On A Current Affair Magda Szubanski said it was ok for her to criticize Jenny Morrison because of the growing influence of the Christian Right in Australian politics.

But just like an expose on a dodgy car salesman who left his stash in the Lamborghini of the unnamed wife of a minor MAFS celebrity who may be cheating (no-judgment); just because someone said it on A Current Affair doesn’t mean its true.

The Christian Right meme gets tossed around a lot on social and regular passive-aggressive media. Having a church-going Christian Prime Minister like Scott Morrison probably doesn’t help those who are easily triggered by such things, though they seemed less concerned when Kevin Rudd was doing the media conferences outside his church. Just saying.

But is this rise of Christian Right influence really a thing? Contrary to the feminist agitprop porn that is The Handmaid’s Tale, where is this much mooted control and influence on Australian society?

Certainly not in our university system where attempts to establish a Ramsay cultural centre to study Western civilization and Judeo-Christian values was strongly resisted by academia as being inappropriate despite it being a completely logical thing for a university based in a country formed through Western Judeo-Christian values to teach — plus the offer of free non-Chinese government money.

And certainly not in influential taxpayer-funded organizations like the ABC that during Easter ran surveys on their website respectfully asking people whether they thought God existed (can’t wait for their Ramadan follow-up polling on Islam). In fact, most of the ABC’s Easter reporting seemed less concerned with celebrating Australia’s largest religious faith than with pointing out its faults.

On bedrock Christian Right issues like opposition to gay marriage, they comprehensively lost that argument with overwhelming public support leading to a change of laws. And despite their criticism, voluntary euthanasia laws are being introduced across Australia.

While the Christian Right object to many of the PC projects of the Green Left, they are clearly losing those battles too. Concepts such as gender fluidity are now widely taught through programs such as Safe Schools and only this week it was announced that use of gendered terms such as ‘mum’ and ‘dad’ are to be discouraged in Victorian schools. Given this social engineering is increasingly (for better or worse) the largely unquestioned default position across Australian society, media and institutions, claims of ‘Christian influence’ seem widely overstated.

In reality, like Black Lives Matter and other covid-lockdown-exempt Left rallying points these complaints about a meddling Christian movement are most likely borrowed from the United States where an actually influential Christian Lobby does successfully insert itself into the democratic process. Though even there the new Biden Administration is moving at a great pace using executive orders to push through an AOC and Twitter approved woke agenda.

Of course (and at least for now) as is their democratic right, Christian groups have and will (sometimes loudly) complain about many of these social changes. Maybe this is what Magda and our other brave Aussie social media warriors are really complaining about. Having largely won the culture wars and had the changes they wanted embedded in law, they just hate the fact that anyone should ever dare to complain about it.

Forget Handmaid’s, this is more like that other much better dystopian novel 1984, where it isn’t enough to obey Big Brother. You must love everything he does as well.

Michael Scammell is a freelance writer. He writes at https://mdswords.wordpress.com and Tweets at @MichaelScammell.