Whats wrong with Voting for Jesus?

Amanda Lohrey’s new essay, Voting for Jesus: Christianity and Politics in Australia, is the latest manifestation of growing public interest in the way that religion might be influencing the political process in Australia. Its appearance, after Marion Maddox’s widely-read God Under Howard (2005) and before Max Wallace’s much-anticipated The Purple Economy (2007), positions it ideally to snaffle up the attention of all those closet paranoiacs and cynics in the mean time.

But this seeming opportunism may prove deceptive. Voting for Jesus contains no new advance on Maddox, and its research is hardly original (indeed, at times it seems little more than a compilation of so much ambient commentary). What then, if anything, is particular to this essay? The answer lies in the way that Lohrey inserts herself into her investigation, those moments when her own spectatorial distance is compromised.