Martin Luther said of Christian education, Wo aber die heilige Schrift nicht regiert, da rate ich furwahr niemand, dass er sein Kind hintue, or "But where the Holy Scriptures do not rule, I say that no one should place his child." The Old Lutherans of the state of South Australia followed Luther's advice, and their trials and triumphs hold lessons for anyone who seeks a Christian education for his or her children.
Almost 55,000 Germans settled in the Australian colonies of South Australia and Victoria between 1838 and 1850, notes Australian scholar Charles Meyer in the History of Education Quarterly. The South Australia Germans were overwhelmingly Old Lutherans: fundamentalist in their faith, hailing from rural districts and small towns.
In the earliest years, the Old Lutherans accepted land grants and funding for their schools, but after 1850, as the state education system grew, they acted upon the teachings of two of their pastoral leaders: "If we ask the State for pecuniary assistance for the Church, or its religious schools, we open the door for State interference in religious matters." As if to confirm this belief, the education board in neighboring Victoria required schools to devote the middle four hours of the day to secular instruction, pushing religious education to the nether regions of the school day. The Old Lutherans of South Australia, writes Meyer, "saw this as the thin wedge of state interference with religion. They developed a fierce determination to preserve Lutheran education entirely from state interference, even if it meant abandoning any claim to acceptance of government money." Which they did.
As the Australian state gradually pushed religious instruction to the fringes of its subsidized schools, the South Australia Old Lutherans became tenacious critics of state schooling: state-approved religious teaching would be mere "misshapen moralizing," according to one Victorian Lutheran paper. Faith cannot be confined to an hour here or there, rigidly segregated from the rest of the day. Lutherans saw the extirpation of German from the schools as an assault on their church: "[N]o translator has recreated the spirit of the Holy Word like Luther," wrote one Australian Lutheran. "He who takes away our Bible condemns our people to spiritual death and decline."
In 1872, the Australian government ceased financial aid for non-state schools, a move cheered by the Old Lutherans, who actively opposed a later referendum to restore such funding. "[F]ar from being a disaster," writes Meyer, "refusal of state funding or benefits actually freed the Lutherans to carry on their schools as they wished, establishing their school committees from within their congregation, selecting their teachers according to religious commitment as well as teaching qualifications, and largely controlling the curriculum."
Then came the First World War. The Australian government banned all use of the German language, even in religious services. Thousands of German nationals were arrested. The "equation Lutheran=German=enemy sympathizer became generally accepted." In 1917, the South Australian government shut down all 49 Lutheran schools. Despite the lifting of this ban after the war, "Lutheran school numbers in South Australia remained painfully low."
But this story need not end on a downer: Meyer notes that in recent years, Lutheran schools "have steadily grown" in number.
