The official commemorations for Australian military personnel who’ve died on the battlefield or whose lives were marred due to war service have long been adorned with ecclesiastical language.
Friday’s services across the country are the most profound cases in point even though, after almost 110 years of Anzac Days, many Australians may have become culturally inured to the way our national remembrance has become – and remains – so imbued with religiously inflected rhetoric.
That’s why we will hear referenced, repeatedly on Anzac Day, the “spirit” of Anzac and of those killed on the battlefield, of their “sacrifice” and how death somehow transforms them into the “fallen” though not as often these days do you hear them referred to as the “glorious dead”. Surrounding it all will be Christian prayer.
When previously writing about the politics of commemoration I’ve referenced an Australian Vietnam veteran Jim Robertson who wrote a submission to the federal government ahead of the centenary of Anzac in 2015. His words are just as salient today.
He took exception to the term “fallen” (which I agree is something of a sanitisation of battlefield death) as used by politicians when speaking of the war dead. For, Robertson pointed out, they “did not trip over a stick or a garden hose, they were drowned, burned, shot, gassed and eviscerated to lie face down in mud or sand at the bottom of the ocean”.
To think of the war dead as fallen may once have been comforting to some in the same way that the famous though historically highly dubious Atatürk letter (whereby the “Johnnies and Mehmets” lay side by side in the earth at Gallipoli) gave solace to the families of those killed on an obscure finger of the Ottoman Empire which must have seemed a world away then.
The Australian War Memorial’s Anzac dawn service is popularly revered as a solemn and respectful commemoration of Australia’s participation in the Gallipoli invasion in 1915 – an event many still (fallaciously, I’ve long argued) cling to as the birth of the Australian nation.
But not everyone believes the ceremony ought continue to include elements of traditional Christian worship as it conventionally has, and as it did last year and doubtless will again this year. Last year, again, there were Christian hymns. The Lord’s Prayer. A presiding Christian chaplain.
There is no doubt many soldiers of the First Australian Imperial Force took solace in their predominant Christian faiths amid the horrors of Gallipoli, the European western front and the Middle East.
But times change as do religious affiliations, as reflected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics which records that at the last Australian census (2021) the most common religions were Christianity (43.9%), Islam (3.2%), Hinduism (2.7%) and Buddhism (2.4%). Some 38.9% of Australians said they had no religion.
The census found, “The number of people affiliated with Christianity in Australia decreased from 12.2 million (52.1%) in 2016 to 11.1 million (43.9%) in 2021. This decrease occurred across most ages, with the largest decrease for young adults (18-25 years).”
It can be reasonably assumed the affiliations and beliefs of contemporary Australian service personnel are reflected in these numbers too.
While secularism is growing in Australia, particularly in younger demographics, official Anzac commemorations across the nation (especially the biggest, televised and most observed – that at the war memorial in Canberra) remain fervently Christian.
The memorial, generally slow or resistant to cultural change on a range of salient issues (not least on appropriate commemoration of the Australian frontier wars between First Nations resisters and British troops, settler militias, vigilantes and police) is not, it seems, about to lead the way when it comes to de-Christianising the Anzac Day service. The memorial hosts the annual service on behalf of the Australian Capital Territory Returned and Services League, which apparently remains intransigent on lowering the Christian tempo of the performance.
The Rationalist Society of Australia has been at the forefront of the push to expunge the Christian rites and practices and prayers from the service, complaining to the ACT Human Rights Commission that the service has discriminated against and excluded some Australians who might otherwise commemorate Anzac.
As Australia’s first world war veterans (all dead now) fade from living memory, just as those of the second world war will too within a generation, commemoration of Anzac and its profound impact on Australian society and identity must surely evolve with the times. An abundance of Christianity in Anzac Day services stands to emotionally and culturally isolate more and more people.
Many Christians, in their celebration of Jesus as a peacemaker, also feel uncomfortable about the pervasiveness of Christianity in military commemoration, not least Anzac and 11 November, Remembrance Day.
They’ve got a point: it does seem increasingly anomalous, given the pervasive capacity of religion and its territorial affiliation with land to spark wars. Look at the TV any night. In that, perhaps, might be found a parallel with the war memorial’s acceptance of sponsorship funds from weapons manufacturers.
Religious faith, of course, gave considerable succour and comfort to the men in opposing muddy, bloody trenches during the Great War. To have God on one’s side was comforting – even when another avowed Christian was shooting at you from the enemy dugout.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
