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Recall Andrew Thorburn. He lost his job not because he did anything wrong, but because a new worldview has quietly captured Australia’s public square. The Australian Christian Freedom Index shows just how far that capture has gone.

Last month, the Canberra Declaration led the launch of the Australian Christian Freedom Index, a landmark report documenting the perilous state of Christian freedom in our country.

Among the many stories told in its pages was that of Andrew Thorburn, the one-time CEO of Essendon Football Club whose tenure there lasted a grand total of two days.

The Andrew Thorburn affair is one Australians cannot afford to forget, not least because it illustrates the subtle but powerful effect of worldview on our legal system.

Thorburn had done nothing wrong. There were no complaints about his conduct from staff members, players or fans. He was irresistibly pressured to resign because journalists discovered that he was also on the board of an Anglican church that — shock horror — actually believed what the Bible says about homosexuality and abortion.

Thorburn’s church didn’t even have a reputation for being particularly fiery or outspoken. Journalists had decided to dig through old website archives and had found a few sermons from a decade earlier. Thorburn hadn’t preached those sermons and probably didn’t even know about them. But the media had a story to sell and they didn’t let up until their target was out of a job.

Everyone Has a Worldview

It wasn’t just the media. At a press conference, then-Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews was asked about the views of Thorburn’s church. He said:

Those views are absolutely appalling. I don’t support those views; that kind of intolerance, that kind of hatred. Bigotry is just wrong. All of you know my views on these things. Those sort of attitudes are simply wrong, and to dress that up as anything other than bigotry is just obviously false.

These words from the Premier were reported widely and hung heavy over the Thorburn affair. There’s little doubt Daniel Andrews contributed to Thorburn’s decision to quit.

But notice what Daniel Andrews didn’t say. He didn’t engage with anything the church actually believed — he simply used a bunch of mean words to caricature them.

He didn’t mention that millions of Victorians — the very people he was elected to represent — still believe what Thorburn’s church believes. He didn’t acknowledge that he was calling a significant portion of his own constituents “bigots”.

He didn’t even consider that someone reasonable might see it differently.

More importantly, Daniel Andrews didn’t seem to be aware that he was himself making a moral judgment, nor explain where his standards came from informing that judgment.

In fact — and here’s the key point — Daniel Andrews didn’t seem to realise he had a worldview at all. The Premier was the proverbial fish that was so accustomed to the water that he didn’t realise he was wet.

The Public Square Is Not Neutral

The reality is that every evaluation or choice that we make manifests a worldview. The church Daniel Andrews criticised had a worldview, but so did Daniel Andrews! The problem is that he was so invested in his own view of the world that he didn’t realise he had one. To him, this wasn’t about competing worldviews or competing visions of the good — it was simply a matter of basic decency.

In Daniel Andrews’ mind, his values weren’t values — they were just common sense, and what everyone should obviously believe. And in his mind, Thorburn’s values weren’t values either — they were hatred and bias and bigotry.

The Andrew Thorburn affair illustrated something profoundly important that remains relevant all these years later: There’s no such thing as neutral beliefs or a neutral public square. Everyone has values. Everyone operates from a particular moral framework.

The moral framework Daniel Andrews was operating from — let’s call it the post-Christian creed — it has its own account of what it means to be human, its own beliefs about where authority comes from, its own unforgivable sins, and its own saints and heretics.

In fact, the post-Christian creed is the governing consensus of our entire culture. Universities, the media, the entertainment industry — all of it runs on the assumption that the post-Christian creed is true, neutral and self-evident. And it assumes that the worldview it replaced — namely, Christianity and Christian ethics — is sectarian, biased and ideological.

The Bias in Australia’s Legal System

Neither are Australia’s laws neutral. Our courts and tribunals are not neutral. Our judges and juries aren’t either. Every statute encodes a certain set of values and beliefs.

Moreover, every person operating within the legal system has a certain set of values and beliefs — beliefs like what personhood means, how marriage is defined, what makes a family and whether speech that hurts people’s feelings should be illegal. Beliefs like where and how someone is allowed to practise their faith, where tolerance should start and end, whether a person’s conscience is sacred or if it can be overridden by the state.

These aren’t merely legal questions — they’re philosophical ones. In fact, they’re theological ones, and they always have been.

The people tasked with writing, interpreting and enforcing Australia’s statues are not doing so from a neutral standpoint. They’re taking their own worldviews and beliefs and applying them in the legal arena.

The myth of legal neutrality might be the most powerful myth in modern public life. It’s also very useful — because it allows one worldview to write the rules, enforce them, and punish those who dissent, all the while insisting they’re acting from a position of pure reason and impartiality and self-evident truth.

If you want to see the myth of legal neutrality exposed — and the bias of Australia’s current legal system up in neon lights, I encourage you to go and read the Australian Christian Freedom Index.

And please make sure you share it — especially with the Christian leaders and pastors you know.

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Image via Leaders Summit and screenshot of YouTube/Sky News.