COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright Schooling Faith: Religious discourse, neo-liberal hegemony and the neo-Calvinist ‘parent-controlled’ schooling movement Remy Yi Siang Low A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences 14 November 2013 Statement of Originality I declare that the research presented here is my own original work and has not been submitted to any other institution for the award of a degree. Signed: Date: 14 November 2013 2 Acknowledgements I would like to express my utmost gratitude to Dr. Guy Redden, supervisor extraordinaire, for his invaluable insights, searching questions, generous sacrifices of time and, of course, delightfully colourful metaphors. If he was paid per word for reading, the years of my candidature would be sufficient to fund his retirement. A word of sincere thanks is also owed to my associate supervisor, Dr. Ruth Barcan. Her advice on how to begin, how to keep going and how to finish has played no small part in sustaining me through this journey. I am also grateful for Dr. Barcan’s careful reading of the final drafts of this thesis. Credit must also be given to Dr. Roland Boer, who has been an ‘intellectual father’ to me. I am grateful to all my teachers, colleagues and friends in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney who have been tremendously supportive of me. I have particularly loved the many cups of coffee and glasses of wine in the company of the ‘Orgone Collective’ (Timothy Laurie, Mark Steven, Liam Grealy and Jess Kean), Qiu Zitong and Sarah Cefai, as well as fellow travellers Andrei Miriou and Emelia Noack-Wilkinson. Special mention must be made of Maria Elena Indelicato, who has been a constant light at the lowest and darkest passages of my journey. She is a colleague, guide and sister for whom I am eternally thankful. I also thank Lara, who brings me comfort and delight, as well as critical and searching questions on all matters metaphysical! I owe an incalculable debt to my mother, Wendy, who has never stopped believing in me, even when everyone else had cast me into the ‘too hard’ basket. I hope you are vindicated by what you see. For their love and support, my father (Eng Hwa) and my sister (Lyn) also deserve many thanks, as do my family in Penang, Malaysia, whose open arms to balik kampung are a refuge from life’s storms. Finally, I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my beloved arma (grandmother), who did not live to see this thesis completed. Despite being illiterate, she never ceased to impress upon me the importance of learning. I know your spirit participates in my every step. 3 Abstract Since the mid-1990s, there has been a sustained growth in religious schooling in Australia generally and with it, an intense dispute has swirled around the acceptability and desirability of this trend. In turn, these debates in the realm of education are not separate from broader questions arising in ostensibly secular-liberal nations like Australia over what has been termed the ‘new visibility of religion’ in public life. In this thesis, I bring the questions surrounding the new public visibility of religion to bear specifically on the issue of religious schooling in Australia. In the first half, I offer an extended genealogical account of how education in such schools has come to be officially defined as concerned with the transmission of private beliefs in supernatural objects alongside the delivery of state-mandated training requirements. The antecedents for this definition lie, I contend, in the nominalist, Protestant and Anglo-liberal inheritance of the present neo-liberal regime. On the basis of this, I consider the effects of such a definition of religious schooling with reference to the case of the Neo-Calvinist ‘Parent-Controlled’ schooling movement in the latter half of this thesis. This religious schooling movement was initiated in the 1950s in explicit opposition to the mainstream education system in Australia, advancing instead an expansive view of religious discourse as affecting all educational practices. The movement remains insistent on its religiously distinctive ‘foundational values’ despite its present integration into the mainstream education 4 system today. I examine how this is negotiated in the discourse of the NCPC schooling movement within the present conjuncture. Through this specific example, I submit that the new visibility of religious schooling in Australia is predicated on two conditions of acceptability defined by the hegemonic discourse of neo-liberalism: firstly, that religious schooling is able to conform to a broad consensus on the purpose of schooling as a means of training worker-citizens; and secondly, religion of the sort articulated by such religious schooling adopts a form marketable to consumers, who are free to choose schools on the basis of their private preferences. This has implications not only for the way religion is conceived in religious schools that are currently operant, but also for those whose religious discourses are less amenable to such articulations. 5 Table of Contents Statement of Originality ................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgements......................................................................................................... 3 Abstract ........................................................................................................................... 4 Figures ............................................................................................................................ 9 Abbreviations ................................................................................................................11 Introduction ..................................................................................................................12 The new visibility of religious schooling in Australia .......................................21 Contours of the debate over religious schooling ................................................26 On liberalism and neo-liberalism .......................................................................35 Excursus: Arriving at the non-neutrality of religion and education ...................39 A conjunctural approach to discourse, tradition and hegemony.........................48 The long route through history: Thesis in outline ..............................................61 Chapter 1 – A prolegomenon to genealogies of religious education ............................68 Introduction ........................................................................................................68 How is religious education officially conceived in contemporary Australia? ....68 The contingencies of religion and education ......................................................76 Why genealogies of religious education? ...........................................................85 Discursive traditions ...........................................................................................90 Conclusion ........................................................................................................100 Chapter 2 - Religious education in the Anglo-liberal tradition ...................................103 Introduction ......................................................................................................103 Liberalism as a discursive tradition ..................................................................104 Religion/world: Nominalism and the cleavage of belief from practical reason109 Religion/practice: The Protestant reformation and the individualisation of belief124 Religion/public: The Anglo-liberal state and belief in the private sphere ........141 6 Conclusion ........................................................................................................167 Chapter 3 – The development of religious education in Australia .............................170 Introduction ......................................................................................................170 Religious education in Australia: Foundational politics ...................................173 Religious education in Australia for the national good ....................................191