Now You See It

This article opens and ends with reference to two interlinked studies: C harles T aylor's 2007 A Secular Age , and his 2011 Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays . These are often magnificent but sometimes flawed works. This article aims to explore the implications and ramifications of T aylor's failure to discuss, in either study, nineteenth‐century provision for secular instruction by government elementary schools in I reland, G reat B ritain, and the A ustralian colonies. What these did or did not mean should have been grist to T aylor's mill, especially since, in these places (and other E nglish‐speaking countries, such as the U nited S tates, C anada, and N ew Z ealand) “secular instruction” provisions soon attracted energetic imputations of infidelity and atheism, as well as support. “Secular Instruction” Acts in two A ustralian colonies ( V ictoria in 1872, S outh A ustralia in 1851 and 1875) are here considered in detail, for these, especially the V ictorian, were interpreted by some then and more recently as emphatically secular (in the sense of “Godless”). My argument is that this emphatic secularity, for emphatic it often was, mostly should not be read as “Godless” but as an often Protestant‐inflected statutory expression — of the kind usefully defined — by reference to an ideal type — as “Civic Protestantism.”

Argument (complex analysis · Atheism · Islam · Political science · Protestantism · Secular state · Secularism · Secularity · Secularization · Sociology · Theology · Australian History and Society · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Law · Philosophy · Religious Education and Schools · Religious studies

• John Clifford, Militant Evangelicals, and the Colonial Model for ‘Secular’ Schools (1870s-1920s)

  Open Access•Géraldine Vaughan•E-rea•2022

  Add to list