I recently read Amanda Lohrey’s QE from 2006, Voting for Jesus: Christianity and politics in Australia, which seems relevant to this discussion. In it she quotes Justice Michael Adams, a Uniting Church elder, who said at a Christian legal convention in 2001 that basically ‘every major reform in modern history – including the much-vaunted Christian opposition to slavery – was opposed by the organised churches and divided individual Christians’.

Lohrey writes:

Justice Adams concludes that the churches, as such, have generally reflected the dominant notions of the societies in which they operated, ‘whether they were brutal, cruel, acquisitive, irrational, unjust or (latterly) liberal’. What then is the role of the church in law reform? asks Justice Adams, and concludes:

I think that it can do little else than not stand in the way … In the end, there is no reason to suppose that the Church will try to defend that which it never helped to create, a liberal democracy governed by the rule of law, for all that individual Christians might do do.

I was reading the essay for an entirely different reason – the role of the Church in abortion law reform – but this passage stayed with me, and, imo, echoes Maxine’s sentiments.