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Now You See It: Now You Don't! Issues of Secularity and Secularisation in Publicly Funded Elementary Schools in the Australian Colonies during the Middle Third of the Nineteenth Century
Author(s) -
Ely Richard
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of religious history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 13
eISSN - 1467-9809
pISSN - 0022-4227
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9809.12072
Subject(s) - secularity , secularization , protestantism , secularism , atheism , secular state , religious studies , argument (complex analysis) , sociology , law , philosophy , political science , theology , islam , biochemistry , chemistry , politics
This article opens and ends with reference to two interlinked studies: C harles T aylor's 2007 A Secular Age , and his 2011 Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays . These are often magnificent but sometimes flawed works. This article aims to explore the implications and ramifications of T aylor's failure to discuss, in either study, nineteenth‐century provision for secular instruction by government elementary schools in I reland, G reat B ritain, and the A ustralian colonies. What these did or did not mean should have been grist to T aylor's mill, especially since, in these places (and other E nglish‐speaking countries, such as the U nited S tates, C anada, and N ew Z ealand) “secular instruction” provisions soon attracted energetic imputations of infidelity and atheism, as well as support. “Secular Instruction” Acts in two A ustralian colonies ( V ictoria in 1872, S outh A ustralia in 1851 and 1875) are here considered in detail, for these, especially the V ictorian, were interpreted by some then and more recently as emphatically secular (in the sense of “Godless”). My argument is that this emphatic secularity, for emphatic it often was, mostly should not be read as “Godless” but as an often Protestant‐inflected statutory expression — of the kind usefully defined — by reference to an ideal type — as “Civic Protestantism.”