Australia Is Not the Free Country You Remember
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.
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Certainly the most important document Canberra Declaration has produced with the view of changing laws for the better in regard to protecting freedom in Australia
A very serious subject ( Loss of Freedom ) which affects us all, whether Christians or not. The attacks on Christianity are subtle and mostly unreported because if the general public knew how lives are destroyed by court cases , there would be a backlash, so the reporting of cases go “under the radar”- people losing their homes to pay court costs to people whose litigation has been conducted by high profile teams of lawyers hired and paid by our governments and whose cases have been conducted pro bono. Christianity in Australia is being wiped out in the same way it is in Communist countries like China. I am a Life Member of The Monarchist League of Australia because I fear that a new Constitution would delete the reference to God which would trigger massive Loss of Freedoms. The only remedy is for Australia to resign from the UN and repeal all those Laws made under the aegis/ requirement of that body which is intent on destroying Christianity. Get rid of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and every other Commissioner ! Before we had these bureaucracies our country we had Freedom of Religion, etc, and were was able to deport, properly punish criminals, etc. Think of the money we would save by abolishing these bureaucracies which work to destroy lives. ie persecute. We now live under a Regime similar to The Reign of Terror in France , or, like in Stalin’s Russia because we are ruled by the UN , a Marxist body. Christian Values became Roman Law , and, it is from Roman Law that the laws of the West evolved. Real Womens’ Rights for the first time in history to inheritance, etc were first implemented in the 6th century AD by Roman Emperor Justinian at the request of his spouse,Empress Theodora, whom the Orthodox Church declared a saint for her protection of children and women from slavery, etc.
The Cross on the hill is awe-inspiring. Wear a cross . Beautiful Aboriginal people suffering everyday discrimination for the same reason as us–because they are Christians.
Well done to Kurt and Canberra Declaration for declaring that our Christian freedoms are being seriously impacted. So sad for our grandchildren 😟
This Index is a huge step forward towards stopping the legislative push to restrict and even punish Christians for their beliefs and action in the public square,
It is available as a pdf as well as the printed version which we are able to order on the Canberra Declaration web site.
EDIT: ACFI download https://australianchristianfreedomindex.org.au/
Correction to pdf availability – It can be downloaded from the web site of Australian Christian Freedom Index.org.au