The first Federal Caucus of the Australian Labor Party was elected in 1901. It consisted of 16 Members of the House of Representatives and 8 Members of the Senate. It might be surprising today to learn that most of them were Evangelical Christians. In the chapter “The First Caucus” in True Believers, The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Stuart Macintyre writes that “there were six Presbyterians, five Anglicans, three Methodists, two Congregationalists, a number of members of Nonconformist sects, and only three Catholics. Some were merely nominal adherents, but around half of the Caucus worshipped on Sunday.”( John Faulkner and Stuart Macintyre (editors), True Believers, The Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party, Allen and Unwin, NSW, 2001, p. 24)
Macintyre does not say how many Nonconformists there were, but they appear to have been Egerton Lee Batchelor from South Australia, a member of the Church of Christ, and King O’Malley from Tasmania who is a bit hard to categorize, but when he was previously living in the United States, he was First Bishop of the Waterlily Rock Bound Church which he founded.
This means that 18 of the 24 (three-quarters) Caucus members were Evangelicals or Protestants, and one quarter were Presbyterians, including James Black Ronald, a Presbyterian minister, which sounds odd today because I do not know many Presbyterians (i.e. none) who vote Labor.
Although the religion we would usually associate with the ALP would be Catholicism, there were only three Catholics. The first Caucus was surprisingly Protestant and Evangelical.
I first became aware of the Evangelical representation in the first ALP Caucus in The Fountain of Public Prosperity by Stuart Piggin and Robert Linder who described the period from 1870 10 1914 as “the high-noon of Australian Protestantism. Six out of ten adults in Melbourne and four out of ten in Sydney were in Church every Sunday.” (Stuart Piggin and Robert Linder, The Fountain of Public Prosperity, Evangelical Christians in Australian History 1740-1914, Monash University Press, Victoia, 2018, p. 386) Their book shows that Evangelicals were once a lot more prominent and influential in Australia than historians usually acknowledge.
Many Evangelicals were concerned with poverty and social reforms and found common ground with the emerging Australian Labor Party. Earlier, 60% of the first Parliamentary ALP, which was elected in New South Wales in 1891, were Evangelicals. 9 were Methodists and 12 were from other Evangelical denominations (Robert Linder, “The Methodist Love Affair with the Australian Labor Party”, 1891-1929″, Lusar 23&24 (1997-1998), pp. 35-61)
Piggin and Linder attributed the decline of Evangelical influence in the ALP in part to class conflict (The Fountain of Public Prosperity, pp. 468-469). The 20th century saw the rise of the suburbs and the middle class and Evangelicals tended to become middle class and identified with the conservative side of politics.
Even if many Evangelicals still agreed with the ALP on some issues of justice and welfare, they would have felt they could no longer support the ALP because of their more progressive policies which Evangelicals regard as in conflict with their Christian values. A few years ago the ALP in my state of Tasmania had a no pokie machines policy. Every Chrisitan I know agreed with them, but they did not vote for them because of their radical social agenda.
The 20th century also saw the rise of anti-Christian Communism and many on the Left, even if they were not Communist, still became increasingly hostile to Evangelicals.
I also suspect that part of this hostility is that the Left does not like the competition. The Old Testament prophets spoke of the coming Kingdom of God in which there would be peace and justice and no poverty. This is pretty much the Socialist vision of the Left, except they think they can do it on their own without the intervention of God. the attempts of Stalin, Mao, and others in the 20th century to create a socialist utopia has shown that attempting to build the Kingdom of God without God can only end in disaster.
Malcolm Nicholson 