A number of points need making about this trope:

(a) Abbott is, of course, not the first federal leader of the Liberal party to be a Catholic. Sectarianism was definitely a factor in the largely Protestant and bourgeois parties of the centre right in the past, and there may be residual effects within the Liberal party itself. It’s worth remembering that Malcolm Turnbull is a Catholic, and this issue (as far as I can recall) was never highlighted during his leadership.

However, Tony Abbott is the first leader to be associated with a particular style of political Catholicism – one which, some decades ago, would have been much more closely associated with the DLP (and indeed still has influence within various ALP right factions and unions). Outside the circles around Cardinal George Pell this sort of neo-grouper politics has little influence in Australian Catholicism itself. Australian Catholics are less unified politically than in the days of sharper religious and political cleavages, and while social justice Catholicism is also a living tradition, my own view is that the post Vatican II Catholic Church is much less politicised with respect to the broader community. That holds less for those who are identified with Pope Benedict’s ‘reform of the reform’, but here, there is often a significant disjunction between Papal social teaching in some areas and an ensemble of conservative social and political positions held by the Pontiff’s Antipodean warriors.

In short, the interface of religion and politics has itself been affected by a secularisation within Australian culture, which is powerfully related to a dissolution of modernist political battle lines.

(b) This fracturing of a largely unitary theological and political constellation is reflected in, and in turn, influenced by a different way of seeing the imperatives of religion for acting within culture. Guy Rundle has summed it up thus:

There are three dominant ideas of God in Christianity at the moment. Leaving aside literal protestant fundamentalists, the division between the other two runs right through the middle of the Roman Catholic church. On the one side are those who believe that God may be a real entity, but cannot be expressed in human terms?—?and consequently the idea that God might have firm views on homosexuality, condoms, evolution, traditional aboriginal culture etc is a category error. On the other is the idea that God has a more knowable form with whom a dialogue of sorts is possible?—?if not exactly a Grandpa in the Sky, God can be thought of in terms sufficiently assimilable to humanity to make the pronoun “He” a meaningful one.

The division is not around the unique divinity of Jesus Christ, but around whether the creation of a specific moral and political order is a business of humans left to do it by themselves, or one in which God’s will and law can be interpreted and acted on.

Our society and politics is overwhelmingly of the first belief. It is a widespread belief that underlies the Australian polity as a humanist one. Tony Abbott is part of the second formation, and it is perfectly legitimate to pin him to the wall on it.

Writing as a Catholic committed to a left wing politics, I would want to complicate that a little – for instance, the question of the Divine and personhood is more complex – but it’s an accurate social diagnosis. I’d also observe in passing that the more universalist perspective on the Divine is also one that Joe Hockey made his own (in a recent speech which is better thought through than most of its detractors grant). However, I’d agree with Rundle’s conclusion – and add to it the point that targeting Abbott as if he were solely representative of Catholicism or God is both wrong and politically counter-productive. It’s, in fact, the mirror image of his own self-conception.

(c) Rundle also raises the spectre of right wing ressentiment and victimology in an interesting discussion of the populist politics of the right. Again, it’s worth remembering that Tony Abbott and the conservative commentariat are not the ‘representatives’ of Catholics in the pews (or the much greater number who kneel in pews only very occasionally, if at all); and that the much taunted Liberal ‘base’ is in one sense correct in assuming the rhetorical position of victimised minority – the minority bit.