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The freedom to attend church or sing hymns was never the point. Christianity has always sought to shape culture, transform lives and speak into every aspect of civic life. And that’s precisely the freedom we’re losing.

There’s a certain church graveyard in remote north-east Indonesia with 150 identical white headstones, each bearing the same date of death: the 19th of June, 2000.

That was the day a jihad militia swept into the Christian town of Duma in North Maluku and massacred the locals, first the men standing guard at the church gate, then the women and children who had been sheltering inside the church.

I have walked through that graveyard. I have friends who lost loved ones that day. I have heard their stories of survival.

Australian Christians do not experience persecution the likes of which those Indonesian Christians suffered.

But it is a mistake to think that, unless we’re talking about firing squads or extrajudicial killings, Australian Christians experience no persecution at all.

Still a Free Country?

The truth is that Australia is not the free country it was even a few decades ago.

Ask father and war veteran Bernard Gaynor, who was forced to sell his family home to pay for $1 million in court costs for blogging about Christian marriage.

Or ask Lyle Shelton and Kirralie Smith, whose cases were before the courts just last week. They, too, have incurred costs running into the hundreds of thousands for speaking out against drag queens in children’s libraries and men in women’s sports.

Or ask the 4,500 Christians who told us in the ACFI Survey that they’ve experienced hostility, threats or harassment for expressing a Christian worldview.

In that survey, Christians told us that the further they venture from the church sanctuary, the more restrictions they encounter. Only 2.3% of those surveyed felt Christian schools are very free to operate according to their beliefs. Only 1.2% said the same of Christian hospitals and health professionals.

Freedom of religion is not just the freedom to attend church, sing hymns or read the Bible. It’s the freedom to live out your faith in every domain of life. Christianity has always sought to be a public faith — salt for the earth, light for the world, a city on a hill.

Take that freedom away, and you have hollowed out Christianity and stripped it of its culture-shaping, life-transforming power.

Australian Christians have long taken that freedom for granted. But they can’t any longer.

The Cost of Speaking Out

Since the year 2000, 74 laws have been passed restricting Christian freedom.

In the inaugural Australian Christian Freedom Index, we document 40 case studies of Christians who have lost jobs, been dragged to court, or suffered costly discrimination for their faith.

Firing squads, no. Persecution, yes.

There are many organisations that track and measure persecution in the non-Western world. One of those is Voice of the Martyrs.

The CEO of Voice of the Martyrs Canada, Floyd Brobbel, defines persecution as an eight-stage scale that begins at ridicule and ends in martyrdom.

We mapped Australian cases studied across Brobbel’s persecution scale and found cases that span the first 5 of those 8 stages. Many are concentrated around Stage 3: Discrimination. Serious precedents — such as the ACT government’s forced acquisition of Calvary Hospital — have been set in Stage 5: Attack.

Exactly how we should measure persecution remains a topic for debate. But that Australian Christians have begun experiencing persecution is not.

The index is not primarily a list of grievances, however. It’s a clarion call to restore the country we all love.

Christian freedom matters because the freedoms every Australian enjoys were, in large measure, a Christian gift to the world.

Whether we protect Christian freedom in Australia could well determine whether or not freedoms in general endure in our nation.

The hour is late, but much can be done. I urge you to read the Australian Christian Freedom Index and share it widely.

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Image courtesy of Unsplash.