This week, The Guardian has been exposing alarming details about the culture and business practices within the schools of the notoriously secretive Exclusive Brethren sect.

At the RSA, we have reported on the claim by the Gold Coast City Council's 'spiritual advisor' that other local governments and mayors in Australia are also now pursuing the Seven Mountains Mandate.

If you see an article or video online that should be included in our next edition of the RSA Weekly, please send it to editor@rationalist.com.au. If you wish to comment on articles that appear in our RSA Weekly, feel free to share your views via the same email address.

Enjoy your weekend!

12 July: Schools set up by the Exclusive Brethren sect have spent millions of dollars with businesses owned by church members on major building projects, including to a company majority-owned by the powerful Hales family, a Guardian Australia investigation has found. The Brethren’s OneSchool Global schools are registered charities in Australia and exempt from income tax. The OSG schools also have building funds endorsed for deductible gift recipient status. Read the full article

12 July: The self-proclaimed leader of a religious group accused of causing the death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Struhs has told a court the case against them is "religious persecution" and that the defendants don't care what judgement is delivered. Read the full article

11 July: Anthony Albanese has appealed to voters in Labor’s heartland seats in western Sydney not to dump the party over the war in Gaza, insisting his MPs are “working hard to deliver” practical improvements. The leader of the house, Tony Burke, and the education minister, Jason Clare, are among the Labor MPs considered to be vulnerable to campaigns run by new groups known as The Muslim Vote and Muslim Votes Matter. Read the full article

10 July: Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says the Coalition must deliver a “line-by-line” response to Labor’s draft religious discrimination reforms in order for the overhaul to progress. Addressing the National Press Club in Canberra, Mr Dreyfus declared his opposition counterpart Michaelia Cash had “refused to engage” and he didn’t count the public statements she’d made as a proper response. Read the full article

10 July: The Exclusive Brethren’s OneSchool Global network of private schools has received almost $30m in commonwealth payments for educational “disadvantage” over five years despite many being among the country’s wealthiest schools, a Guardian Australia investigation has found. Read the full article

11 July: The ratepayer-funded ‘spiritual advisor’ at the Gold Coast City Council has revealed other Australian mayors and local governments are also pursuing the Christian fundamentalist Seven Mountains Mandate. In a live-streamed interview on Facebook in April, Pastor Sue Baynes, the council advisor to Mayor Tom Tate, said mayors at other councils were replicating the “model” she had implemented on the Gold Coast. Read the full article

9 July: Students at a network of private schools set up by the Exclusive Brethren sect are subject to near constant surveillance, including in out-of-school hours, according to former staff, students and parents. They say school-issued laptops are closely monitored by a roster of church members. Read the full article

9 July: Australia’s attorney general has said some forms of criticism of Israel can be antisemitic, after the government appointed a special envoy to combat rising levels of hatred against the Jewish community. Peak Jewish groups welcomed the appointment of Jillian Segal AO. The government plans to soon appoint a similar envoy to combat Islamophobia. Read the full article

8 July: A Guardian Australia investigation has sought to find out what is happening behind the gates of the OneSchool Global schools, to question whether the Australian taxpayer should be directly supporting an ethos that appears at odds with many of the values of modern Australia. This question is particularly relevant at a time when public, secular schools are so desperately in need of funds. Read the full article

8 July: The Greens have doubled down on calls to remove the Lord’s Prayer from Senate proceedings. Senator Mehreen Faruqi said she believed in a “secular parliament” with a “separation of church and state” and said the Lord’s Prayer should no longer be read out to start each Senate day. Read the full article

8 July: The mayor of Liverpool Council has ordered the removal of artwork, one of the finalists in the Blake Prize, because the Christian Lives Matter movement took offence “at Jesus Christ being portrayed as a Looney Tunes character”. The Christian Lives Matters group threatened to have hundreds of people turn up to protest the artwork. Read the full article

6 July: Participation numbers in Special Religious Education classes are so low in some New South Wales public schools that secular advocates predict the program may fade out within a number of years, especially in the regions. Read the full article

6 July: The Muslim Vote campaign rose to prominence after the local elections when it vowed to “punish” MPs over Gaza and issued a series of demands to Sir Keir Starmer. It had endorsed all four successful independents who won seats in areas with a large Muslim population, as well as Jeremy Corbyn in North Islington, causing an upset on an otherwise jubilant night for Labour. Read the full article

Frank Bongiorno: Australia’s multiculturalism worries over the place of Muslims in Australian society. The country calls itself secular, but retains a Christian identity in culturally ambiguous but nonetheless tangible ways. Muslims are commended when they conform to the role of model minority in such a society. Explicit support for “Australian values” is regularly demanded of them in a way no Christian migrant group experiences. Read the full article

Jon Whittle and Stefan Harrer: In the past year, generative artificial intelligence tools — such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora — have captured the public’s imagination. But with greater public knowledge of AI will come greater public scrutiny of how it’s being used by scientists. Read the full article

Maurice Quirk: Albanese stated that religion-based politics are not the path to social cohesion, and that political factions only serve to further isolate minority religions. But little attention has been paid to what Albanese and other politicians are actually talking about when they talk about religion. Read the full article

Even when an election’s a foregone conclusion, such as last week’s landslide victory for Labour in the UK, there’s usually unexpected results. Such was the victory of four independent Muslim candidates in what had been safe Labour constituencies. The major reason for their success – the war in Gaza. How likely is such a scenario in Australia? Listen to the interview

Lucy Hamilton: Twice in a fortnight, the president of the Heritage Foundation has declared that America is experiencing its second revolution. The revolution would remain bloodless (because their side is “winning”) “if the left allows it to be.” The two bodies whose acts provoked the announcements are leading Atlas Network partners. Read the full article

Melissa Quinn: Voters in recent weeks have begun to hear the name 'Project 2025' invoked more and more by President Biden and Democrats, as they seek to sound the alarm about what could be in store if former President Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House. Overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, the multi-pronged initiative includes a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president to usher in a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch. Read the full article

Dan Hitchens: Although Starmer would be the first openly atheist PM – belief in God appears to be about the only view he has never held – that is less noteworthy than it sounds... But in a country where 37 per cent tick the ‘no religion’ box, a non–believing PM is hardly a sensation. There is no religious vote here as there is in the US, no mileage in exaggerating your Christian identity as, for instance, Italian politicians do. Read the full article

Sam Bidwell: For amateur psephologists, this election provides plenty of analytical fodder. Yet for those thinking about the next fifty years of our politics rather than just the next five, the biggest story of this election is the wholesale emergence of sectarian campaigning and ethnic voting. Many commentators were stunned to see large Labour majorities overturned by pro-Gaza independents capitalising on Muslim frustrations with the British political establishment — but not me. Read the full article