Aboriginal reconciliation as religious politics: Secularisation in Australia

The characterisation of the Australian polity as a strikingly ‘secular’ polity is in certain respects misleading. Australian political debate continues to be marked by a religious element. For example, the language of Aboriginal ‘reconciliation’ had several distinctly Christian resonances and ambiguities, including the difficult relation of justice and forgiveness. This paper considers the Aboriginal reconciliation process in the light of three different ideas of secularism: secularism as a doctrine of the two ends of humanity; secularisation as disenchantment or rationalisation; and secularisation as the transposition of theology into a mundane or earthly idiom.