Stand on a beach at Bondi at midnight and look up. Stand on a rooftop in Ramallah, a balcony in Lahore, a paddock outside Dubbo, a fire escape in Tehran, and look up. It is the same moon. It waxes and wanes, shows itself full or a fingernail sliver or hides behind cloud, but no serious person mistakes these as different moons because they are seen from different places or called by different names. The Bedouin who steers by it, the astronomer who calculates its libration, the poet who addresses it as a beloved’s face – none of them owns it, and none of their descriptions exhaust it. It is one object, described from a thousand vantage points, in a hundred languages, through a thousand years of longing.
Every culture that has ever looked up has given that object a name of its own. Hebrew has two: yare’ach, the wanderer, and levanah, the white one. Arabic calls it qamar. Persian, the language of Hafez and Rumi, calls it mah, and builds an entire poetic vocabulary of the beloved’s face around it. Sanskrit calls it chandra, the shining one, and treats it as a full deity within a far more populous cosmology than the Abrahamic traditions ever imagined. Latin gave the Romance world luna. Mandarin calls it yuè, Japanese tsuki, and on this continent the Wiradjuri, my own father’s people, call it giwang – a word carried orally across an unbroken chain of storytellers for tens of thousands of years before any of the others were written down. None of these names describes a different sky-object. A Wiradjuri elder pointing at giwang and a Persian poet apostrophising mah are not in competition. The multiplicity of names has never once been mistaken, by anyone sane, for a multiplicity of moons.
This is not a new observation. It is, I would suggest, the oldest and simplest corrective to the oldest and stupidest of human quarrels: the quarrel over whose God is the real one.
A chorus of certainties
Australia in the current season is producing this quarrel in stereo. Senator Ralph Babet, the United Australia Party’s sole federal representative, has made “Australia is a Christian country” close to a personal refrain, arguing that the nation’s laws, culture and freedoms flow from a Judaeo-Christian foundation, and that even the separation of church and state is, in his phrasing, “a Christian idea.” Senator Pauline Hanson, for her part, told Sky News in February that she could not accept there were “good” Muslims, doubling down when pressed by suggesting the reassurance that “there’s good Muslims out there” was simply not credible to her. She partially walked the comment back – offering a conditional apology to Muslims who did not support sharia law, polygamy or “a world caliphate” – but the framing had already done its work: an entire faith community rendered suspect by its label.
Meanwhile, in synagogues, church halls and comment sections rather than Hansard, one hears mirror-image claims from inside other traditions: that the Jewish people are, by ancient covenant, distinctively chosen by God above the nations; that Christianity alone carries the fullness of revelation and other paths are, at best, preparatory shadows of it. These are not fringe curiosities. Chosenness is a real and old theological category within Judaism, argued over by rabbis for two millennia, and Christian exclusivism has serious patristic and reformed pedigree. They deserve to be taken seriously as theology, not waved away as bigotry. I will come back to that.
But sitting underneath all of these claims is a shared unexamined assumption: that when we say “God,” we are each holding a different, competing object, and that piety is measured by how fiercely you defend your object against everyone else’s. That assumption collapses the moment you take monotheism seriously on its own terms.
If there is only one, there is only one
Here is the argument, and it is not complicated, because the best theological arguments rarely are. If God is one – genuinely one, not merely “our favourite deity in a field of rivals” – then Yahweh, Allah, the God of Abraham invoked in a Christian creed, and the “Almighty God” of the Australian Constitution’s preamble are not four gods competing for market share. They are four descriptions, filtered through different languages, histories and liturgical grammars, of the one reality Jewish, Christian and Islamic theology all insist cannot finally be captured by any single description. Divinity does not multiply because English says God, Arabic says Allah – the Arabic word for God, used by Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews long before Islam existed – and Hebrew says Elohim or the Tetragrammaton observant Jews decline even to pronounce.
This is not a fringe idea smuggled in from outside these traditions, though I want to be careful not to overclaim it as their dominant self-understanding, since the exclusivist voices I am about to steelman have at least as much claim to orthodoxy. It is, at minimum, a real and recurring strand within them. Second Isaiah’s monotheism sharpened, in exile, into something more radical than tribal preference – the nations’ idols were nothing at all – though this sits in real tension with a Sinai covenant understood as specific and unrepeated. The Sufi poets of Persia – Rumi circling the flame, Hafez pouring wine as a figure for divine intoxication – argued that the different names and maps of law that Islam, Christianity and Judaism drew were fingers pointing at a single moon, though mainstream Sunni and Shia orthodoxy has historically treated this as a minority current rather than its centre. Marcus Aurelius arrived at something structurally similar in a Stoic register: a single rational, providential Logos, of which every human tradition catches only a partial glimpse. These are minority reports within traditions whose majority reports have long been exclusivist – cited here not to settle the argument, but to show the “one moon” intuition has always been argued from inside religion, even where it lost.
None of this requires abandoning particularity. A Jew can hold the Sinai covenant as decisive for the Jewish people specifically, a Muslim can hold the Quran as the final revelation, a Christian can hold the incarnation as the hinge of history – and still recognise that the object all three relate to, however differently approached, is not three objects but one. Particularity of path is not multiplicity of God. Rivers can differ enormously in course and current while still running, all of them, to the one sea.
But I want to be precise about what this argument actually settles, because it is weaker than it can sound. The moon image establishes only that the referent is one – that Yahweh, Allah and the Trinity are not three beings competing for worshippers, the way Marduk and Baal once did. It cannot settle the harder question classical exclusivism actually asks, which is not “how many gods are there” but “what has the one God said, done, and required, and who has received that correctly.” A Christian holding the incarnation as the hinge of history is not confused about how many gods exist; she is making a doctrinal claim a Jew or Muslim can reject entirely without doubting they address the same God. A Muslim holding the Quran as God’s final word is not disputing the identity of the object; he is disputing the completeness of what preceded it. Jewish chosenness is not a claim that others worship a lesser deity; it is a claim about a specific covenant with a specific people. None of these are claims the moon metaphor can adjudicate – the disagreement is over content and authority, not the numerical identity of the referent, and serious theology across all three traditions has been built with real coherence on exactly that distinction.
What the moon argument can do, more modestly, is show that the further step – from “God has spoken uniquely to us” to “God has therefore granted us standing over people who name Him differently” – does not follow from the theology at all. It is an addition, imported from somewhere other than the doctrine itself. Isolating that addition, rather than dismissing the underlying exclusivism as a category error, is the more honest project, and the one this essay intends.
Steelmanning the exclusivists
It would be intellectually lazy to simply dismiss Babet, Hanson, and their doctrinal cousins as ignorant, or to imagine they can be argued out of position by the moon metaphor alone. As already conceded, classical Christian exclusivism, mainstream Islamic claims about the Quran’s finality, and Jewish chosenness are not, at root, claims that other people worship a different or lesser deity. They are claims about what the one God has uniquely done, said, or covenanted, and who has received that correctly. Take the strongest version of each case.
Babet’s underlying historical claim – that Australian institutions, from the common law’s inheritance of ecclesiastical courts to the Constitution’s preamble invoking “Almighty God,” were shaped substantially by Christian assumptions – is not fabricated; it is defensible legal history. A serious secularist can concede the origins without conceding his further, contestable claim that this obliges the nation to retain a formal Christian character today, or that non-Christian Australians are guests in someone else’s house rather than equal citizens of a plural one. The steelman is historical; the weaker part is the leap from foundation to present ownership.
Hanson’s steelman is harder to make charitably, but it exists: there is a real, live current within global Islamic discourse – from clerical endorsements of theocratic law to explicit caliphate movements – that is genuinely illiberal, and naming that tension is not automatically bigotry. The failure was the size of the brush. “No good Muslims” does not distinguish the mother in Lakemba raising her kids from a recruiter for a foreign death cult. Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner called this out directly, and the backlash came from across the political spectrum, including from within the Coalition.
Jewish chosenness, at its theological best, is not a claim of superior worth but of particular obligation – singled out for a covenant with demanding responsibilities, not licence over others. Christian exclusivism, at its best, is a claim about the shape of salvation history, not a licence for triumphalism. Both can be held with humility. They become something closer to supremacism only when “we are chosen” or “we are the fulfilment” slides into “we are entitled,” and that entitlement starts writing policy or the terms on which other citizens belong.
What the fight is actually about
This is the deeper diagnosis: most of what passes for religious conflict in public life is not really a disagreement about the nature of God. It is a fight over power, land, demographic anxiety and tribal belonging that has borrowed religious vocabulary because religious vocabulary is the most totalising language a society has.
White Christian nationalism of the Babet variety is not, at bottom, a theological dispute with secularism; it is an anxiety about demographic and cultural change, reaching for scripture to give a contested cultural preference the authority of divine sanction. Islamic fundamentalism of the caliphate-and-sharia variety Hanson gestures at is not a dispute about which name to use for God; it is a political theology of conquest and control, which plenty of devout, believing Muslims reject as a corruption of their own faith. And a great deal of everyday Christian exclusivism in the Australian suburbs is not really about doctrine at all; it is inherited tribal identity, mistaking familiarity for truth.
There is an equivalent temptation on the Jewish side, and I should name it rather than let this essay quietly exempt my own inheritance: a strand, distinct from mainstream Zionism and from religious chosenness properly understood, that treats other peoples’ claims to land or dignity as subordinate by divine right. It exists, and deserves the same critique. But I want to be honest about scale rather than manufacture a false symmetry: Babet and Hanson are sitting federal senators making these claims from the floor of parliament. Nothing resembling that platform currently exists for Jewish supremacist rhetoric in Australian public life, and pretending otherwise would itself fail the epistemic precision this essay is arguing for.
None of these things – white supremacy, Islamic fundamentalism, Jewish ethno-religious supremacism, ordinary Christian tribalism – requires the premise that there are competing gods. They require only the premise that my group has privileged access to the God, and that this access confers rights over people who name God differently, or not at all. Once you accept the strict monotheist claim these traditions formally hold – one God, no rivals – that slide from access to entitlement loses its theological floor even where the underlying exclusivism remains coherent. The moon does not shine more brightly on Bondi than on Lakemba.
Where the metaphor runs out
Intellectual honesty requires admitting where the moon image stops working, because Australia’s religious landscape is not only the three Abrahamic traditions arguing over one name. Buddhism, in most classical forms, makes no claim about a creator God, and would regard the whole “whose God” dispute as resting on a premise it declines to affirm. Hinduism ranges from a Vedantist’s strict non-dualism – Brahman as the single ground of being, close to the “one moon” argument – through to village polytheism, which is not. Sikhism holds a monotheism arguably closer to the Abrahamic model. Indigenous Australian cosmologies are not reducible to any of the above; an active, ancestral, law-giving presence in Country resists translation into “one God” language without distortion.
So the argument here is deliberately bounded. It is not a claim that every religious tradition on earth is secretly describing the identical metaphysical object – a much shakier claim, closer to a slogan than an argument. It is narrower: within the family of traditions that already assert monotheism as a first premise, the slide from access to entitlement is specifically incoherent on those traditions’ own terms, because they have already conceded there is only one God to claim access to. A believing Christian, Jew or Muslim cannot escape that critique by relativising the object the way a polytheist or non-theist legitimately could.
The political economy of certainty
It is worth asking, too, why this quarrel is so politically useful just now. A senator building a national profile on “Australia is a Christian country” is offering an emotionally resonant answer to voters anxious about migration and cultural change, requiring no policy detail and no engagement with the complexity of a multi-faith federation. A party leader whose polling has begun to eclipse the major opposition benefits, in narrowly electoral terms, from a controversy that consolidates a base around grievance, whatever the cost to the Muslim Australians living with the aftermath. Religious language here is being used the way political entrepreneurs have always used it: not as honest wrestling with the divine, but as the most efficient vehicle for converting cultural anxiety into political capital, because “God is on our side” forecloses debate in a way “our polling suggests” never could. This does not require impugning every believer swept up in it, but the loudest political voices invoking God are rarely the most reliable guides to what their traditions teach about Him.
A word from country
I say all this as someone who carries two traditions in one body – my father’s Wiradjuri inheritance, my mother’s Jewish one – and who has spent a career refusing to treat either as ammunition against the other, or against a third. This section is doing different work from the argument above, and I want to be clear about that rather than let it ride on the “one moon” logic by proximity. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander spiritual traditions are not a fourth monotheism waiting to be folded in; as noted earlier, an active, ancestral, law-giving presence moving through Country resists translation into “one God” language without distortion, and I will not attempt that translation here. What I will say plainly is this: whatever the merits of the theological argument above, Babet’s claim that Australia’s laws and culture flow from a Christian foundation has been asserted, by generations of missionaries and colonial administrators before him, over sixty-five thousand years of continuing spiritual practice on this continent, as though the land and its Law were empty until Christianity arrived to fill them. That is not a theological dispute about the identity of God. It is a historical claim about whose sacred relationship to this country gets to count, and on that question the record is not ambiguous.
Putting the telescope down
None of this is an argument for religious relativism in the lazy sense – that all traditions are interchangeable, that doctrine doesn’t matter, that a Jew, a Christian, a Muslim and a Stoic humanist are all really saying the same thing in different accents. They are not. The rivers really do have different courses, and those differences carry real moral and liturgical weight – how you pray, what you eat, what you owe your neighbour, what you believe happened at a specific moment in a specific place. I am not asking anyone to pretend those differences are illusions.
What I am asking is narrower and harder to argue against: that the differences are differences of description, path, emphasis, and claims about what the one God has done and required – not differences of object in the sense of competing deities. Once you hold that distinction clearly, the supremacist and exclusivist claims currently circulating in Australian public life – Babet’s Christian nation, Hanson’s suspicion of an entire faith, chosen-people triumphalism, salvation-history triumphalism – stop being theology and reveal themselves as something smaller: tribal politics wearing a borrowed robe.
Marcus Aurelius told himself, in a Roman winter campaign, to keep returning to first principles when the noise of the world grew loud. The first principle here predates every synagogue, church and mosque in this country: look up. It is one moon. Whatever you call it, wherever you are standing, however thin or full it appears from your patch of ground – it is one moon. I have not tried to argue Babet out of the incarnation, or Hanson’s targets out of the finality of the Quran, or a chosen-people triumphalist out of the covenant at Sinai; those are old, serious arguments this essay does not need to settle. What I have tried to argue is narrower and harder to escape: none of those positions, honestly held, requires or licenses the further claim that the God they describe stands closer to their citizenship, their entitlement, or their country than to anyone else’s. That further claim is not theology defending itself from rivals. It is tribal politics, dressed in a borrowed robe, fighting over a reflection in the water – while the thing itself hangs quietly overhead, indifferent to the argument, available to anyone who simply stops shouting long enough to look.
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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, August 2026
There is only one god, we are all equal in the eyes of god.