In the wake of the December 2025 Bondi Beach terrorist attack, the Australian government has moved swiftly to introduce new legislation, toughening regulations on speech and lowering the threshold for what constitutes a hate crime. In an effort to appear religiously impartial, the government is framing the law as a broad initiative against all forms of hate and violence, rather than targeting any specific ideology. The proposed measures expand existing hate crime provisions and introduce stricter penalties for offenders.
But the government’s attempt to combat Islamic terrorism through the appearance of religious neutrality is fundamentally incoherent, because no government can, in practice or principle, govern in a religiously neutral way. Every nation necessarily operates from a foundational moral framework—a governing assumption of what is true, good, and permissible within the society. That framework functions as a de facto state religion, whether or not it is formally acknowledged as such.
This reality is evident in the laws Western nations enforce and the religious observances it prohibits. Practices such as polygamy, female genital mutilation, slave labour, child marriage, incest, animal sacrifice, and public nudity are prohibited outright. Not because they are universally condemned across cultures, but because they violate the moral assumptions embedded in Western law.
These assumptions are not culturally accidental or mere tradition; they are the direct inheritance of a Christian worldview that has shaped Western notions of human dignity, sexual ethics, justice, and the sanctity of life for centuries. In this sense, Christianity is not merely one religion among many in the West. Christianity is the moral basis and architecture upon which our Western legal systems were built.
Even an appeal to “secularism” cannot escape the fact that every system rests upon religious assumptions. Secular states create and uphold laws, and law is, by definition, enforced morality. Morality does not describe how the world merely is; it prescribes how people ought to act according to an ideal vision of human nature and social order. That vision inevitably rests on metaphysical presuppositions about meaning, purpose, and value. Claims that materialism alone cannot justify. For this reason, morality, and thus all law, is intrinsically religious in character, even when stripped of explicit theological language.
The pretence of religious neutrality, therefore, does not produce “fairness” and “social cohesion”; it perpetuates a moral framework, and thus a religion, under the guise of religious impartiality. And yet, by refusing to name its own moral foundations, the state undermines its ability to openly distinguish between belief systems that can coexist within its legal and moral order and those that fundamentally conflict with them. A society that cannot articulate its core moral commitments cannot coherently defend them. That is what we’re currently dealing with.
Rather than feigning neutrality, Western governments should openly acknowledge the historical and moral reality that Christianity formed the basis of their legal traditions, cultural norms, and moral awareness.
Recognising Christianity as the prevailing moral framework of the Western world does not require ecclesiastical rule or the suppression of private conviction. It simply requires the honest admission that alternative religious and ideological systems are welcome only insofar as they conform to the standards and expectations of a Christian-shaped legal and moral order. Until then, the state is left attempting to enforce values it refuses to name, and fighting threats it no longer knows how to define.
