Evangelical Belief And Enlightenment Morality In The Australian Temperance Movement

"This book explores the history of the Australian temperance movement and the ideas that informed it, offering a detailed examination of the beliefs of evangelicals involved. The temperance movement in Australia was large and influential, and played a vital role in shaping the cultural and political life of the emerging nation across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study focuses on the relationship between evangelicalism and moral enlightenment ideas within the temperance movement between 1832 and 1930. It considers the complex and varied ways in which they interacted within the thinking of the movement's leaders, enriches discussions regarding religion and secularisation, and offers new insight into the involvement of women. Against the larger horizon of global evangelicalism, the international temperance movement, and the evolution of Australian political culture, the chapters look at the reported words and actions of five key temperance leaders: John Saunders, George Washington Walker, Alfred Stackhouse, Mary Ann Thomas and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls. The book will be relevant to scholars of religious history and those with an interest in the evangelical Protestant tradition"--

This book explores the history of the Australian temperance movement and the ideas that informed it, offering a detailed examination of the beliefs of evangelicals involved. The temperance movement in Australia was large and influential, and played a vital role in shaping the cultural and political life of the emerging nation across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The study focuses on the relationship between evangelicalism and 'Moral Enlightenment' ideas within the temperance movement between 1832 and 1930. It considers the complex and varied ways in which they interacted within the thinking of the movement’s leaders, enriches discussions regarding religion and secularisation, and offers new insight into the involvement of women. Against the larger horizon of global evangelicalism, the international temperance movement, and the evolution of Australian political culture, the chapters look at the reported words and actions of six key temperance leaders: John Saunders, George Washington Walker, John McEncroe, Alfred Stackhouse, Mary Ann Thomas and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls. The book will be relevant to scholars of religious history and those with an interest in the evangelical Protestant tradition.

This pioneering study describes the quest of Baptists in the different colonies (later states) to develop their identity as Australians and Baptists. The first comprehensive history of Baptists in Australia with a national focus, the Baptist story is traced from their beginnings in 1831 with the first baptisms in Woolloomooloo Bay (Sydney) in 1832 down to modern times. Changes and continuities, achievements and failures are carefully analyzed and related to the wider social, political and cultural context.The first volume covers the period from 1831 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and shows how a strong sense of becoming an Australian Church shaped much of their development from the various types of British Baptists who began the movement in the new nation. What it meant to be an Australian Baptist is described using denominational newspapers, church records and personal memoirs.

Explaining how Australia’s secular society derives from its colonial past, this book examines: • the environmental and social context that encouraged godlessness, including the convict system, the bush, materialism and cultural development; • religious practice and sectarianism; • the state’s policy of denominational even-handedness to ensure social harmony; • the challenges to faith that science and critical biblical scholarship posed; and • churchmen’s attempts to foist a moral code on society, and their ambivalent attitudes to society’s poor and distressed.

Attitudes towards Aborigines by squatters, European works & liberals; very brief history of missions in N.S.W. and work of missionaries in N.S.W. & Tasmania.

Euthanasia emerged as a talking point for progressives and secularists in the West in the 1960s. Given that they simply appropriated (without anyone’s permission) control of national and private broadcasters, newspapers and university faculties, it became, eo ipso, a matter of public controversy. Other modish enthusiasms of that period – sexual licentiousness and psychotropic drugs for example – have long been abandoned, but the quest for legislative sanctioning of the killing of the old and infirm and distressed never abated; not a parliamentary year passed in one of the Australian States, it seemed, or even at Commonwealth level, but another bill was placed on the notice paper. Well, in the states of Victoria and Western Australia, that bill is now an act as it is in Canada, various states in the USA, The Netherlands, Belgium and other nation states. It has remained an Article of Faith for the left throughout all of the decades of post-modernity – just like that other form of authorised killing: abortion. Why is this? What is it about these issues that evoke in the minds and imaginations of liberals and leftists an almost millenarian enthusiasm? It required a scholar of Father Fleming’s insight and experience to provide us with the explanation, in this, the latest and, in my view, most important of his publications. His answer takes us to a close examination of the real legacy of the enlightenment, and it is not the benign and rational one that generations of us have been taught to believe in our schools. His careful unravelling of the three centuries of the secular project from Rousseau to Safe-Schools can leave us in no doubt as to what comes next if we don’t stand up for the Christian inheritance of our institutes. It was always about power. And power always ends up being about persecution. Father Fleming has been a priest, a broadcaster, a controversialist and a scholar in his long and distinguished journey through public life. His book will be essential reading for the many Christian folk of all denominations who now understand that our age will be one that will call upon them to be soldiers as well as servants for the church. – Stuart H Lindsay, barrister and former federal circuit court judge

In this first book to assess the combined influence of temperance and suffrage on woman's evolving role in American society, sociologist Janet Zollinger Giele argues that the two movements together accomplished much more than either could have done alone.