to a particular land in the archipelago. This minority–majority ethnic group tension often goes hand in hand with religious tension. The mass violence against ethnic Chinese Indonesians in 1998, at the fall of the Suharto authoritarian government, brought about an exodus to other countries such as Australia (see Winarnita et al. 2018). I moved to Australia at the age of 12 (now no longer a practicing Catholic), but having been born and previously lived in Jakarta, Indonesia’s cosmopolitan capital, it is not unusual to live in a mixed neighbourhood, or side by side Indonesians from all over the archipelago from different religious backgrounds.

Not everyone finds this usual. In a recent 2-week study tour with Australian university students to Indonesia, they lived in what seems to be an unusual majority Hindu Balinese transmigrant village in a Muslim predominant province of Lampung, on the South of Sumatra Island. The Balinese transmigrated in the 1960s due to volcanic eruptions on their island. The students kept asking our Balinese host, who runs an elephant conservation society, and other villagers what is it like to live in a combined Hindu–Muslim community. The father of our host, an elder, said that they had to put aside their differences and deal with issues such as how to make a living while protecting wild elephants with ecotourism as a solution.

I certainly witnessed another Indonesian ideology from the Pancasila of ‘unity in diversity’, in the combined cultural performances of welcoming guests through both the Lampung sembahan local dance by Muslim young women with headscarfs, together with Balinese female puspanjali dynamic dance accompanied by a full set of Balinese gamelan. The performance on our last night there was in the community centre not far from the Balinese Hindu Temple or Pura next to the Islamic Mosque, also at the heart of the village square where local youths of both religions play volleyball together every afternoon. Though this ideology of ‘unity in diversity’ is valued in daily interaction, it does not mean that the country does not have its fair share of sectarian violence between religions and persecution of minority ethno-religious groups; which happened also in this village in the late 1990s (See Schottmann and Winarnita 2013).

The Australian students on the study tour to this Hindu–Muslim village in Lampung all come from different disciplines including anthropology, and having this disciplinary background myself, we talked a lot about ethnography. In particular, how to understand our positionality and the power relations that exist in the fieldwork when we observe and participate in the daily lives of the villagers and living with their host families. As anthropologists, when thinking through decolonisation in our fieldwork encounters, we need to understand not only how colonisation such as the Dutch colonisation of Indonesia creates ethno-religious tension, but also unpack categories such as indigeneity from different and comparative colonial perspectives, as well as its use in discourses of persecution, privilege and power relations.

Anna Halafoff: Multifaith Relational Reality: De-bunking the Myth of White Christian Australia

When I commenced my PhD in sociology of religion at Monash University in 2006, and began working as a researcher for UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations, research on religion in Australia was very much focused on relations between the so-called Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This occurred in response to the global risk of terrorism, post 9-11, 2001, the 2005 London and the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings.

Despite being born in, and then based in, Melbourne for much of my life, I had lived in Far North Queensland and travelled to Central Australia and the Northern Territory in the early 1990s. I was very much aware of these regions, which not only are home to many Indigenous communities but also have long histories and a strong contemporary presence of immigrants from Asia. This diversity was yet to be acknowledged in the sociology of religion in the mid-2000s, which was very much preoccupied with the Abrahamic faiths in the southern states of Victoria and NSW.

At that time, Buddhism was actually the second largest religion in Australia, following Christianity, yet no-one within the sociology of religion seemed to acknowledge the significance of this either. As a practicing Buddhist, I began to study Buddhism in Australia in 2011, very slowly, with limited funding and time, given that most state and scholarly attention was then very much on Islam, and Jewish–Christian–Muslim relations. As briefly stated above, what my colleagues (Weng and others) and I discovered, over a decade of inquiry, and drawing on Hage’s (1998) insights on the Australian ‘White Nation fantasy’, was that the myth of a white, Christian Australia, created by the White Australia Policy, continued to eclipse the culturally and religiously diverse reality of Australia, of Indigenous traditions, and significant waves of migrants from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East since the mid-1800s, and particularly across the Far North (Weng et al. 2021a, 2021b; Halafoff et al. 2022).

As Ganter (2006: 26) exclaimed ‘(i)f we turn the map upside down and start Australian history where its documentation properly begins – in the north – the kaleidoscope of Australian history falls into a completely different pattern.’ She adds that it makes ‘nonsense of the idea of an isolated continent’ given Australia’s proximity to New Guinea and Asia, as ‘until World War II, whites were heavily outnumbered in the north by close-knit Asian and indigenous communities’ with a history of close relations.

My colleagues and I thus began to contribute to the decolonising of the sociology of religion in Australia through our research on Buddhism across the Far North, which completely debunked this myth of white, Christian Australia. Following Raewyn Connell’s (2014) lead on Southern Theory, it made us realise the need to undertake more research on South–South flows of migration, knowledge and material objects that now constitute the worldview diversity and complexity of Australia, comprising Indigenous, spiritual, religious and/or non-religious worldviews (Bouma et al. 2022; Bouma 2006; Halafoff et al. 2022).

Decolonising scholarship involves truth-telling of these untold stories, and of stories that are marginalised, to counter unequal power relations. It also impacts upon how we do research. As Paradies (2020) and Yunkaporta (2019) teach us, First Peoples' knowledges are critical and relational, focused on patterns and interconnections with Country, waterways and skies and multiple species. In both First Peoples' knowledges and Buddhist philosophy, the social expands beyond human society, to the more-than-human, beyond an emphasis on words – although storying is central – to emotions, intuition, knowing, creativity and (non)action (Yunkaporta 2019; Halafoff et al. 2022; Halafoff et al. 2023). Sociology of religion is not only in the process of being decolonised, but also experiencing related material, feminist and animal/multispecies turns, as we question the previously dominant frameworks of modernity, which elevated white, male, European, rational thought above all ‘others’ 2022.

The lands now called Australia’s position, ‘South of the West’ (Gibson 1992) also contributes new insights to the decolonising of the sociology of religion more broadly. It is the voices of those long ‘othered’ that we need most to listen to and learn from. Indigenous scholars, scholars of colour, female and trans scholars, LGBTI + scholars, migrant scholars, minority faith scholars, ‘insiders’ who can share their/our stories, to challenge the dominant, false narratives of who we are as a ‘nation’, which remain shaped by settler colonial violence. This critical and creative storying reveals the relational reality of who we actually are, and concurrently have the potential of becoming, in timeless awareness, to free ourselves and all beings from suffering.

Rosie Clare Shorter: (un)Learning Colonial Legacies

The legacies of colonial violence are embedded in my current academic home, sociology of religion (Nye 2019), and my first spiritual home, Sydney Anglicanism (Wolfe 2019). ‘Religion’ as a category of analysis is enmeshed with Protestantism and Imperialism (Carey 2011; Nye 2019). The global spread of Anglicanism and the English Bible is tied to the imposition of British norms and values (Carey 2011; Piggin and Linder 2018, 2020; Lake 2020; Page and Shipley 2020). While the mission to Aboriginal peoples is described in Australian Christian contexts as an act of love, it is an act of colonisation. In colonial Australia, the ‘Eurocentricity’ of missionaries ‘left them insensitive to the nature of Aboriginal connection to the land and convinced them that First Australians had to be civilised before they were evangelised’ (Piggin and Linder 2020: 565–566). Words such as ‘civilised’ and ‘mission’ are used to hide colonial violence. Unsurprisingly, Aboriginal Christian Leader Brooke Prentis (2018: 10), says that ‘Mission’ is ‘a word that can send shivers down your spine’.

While this does not surprise me, today, it once would have. As a child, in the 1990s, I did not learn that the bible I was asked to memorise was a multicultural text which had been used both to advance colonial power and to resist it (Lake 2020). I did not learn about William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta man, who used Christianity to fight colonial violence 100 years ago.

I did not learn about this at my Presbyterian high school, with its call to sancte sapienter (holiness and wisdom) emblazoned on our badges, nor in the Anglican church, despite a diocesan commitment to using Scripture to ‘test’ tradition and Church practice (Thompson 2012: n.p.). It is a sign of my ignorance and privilege that despite having three migrant grandparents, two of them holocaust survivors, I did not grow up thinking critically about coloniality, or personally experiencing racialized violence.

My late realisation of the ways in which my faith tradition and my discipline are implicated in colonial and gendered violence has made me acutely aware of the need for decolonising the study of religion, and, for Christian people, decolonising our practice of religion. Learning that gendered and racist violence is firmly enmeshed in colonial systems of power, which in turn are endorsed by Christian churches (Lugones 2016: O’Sullivan 2021) makes this a matter of urgency and of survival. I need to turn my attention towards decolonial analyses and action because to do otherwise would be unethical and unjust.

As academics, our trade is in knowledge production, so we can respond to the challenges and opportunities of decolonising, by rethinking how we do knowledge, how we do research, how we write and who we cite (Ahmed 2017; Nye 2019). Nye (2019) contends that to decolonise the sociology of religion requires more than adding more non-white authors to the curriculum and to our research. Attending to the politics of citations also means removing some authors, even if their work has been deemed a ‘classic’, foundational even. For example, Nye is blunt about removing Durkheim’s works from reading lists, or at the very least making sure it is criticised as an example of colonial and racist methodology.

As I look to the past and the future of sociology, I want a different set of classics. The first time I taught undergraduate sociology in 2020, the textbook certainly critiqued the canon of dead white men, yet still replicated it, giving merely a passing not to some ‘founding mothers’ and W. E. B. DuBois. We are often tasked with ‘going back’ to influential yet problematic authors (Durkheim, Foucault), but perhaps we need an expectation of ‘going back’ to DuBois and Frantz Fanon.

So, let’s assemble a decolonised ‘canon.’ I’m conscious of Connell’s (2014) point that we don’t decolonise by creating another dominating discourse or by merely circulating a reading list. However, as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2000: 316) argues, ‘being non-existent within curricula’ is how colonial silencing and violences are enacted across universities. Assembling an alternate set of key texts and frameworks is a worthwhile project. Not ‘founding’ texts, but, to echo Paradies (2020), a set of ‘unsettling’ texts, which are attuned to the legacies of colonial violence and which prioritise non-white voices, non-male voices and collaborative projects. Such texts might not be labelled as sociology of religion, they might come from neighbouring research areas. But now is the time for an anti-colonial sociology and a more imaginative and creative sociology, which moves beyond reliance on the ‘classics’ (Connell 2020) and beyond firm disciplinary walls. As Walter (2022: 2) and colleagues ask of sociology more broadly:

What is the use … of a field of study whose stated task is to empirically and theoretically explain how societies work, but which fails to examine colonization as the genesis and ongoing foundation of the structure and function of its own society?

Now is the time for flexibility, imagination, collaboration. Now is the time for a decolonial sociology of religion.

Conclusions

Our reflections, though varied and diverse, reveal the importance of critical, decolonial engagement with studies of religion in Australia. We have particularly focused on the need to challenge the dominant myth of a White Christian Nation, from multiple perspectives. Doing this is integral to fostering a rich, robust and relevant fields of study, which look beyond Western constructions of religion as the stuff of doctrine and belief, and are instead attuned to the many and varied lived, material and embodied, multifaith and spiritual practices that exist across these lands.

Beginning with Paradies’s reflections, this paper serves as a reminder that narrow colonial categorisations have resulted in studies of religion in Australia being blind to the religiosity and spirituality of First Peoples. Paradies calls us to look beyond Western constructions of religion as the stuff of doctrine and belief, and to attend to the music and melody of Indigenous religion, spirituality and relationality. Next, through the collective experiences of Weng, Abur and Winarnita, we are reminded that coloniality structures contemporary societies, human interaction and transnational experiences across continents, and produces a set of relations which are more complex than Indigenous/non-Indigenous, where it is assumed the non-Indigenous settler is necessarily white. Weng’s reflections asked us to critically consider the co-construction of whiteness and Christianity, her presence as a ‘visibly Asian’ volunteer among an otherwise homogenous group of white Christian women disrupted the expectations of both white Australians and international students. Similarly, as a migrant from Africa, Abur’s experiences some of the limits and challenges of Australian multiculturalism; an ideal or value that in reality is riddled with racism and exclusion. Winarnita expanded our discussion to consider Dutch imperialism, and the complex layering or multi-religious and multicultural experiences across Indonesia. Flowing from Winarnita’s timely reminder that our positionality informs how we research and what we are attuned to see, Halafoff and Shorter both reflected on the practicalities of how we start to do decolonial research. Given the decolonial emphasis on engaging with knowledge (production) differently, on deep-listening and truth-telling, Halafoff aptly reflects on the importance of story as method, on creativity and relationality, focusing on the untold stories of Buddhism, multifaith diversity and cultural exchange across the north of the continent. Shorter then examined the daily work of citational politics – who we leave in, who we leave out – and what this tells us about the tendency to replicate old colonial hierarchies, as well as the capacity to disrupt and do away with them.

Finally, our collective reflections have been an exercise in relational thinking. Together we highlight that acknowledging diversity in religious, spiritual and cultural practice is core not only to doing decolonial study of religion in so-called Australia, but, perhaps more importantly, to truth-telling and unravelling historical political myths, and to both imagining and enacting a shared future which radically breaks away from colonial violence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council DP23100538 and the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation – Mobilities, Diversity and Multiculturalism Stream Funding.

Notes on contributors

Anna Halafoff

Anna Halafoff is Associate Professor in Sociology of Religion in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. Anna is a Chief Investigator on three Australian Research Council Discovery Projects: Spirituality in Australia, Religious Diversity in Australia and the Worldviews of Generation Z Australians and on. She is the author of The Multifaith Movement: Global Risks and Cosmopolitan Solutions, and co-author (with Andrew Singleton, Mary Lou Rasmussen, and Gary Bouma) of Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity.

Rosie Clare Shorter

Rosie Clare Shorter is a feminist researcher interested in genders and sexualities research, and sociology of religion. She is a thematic group (sociology of religion) co-convenor for The Australian Sociological Association, and has taught into a variety of undergraduate courses across sociology, anthropology and gender studies. She lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne), and is currently a Research Fellow at Deakin University.

Enqi Weng

Enqi Weng is a Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. She researches the impact of coloniality, with a focus on intercultural relations, and the inclusion and belonging of ethnic and religious minorities, including within digital media culture. She is the author of Media Perceptions of Religious Changes in Australia: Of Dominance and Diversity, Vice President of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion and Reviews Editor for the Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture.

Yin Paradies

Yin Paradies is an animist anarchist activist Wakaya man who is committed to understanding and interrupting the devastating impacts of modern societies. He seeks mutuality of becoming and embodied kinship with all life through transformed ways of knowing, being and doing. Yin is Chair in Race Relations at Deakin University where he conducts research on topics such as racism, anti-racism and cultural competence. He also teaches and undertakes research in Indigenous knowledges and decolonisation. Yin has authored 250 publications, been awarded grants worth $49 million, is an invited reviewer for more than 125 journals and has 19,000 citations with a Google h index of 66.

William Abur

William Abur is a lecturer in social work department at the University of Melbourne. He conducted research and published review papers in his areas of research. His research interests include refugee settlement, mental health, trauma, resilience, youth and family wellbeing, social work education and practice, participation in employment and sport, racism and discrimination, Ubuntu social work practice. William has intensive experiences and skills in group work, casework, case management, community development, social work education, social research, counselling, and cultural training. He has worked in secondary schools, community mental health and settlement services. He had worked in refugee camps as a counsellor and a manger for the counselling centre in Kenya for seven years.

Monika Winarnita

Monika Winarnita is a Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the University of Melbourne and is currently the Convener of the Indonesia Forum. She is also a member of the Gender, Environment and Migration Research Network at the university's Asia Institute. Monika's publications and research interests include ethnography of the Indonesian and Malay diaspora, gender and cultural performance, as well as digital lives and precarious work. Her book based on her PhD Thesis (Australian National University, 2014) ‘Dancing the Feminine: Gender and Identity Performances by Indonesian Migrant Women’ (Liverpool University Press UK/University of Chicago Press USA, 2016) was awarded Monograph of Distinction (chosen out of 80 titles) by the University of Victoria BC Canada in 2017 during her Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship.