Broad church

The Liberal party in Australia is often described as being a broad church, encompassing conservatives and radicals, wets and dries.

If representation and recruitment is an objective, self-styled mavericks like Kelly and his Queensland sidekick George Christensen have some utility. This duo operates like an extended wink and a nudge; they tell voters the Coalition is a broad enough church to be a home for fringe views.

Hampden contributed nothing to the theology of his time and specifically rejected the Broad Church in the 1860s.

The first Broad Church, in her view, included Coleridge, Arnold, Kingsley, and Maurice, and was spiritual in the same way as the Evangelicals.

Mid-nineteenth-century Anglican Broad Church thinkers included such figures as FD Maurice, AC Tait, AP Stanley, Benjamin Jowett, and Charles Kingsley. There was also a Broad Church movement (sometimes referred to as ‘liberal evangelical’) in Scotland,which included James Robertson, John Tulloch, John Caird and Norman MacLeod.