The Australian Liberal Party and Religion
There is a lot of discussion and I think a misunderstanding of religious groups’ influence in the Liberal Party in Australia. Much of it characterizes the religious group of the hour - Pentecostals, opus dei, mormons and others - as being some kind of unwelcome infestation of the party by brainwashed people. This is dehumanizing and utterly wrong in my opinion. It is both better and worse than that and to accurately characterize this a better model of understanding comes from sociological analysis by Philip Selznick of Bolsheviks in his classic “The Organizational Weapon” and similar work on club models of religion.
In the Wealth of Religions Barro and McCleary outlines a paper by Laurence Iannaccone of a club model of religions that “thrive by insisting on extreme behaviour and sacrifice to promote homogeneity and commitment among members. The sacrifice and stigma screen out free riders and retain the enthusiastic participants who promote individual and group interests.” One example cited of this stigma includes non-conformist religious practices like those of the “early Pentecostals in the United States featured members making animal sounds such as barking, howling, hooting like an owl and chattering like a frightened monkey…. these enthusiastic worship services drove the less committed away. Consequently, the quantity and quality of within-group religious goods increased.”
There are a lot of people who make fun of various religious groups on twitter of the more extreme or fringe Christian variety. The benefits of the group cohesion within these groups cannot be readily denied - the branch stacking in the Victorian branch has been widely reported as in South Australia. Increasingly if you want to get preselected in the Liberal Party you do not necessarily have to be a member of one of these religious groups but you probably need their indifference at a minimum. To that end those claiming the Liberal Party has been hijacked do have a point: these groups do not necessarily represent a majority but a highly cohesive minority of 25-30% can exert effective control, as any investor in Asian listed but still substantively family controlled equities can attest.
Why do people join these groups? For the in-group goods, namely solidarity more or less no matter what which can be awfully useful in political life and life in general especially if you have a tendency to sleep with your staff while espousing family values (form an orderly queue former ministers of the Morrison government). Having people who will back you up more or less no matter what you do can be very useful, and the more fundamentally malign and immoral you are the more useful it is. One extended analysis by Berman of these religious groups and clubs asked why they are so effective at violence in the case of clubs in the middle east:
Berman found that the mutual aid model is most effective in countries or regions with inefficient if not failed economies. Radical religious groups that engage in violence, such as Hamas, the Taliban, Hezbollah, and al-Sadr’s militia, thrive in inefficient economies as they rely on members who have poor outside alternatives to joining the group. Should outside options exist, these groups ensure that they destroy them. That is why many of these groups have a scorched earth approach to warfare.
The systematic undermining of any other factions and the like is very much part of the program here and allows these clubs to control a party. If the party controls government, then it can dole out jobs for the boys, staffing roles and all manner of goodies to group members. If you are a person of middling talents and ambitions both political and monetary then joining the club seems like a good choice. This is perhaps why we see a lot of “family values” types being caught out not engaging in what that term is generally understood to mean - they made a calculated bet to join something they never really believed in.
A key feature of all this behaviour is a deep alienation with the existing order at a doctrinal level: “the religious terrorist perceives himself or herself as engaging in the destruction of a system with which he or she does not identify. The problem lies with the enemy, not with the sect.” The religious club generally believes that the state of things is irretrievable by any incremental or organic process, the rules do not or should not apply to them and that a core objective is subverting or replacing those rules and norms. It is utterly opposed to any form of institutional conservatism.
To that end it is best to look at these movement and their political behaviour and conduct as more like Bolshevik parties as extensively analysed by Philip Selznick in “The Organizational Weapon”. His characterization of Communist or Leninist subversion applies readily to the current milieu of religious right groups within the Liberal Party:
Communist subversion is of another order. The difference lies in the central aim of Leninism: the concentration of total social power in the hands of a ruling group. This is not the only goal of bolshevism, but this search for unlimited power decisively shapes the behavior of the communist parties. Whether or not we say that bolsheviks seek power for its own sake, or in order to further some more ultimate aims, makes little difference.
Similarly:
Nor is it to be expected that communism will adapt itself to the constitutional order. To be sure, other movements, as they have gained influence and a stake in the status quo, have altered their aims. But the problem is not one of goals alone, but of methods that have placed their stamp upon the character of this movement and are sustained in action wherever bolshevism exists. These methods are inherently subversive because they represent an unrelenting search for power in areas and by devices which know no constitutional restraint. The continued use of these methods holds communism to the revolutionary line.
I suspect that at this point the Liberal Party is too far gone on this account. The branches have been stacked, the organization fundamentally cannot be pulled back from control exerted by these more extremist groups and worst of all for all involved it appears much of the Australian public has figured this out. Selznick’s comments about Bolsheviks can well apply to religious culture warriors:
Leninism views politics as omnipresent. As a consequence, bolshevik strategy has identified vast new areas of political potential in what are usually thought to be nonpolitical special-purpose social institutions and mass organizations. This theory of power has increased the sensitivity of bolshevik strategy to unconventional methods of gaining influence. Exploitation of these devices has helped to keep the communist movement from adapting itself to constitutional methods; in this way, it has rejected the path of accommodation taken, for example, by most sections of the international socialist movement.
And in that regard in like of recent reporting they forgot some important lessons of Leninism:
The most general of such implications is the subordination of propaganda to the needs of organizational strategy. If the struggle for access or legitimacy demands concealment of aims, then the communists will not hesitate to hide them.
The only way to recover is to lose and lose so brutally and comprehensively across every state and territory that the various hangers on and enablers realize that the club can no longer deliver the goods to the in group because it is now unelectable. At that point the party likely shrinks and something else emerges because it is going to be very hard to unstack a party which has been occupied by such a disciplined and focussed vanguard. This is why I expect the Liberal Party to shrink and probably cease to be a major party barring some radical reform and changes. Anything that accelerates that process is indisputably a good thing.
Tough words and uncomfortable truths no doubt for some readers but there is a clear distinction between a small counterinsurgency and when it is time to get on the last chopper out because it is now very much over for the party as a moderate or Burkean conservative force. As reasonable as some people may sound if they do not control the branches their opinions are as valuable as South Vietnamese generals in 1974.
Excellent mentalizing of Australian Pentecostals and the rationale behind their political strategy. We need more analyses like this that treat extremist religious groups not as an anti-modern aberration but as as social groups integral to the needs of modern electoral politics.
Geee isn't this interesting to revisit now, post the 2025 election.....