The Double-Edged Sword of Faith
Religion is a paradox. It consoles the grieving—and crowns the powerful. It forms communities—and fortifies empires. We know this in our bones and our histories: from coronations and crusades to constitutions and classrooms.
Faith gives meaning; institutions seek legitimacy. Those two forces have braided together for millennia.
But there is another story—older than kingship, older than cathedrals—where spirituality isn’t a vertical hierarchy but a living web. On this continent, Australia’s First Nations hold a spiritual tradition extending tens of thousands of years, where the sacred isn’t wielded as control but woven into land, kin, and obligation.
Archaeology places human presence here to at least 65,000 years, aligning with Indigenous custodians’ own testimony of continuous culture. Naturebth.humanrights.gov.au
If the long arc of world history shows how religion legitimized rule, Indigenous Australia shows how spirituality legitimizes relationship.
Indigenous Spirituality—Sacred, Ancient, Earth-Bound
The Dreaming (often called Dreamtime) isn’t a past era; it’s a continuing law of reality. It’s the cosmology that maps creation, kinship, seasons, songlines—binding people to place and story. In this worldview, a river is not merely water; it is ancestry, law, memory. A rock formation is not scenery but scripture. Encyclopedia Britannica
Even the boomerang—too often reduced to a tourist icon—holds layered meanings. Museum and cultural sources document its appearance in creation narratives and ceremony, marking resilience, return, and continuity across Country. It is both tool and teaching: an object that moves, returns, and reminds. National Museum of Australiadiscoveraboriginalexperiences.com
Crucially, this spirituality is relational rather than institutional. Authority is distributed through Elders, Country, and story, not concentrated in a single throne or see. Spiritual law is inseparable from ecological care; moral obligation flows through kinship and land custodianship.
If you’re looking for a faith resilient to conquest, commodification, and the churn of empires, consider the one that has endured here—unbroken—for at least 65 millennia. bth.humanrights.gov.au
When Religion Was Used to Control
Elsewhere, the record is different. Across continents, rulers fused the sacred to the scepter.
The Devarāja of Southeast Asia. From the early 9th century, Khmer kings cultivated the devarāja—the “god-king”—to sanctify royal authority. The court and temple network at Angkor weren’t only spiritual centers; they were stone-set legitimacy, aligning cosmology with kingship and mobilizing labor at imperial scale. Encyclopedia Britannica
State Shintō in Imperial Japan. In the Meiji Restoration and through World War II, State Shintō presented the emperor as divine descendant and bound national identity to shrine ritual and civic obedience. This wasn’t merely personal devotion; it was policy—an official religion of the modern state. Encyclopedia Britannica
Christianity and Colonialism. Missionary movements often arrived as the moral arm of empire, translating conquest into “civilizing” projects.
The scholarship is nuanced—missionaries also delivered education, medicine, and sometimes protection—but the political effect is clear: religion legitimated colonial order and reshaped subject peoples’ worlds. Cambridge University Press & AssessmentOxford Academic
The Imperial Cult of Rome. Roman rule bound disparate provinces through the cult of the emperor, ritualizing loyalty to the center and yoking piety to politics. Sacrifice at the altar became shorthand for allegiance to the state. Encyclopedia Britannica
Across these cases, the sacred validated the sovereign. Faith became structural power.
Structure, Legitimacy, and Why It Endures
Why does this fusion of altar and authority persist? Social theory offers language: legitimacy. Max Weber’s classic typology describes traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational authority.
Religions frequently underwrite the first two—sanctifying dynasties (“we’ve always done it this way”) and anointing leaders as divinely favored. Once faith and state interlock, questioning power feels like blasphemy. Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Modern comparative data makes the pattern empirical. Jonathan Fox’s global analyses of religion-state relations show that governments regularly regulate, co-opt, or privilege religion to shape social order. The goal isn’t always theocracy; it’s stability—anchoring national identity, disciplining dissent, and conferring moral weight on law. Cambridge University Press & AssessmentTaylor & Francis
When religion becomes structural, its spiritual edge can dull. Clerical authority slides into bureaucracy; doctrine serves policy. The faithful feel the gap: between what nourishes souls and what maintains systems.
Law, Ritual, and the Intimacy of Control
Control isn’t only ideology; it’s infrastructure.
Law. In medieval Europe, canon law profoundly shaped daily life—marriage, inheritance, contracts—radiating beyond church courts to influence secular jurisprudence. To live under Christendom was to live inside a legal imagination forged by theology. Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Ritual. State Shintō’s calendars, Roman sacrifices, colonial mission schools—the ritual apparatus carries power into the body. Bending the knee becomes belonging; refusal becomes treason. This is the quiet genius (and danger) of sacred politics: it moves through repetition, symbol, and space, until order feels natural.
Set against this is Indigenous Australia’s alternative: law as Country, ritual as relationship. Instead of centralizing power, ceremony distributes obligation—across clan, songline, seasons. The difference is not merely theological. It is political, ecological, and ethical.
What Indigenous Spirituality Teaches Our Century
As democracies wobble and institutions hemorrhage trust, an older wisdom feels newly urgent.
- Relational over hierarchical. Power that flows with Country and kin resists the brittleness of command-and-control. The Dreaming’s authority is not a king’s decree but a network of obligations—endlessly renewed in story, song, and care. Encyclopedia Britannica
- Place-based ethics. When law is anchored to land, exploitation becomes sacrilege. This is not romanticism; it is governance by ecology. In a climate-fractured world, spirituality that treats rivers as relatives is not quaint—it’s rational.
- Continuity through ceremony. Boomerangs, corrobborees, songlines: these are not museum pieces, they’re living archives. Each performance is a renewal of law and identity, making culture anti-fragile—capable of surviving conquest, policy, and time. National Museum of Australia
Humility over hegemony. Indigenous lore admits mystery. This humility—toward land, ancestors, the unseen—counters modernity’s appetite to dominate. What if faith’s highest political good isn’t order, but reciprocity?
A Harder Conversation About Missions and Empires
We should hold a nuanced view of missionaries. Historical research shows they were not monolithic agents of empire. Many challenged colonial abuses; many built clinics and schools; many empowered local evangelists who became the true carriers of Christian faith across Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.
Yet even benevolent missions often reframed local cosmologies as error and translated empire into morality tales—rendering resistance as sin and obedience as virtue. That is how soft power works. Oxford Research EncyclopediasOxford Academic
And it lingers. Today’s debates over religious education, national identity, and “heritage” laws still trace the grooves carved by centuries of sacred legitimation. Which rituals do we fund? Which histories do we tell? Which gods bless the flag?
What We Do With This—A Practical Ethic
If religion can both heal and harm, what’s the ethic for a plural democracy?
- Decenter the throne. When governments privilege one faith, they privilege one form of citizenship. Comparative datasets suggest that entanglement produces predictable downstream effects: discrimination risks, identity policing, and fragile legitimacy tethered to theology. A healthy state protects free religion by declining to be religious. Cambridge University Press & Assessment
- Invest in relational custodianship. Policy shaped by Country—fire regimes, water rights, co-management of heritage—borrows Indigenous logic: care equals authority. This is not merely “consultation”; it’s constitutional wisdom.
- Teach history with both hands. We can say two true things at once: that missions sometimes protected the vulnerable and that they served imperial order; that churches sponsored hospitals and sanctified hierarchies; that spirituality can console and control. Mature democracies can hold complexity.
Guard the inner life. The most radical thing we can do with religion may be to keep it human. To let it be sanctuary from power rather than an instrument of it. To tend the personal—grief, hope, the ache for meaning—without surrendering it to the machinery of the state.
Coda: From History to Story (and Back Again)
Readers of Joseph’s Letter will hear the undertone. The novel’s question isn’t “Which institution wins?” but “What do we owe the truth?”—especially when truth threatens the systems built to hold it. Michael Battersby’s search is not for a throne; it’s for meaning after loss. And that is the test for any faith worth keeping: not how well it props up power, but how tenderly it accompanies the human heart.
Perhaps that’s what Australia’s oldest spirituality whispers to our century: that faith is strongest not when it stands above us, but when it stands with us—in the river, on the red earth, beneath the stars, with law that lives in the land and the people.
If this conversation speaks to you, you’ll love Joseph’s Letter—a story where mystery, grief, and the search for proof collide. Grab the free first chapter and sit with the questions a little longer.
References & Further Reading
- Human occupation of northern Australia by ~65,000 years ago (Madjedbebe excavation). Nature
- Australian Human Rights Commission—statement on 65,000 years and oldest continuous living culture. bth.humanrights.gov.au
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: The Dreaming (Dreamtime)—cosmology, law, and ancestral beings. Encyclopedia Britannica
- National Museum of Australia—boomerang significance & creation narratives. National Museum of Australia
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Devarāja (god-king) and Angkor. Encyclopedia Britannica
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: State Shintō—Meiji to WWII. Encyclopedia Britannica
- Encyclopaedia Britannica: Roman imperial cult as political glue. Encyclopedia Britannica
- The Cambridge History of Medieval Canon Law—canon law’s extensive influence on secular life. Cambridge University Press & Assessment
- Oxford/Cambridge scholarship on missions and empire—missionary activity and imperial legitimacy. Cambridge University Press & AssessmentOxford Academic
- Jonathan Fox, A World Survey of Religion and the State; The Correlates of Religion and State—global patterns of state religion policy. Cambridge University Press & AssessmentTaylor & Francis
Robert Parsons 